By Kristopher Edin
Fall 2009 Kaplan Award Winner
I just started brewing our green tea for the drive out to the end of the road. Christine is slowly rising from bed, the early hour demanding she take it easy. It is 4:45 am. The ferry leaves from Edmonds in one hour. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and the surf report is looking good. Today we plan on driving out to Neah Bay, that place at the end of the road we visit often to escape the city and to enjoy the waves that end their long journeys across the ocean around the northwestern tip of Washington state. Neah Bay is also home to the Makah nation, and I have some questions to ask at the cultural research center about the Makah’s court battles that have kept them from continuing their whale hunts, revived ten years ago with a single successful hunt. I like mixing business with pleasure. Hopefully our buddy Kimm will have his smoker going, and a plate of freshly smoked salmon awaiting, along with a story or two about his good ol’ days, or the latest yuppie tourist that stumbled upon his salmon shed and ruffled his feathers.
***
While putting the boards on the roof rack and loading the back of our wagon with sleeping bags and the old useless cooler we refuse to replace, a young woman stumbles up to me and asks if she could use my phone to call a cab. She’s wasted, and mumbles something about her friends ditching her. I help her out and make sure she gets safely into a cab. I quit drinking alcohol almost two years ago, before I sank any deeper, before the next ambulance ride was my last, before I ended up back in jail. I feel good lending a hand and knowing she’ll be returning home in one piece. I feel good loading up the car at this hour for a school research/surf trip instead of getting loaded and going nowhere. The ocean is my higher power, my AA meeting, or at least the closest comparison I can draw as an ever questioning agnostic individual. Out there, in the water, I’m able to make sense of my place in the world. I’m able to clear my head, drown my anxieties and stresses that can cloud my rationality and debilitate my health and sanity.
We pull away from the house at 5:15 am; on time and relaxed. I tell Christine about the drunk girl, and NPR discusses the growth of sexless New Age Japanese men and desert ants that count. In the Middle East there is death. In the U.S., there is unemployment. Somehow the world continues to rotate.
***
We park off the road, tucked into the trees and salal bushes at Sooes beach in Neah Bay. The rain began to patter the windshield after we drove through the bible beater township of Joyce. Out here though, the rain comes in sheets, blown horizontal by southerly gusts. The surf is more of a washing machine, but I’m able to get a few rides. An adult seal keeps me company, while Christine keeps dry and reads inside the car. I spend a lot of time thinking about identity and sense of place while bobbing around with the seal. The Makah poet and filmmaker Sandra Osawa wrote a simple poem entitled, “The Makah Indians”1, about her tribes creation, how they came to occupy this corner of the world and how they continue to do so.
We sprang from the salt water
a meeting of waves.
Our men hollowed
canoes
from logs
with the bone of whale
and together we rose
as one
but were many
giving thanks to the sea
with a song.
There is a big barn real close to the beach we are at right now. I’ve seen the men, when the barn doors are left open, or when the sun is out and they choose to work outside, hollowing out cedar logs and building these canoes Osawa has immortalized. I am envious of the ancestral knowledge and sense of identity that her poem and my personal observations speak of, because I’ve never been exposed to such powerful understanding of where I come from, culturally speaking anyway.
Now our men keep
returning
to the sea
filled with the rhythm of salmon
flashing a strange beauty
through dark waters
as silver fins
leap wildly over death
seeking the savage moment
that saves
the young.
Our people will not die.
I continue to think of identity and knowledge systems. I’m part of the great American melting pot. Pure Scandinavian blood lines on my father’s side; Nicaraguan and a host of unknowns on my mother’s. My maternal grandmother has kept secrets about my biological grandfather, my mother never having met him either. But that is another story, one of bitter family resentment, lawsuits and estrangement.
What do I know of my ancestral creation myths and legends? The Christianity dogma doesn’t work for me, and was never pushed by my parents. I continue to bob around with the seal, the eastern Pacific churning from a combined wind and ground swell. Maybe my Swedish and Finnish ancestors took to the high seas to whale and provide sustenance for their families and communities, and the ocean and salty air offered deeper, spiritual understandings for life, love and kinship that I haven’t been exposed to, and that inherent connection to the sea is why I am so at home in these cold, unsheltered and unpredictable environments. The surfing conditions continue to deteriorate as I ruminate on this possible revelation, so I paddle in after waving good bye to the seal, as he drops below the surface and rejoins his other world.
***
Smoke is rising from Kimm’s shed, and when we pull up, the aroma of burning cedar, Coho salmon and Lawry’s garlic salt overpowers the wet dog funk from our wetsuits. Kimm sees us and comes out to greet us. In the smoke shack, a big stainless steel bowl is full of today’s salmon. He quickly grabs a fillet and cuts off a couple pieces to throw to the dogs and three more pieces; one for himself, Christine and me. This is the tradition and one that exemplifies the meaning of the word Makah, a name the neighboring Clallam peoples gave them and translates to “generous with food.”2 On our first surf trip out here, Christine and I bought some dry firewood from the Olsen’s who live down the street from Kimm. We were talking to Karen Olsen about the beauty of this place and wondering where to get some fresh fish. That evening she drove over to our Hobuck beach campsite and gave us four pounds of her uncle’s fresh caught halibut, and wouldn’t accept a dime.
“We’re just happy that you two are enjoying our home. Happy surfing.”
I ask Kimm about the food cart across the street that has a new name on the sign since our last visit. His daughters have been running it for years, but an opportunity came up at the end of the summer to sell it. “I got a new truck out of the deal,” he told us with a grin.
“I’ve been giving Roxanne a hard time since she bought the place. I says to her, hey Roxanne, I see you are selling fresh fish over there, fresh outta the back of the Sysco truck! What’s wrong, can’t find any local fish around here?”
“She starts saying this and saying that, talking about health codes and shit. I says to her, you know Roxanne, some people around here would say that we (Makah) have been dealing with fish for a number of years. Some would say hundreds. Some would say thousands! Health codes my ass.We got a reputation to uphold out here. I didn’t take out my boat and haul in an extra 2600lbs of cod for nothing the other day.”
Christine and I drive over to the Makah Cultural and Research Center. The rain continues. We eat smoked salmon in the car with leftover pizza, drink steaming herbal tea, and go in.
“Been raining like this for two weeks,” Kirk tells us after we pay our student admission. He’s been working here for years as the Interpretive Specialist. Somehow the conversation turns to high school football and the big game Neah Bay has to play next week against Lummi at the Tacoma Dome.
“We’ve already beaten them twice this year, but it sure is difficult to beat anyone three times in a row.”
Another group comes into the Center. Kirk asks where they are from, and they say Denver.
“Ah Denver, well I have some Bronco’s trivia for you. Where was John Elway born?”
After making our way through the exhibits that depict the traditional, seasonal Makah life cycle pre-contact with European explorers, I ask Kirk about the current status of Makah whaling. He admits that he doesn’t really know, that he hasn’t been paying attention. Since the successful 1999 whale hunt, court battles have kept the Makah from taking another whale. Whaling is a tradition thousands of years old in this community, and one that “formed a central aspect of cultural life and religious practice, as well as subsistence materials…and was entwined in the complex web of social interactions that constructed their identities.”3 In the documentary The Whaling People, Makah tribal council member Micah McCarty explains how for the Makah, whaling is more than a treaty right, “It’s a hereditary birth right, and that is something a lot of people can’t understand.” He furthered this idea while speaking to my American Indian Studies class last week, a class focusing on Pacific Northwest Native peoples past and present. For Micah, the whaling and canoe culture revival is the best way for his people to cope with the trans-generational trauma that colonization has inflicted. “We aren’t going to get it elsewhere. There is no magical pill. UW medical school can’t heal the wounds.”
I ask Kirk what the 2007 rogue hunt did to the community, when a group of men took off on their own, without the tribes consent and poached a California gray whale. His ambivalence toward the subject fades and his eyes wince. He takes a quick deep breath, and with an exhale he tells us, “It hurt. It really hurt. I’m still angry. A lot of people are still angry.”
For awhile we talk about broken treaty promises, like the 1855 treaty of Neah Bay that states:
The right of taking fish and of whaling or sealing at usual
and accustomed grounds and stations is further secured to
said Indians in common with all citizens of the United States,
and of erecting temporary houses for the purpose of curing.
Kirk does have an optimistic outlook regarding Makah whaling, pointing out how long it took just to secure indigenous fishing rights, referring to the 1974 Boldt Decision that upheld said Treaty right and helped quell the decades old Salmon Wars between Native and non-native fisherman and regional governments in Washington state. The whaling issue will settle itself according to Kirk, and right now he is more concerned with the media and U.S. governments fear propagation and the general public’s absurd obsession with Sarah Palin. Before the conversation shifts to a discussion of Michael Moore’s films, he tells us, “If you can get people to fear, to live in a perpetual state of fear, then you can get them to believe anything. That is what I want to see change. Something has to change.”
***
For two days we’ve camped out of our Subaru and surfed ourselves silly at the mouth of the Twin Rivers along the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We’ve out smarted the wind and rain, finding the smallest pocket of cloud break and sunshine out here, but the cold has become a part of us. I think I’ve overexposed myself to the elements, with hints of illness tickling the bottom of my throat, and a slight grogginess fogging the back of my head. This morning I paddled my longboard way out to a reef break in the middle of a chaotic channel of water, maybe a third of a mile from shore. I sat out there alone, and thought about leaping salmon, breaching whales, cultural origins, treaty rights, evolution, the American dream and surfing. Bull kelp drifted its arms around my legs and cormorants dove for breakfast. I think that I too have sprang from the salt water currents, not here, but out there somewhere, and just as the Makah have been returning to their whaling and canoe culture traditions to mend the wounds of colonization, I’ve been returning to the water to start over and build an identity that has been drifting amongst the chaos of the melting pot. These waves and these waters have brought me more than a few perfect waves; they have brought dialogues and stories that enable perspective from a variety of knowledge systems that have combined to help clear the clutter, and allow cultural reciprocity to heal and inspire as I glide along the face of this life’s wave.
[1] See First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim. One Reel/UW Press 1998.
[2] See Cote, Charlotte. “Whaling, Religious and Cultural Implication: Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth Whaling Traditions.”
[3] Ibid.