The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs, an Indigenous Borderlands People by Joshua Reid (review)

in the sea is my country: the maritime world of the makahs, an indigenous borderlands people Joshua Reid brings readers on an aquatic voyage as he navigates through and reconstructs the maritime history of the q^Widiˇcˇcaʔa·tx̌ (kwi-dihch-chuhaht), the People of the Cape, who came to be known as the Makah. Covering over 250 years of history, Reid shows how the Makah people, who live on the northwestern point of the contiguous United States, were intimately tied to their marine habitat, which informed and shaped their culture and identity. Whereas most historical records focus on oceans as dividing lands and territories, Reid’s narrative creates this marine milieu as a substantive space where the Makah and other coastal Indigenous peoples were deeply immersed in networks of kinship and trade.

Reid offers an in-depth and stimulating analysis of the history of the Makah through the lens of the borderlands. The borderland in Reid’s study stretches nearly five hundred miles, an area he calls ča·di· (cha-dee), the Makah’s name for Tatoosh Island, which was one of their important terrestrial spaces. Covering a time span starting in the late eighteenth century up to the early twentieth century, Reid examines the tensions, triumphs, and challenges these seafaring people faced as they strived to maintain control over the political, social, and economic exchanges within their marine borderland before and after the arrival of the babałid (non-Indigenous people) (Reid refers to the Nuu-chah-nulth word for non-Indigenous as mama’ni, which is incorrect. The proper spelling is mamałn’i [mamalhn’i]).

Reid challenges the dominant notions of borderlands and frontiers. Whereas scholars have defined these through the lens of European imperialism, Reid conceptualizes the Makah marine space as a borderland where interactions, challenges, and contestations are positioned within Indigenous history and experience, and centers his narrative on great Indigenous leaders such as Makah titleholder Tatoosh and Nuu-chah-nulth titleholders Wickaninnish and Maquinna, who commanded the interactions taking place within aquatic zones they created and controlled. While these leaders adapted indigenous protocols to serve interactions with babałid, the ča·di·, Reid asserts, “remained a region where strong chiefs continued to control space on their own terms and to meet their own priorities and agendas” well into the late nineteenth century (52).

Colonialism had a profound and pervasive effect on Indigenous peoples and cultures, who experienced disease pandemics, massacres, assimilation policies, forced removal and relocation, prohibition of spiritual and cultural practices, and boarding schools that threatened their cultures, languages, and identities, which was further intensified by socioeconomic and political marginalization along with racial prejudice. The Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth people witnessed and experienced severe challenges to their social, political, spiritual, and economic systems; especially hit hard was their whaling tradition, with both Nations ultimately making the difficult decision to terminate their whale hunts because the unregulated commercial whaling industry decimated the whale populations that sustained and nourished their communities.

When examining the impact of colonization on Indigenous peoples there is no one Indigenous experience; some individuals actively resisted, some individuals acculturated, and some successfully adapted to the changes being forced on them and their societies. Providing a more nuanced understanding of how Indigenous peoples engaged with settler-colonialism, Reid’s study acknowledges Indigenous agency in these colonial encounters to show how some Makah members found ways to adapt by utilizing new technologies and opportunities that Euro-American society presented to them. Reid maintains, “When examined from a Makah perspective, these actions reveal dynamic, indigenous actors who exploited new opportunities within their own cultural framework … the People of the Cape combined customary practices with new opportunities to attain high standards of living. Their participation in the expanding settler-colonial world supported their ability to continue forging a unique Makah identity and to resist the cultural assault of federal assimilation policies” (165...