Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

Chapter 11: Marine Tenure of the Makahs

Chapter 11 Marine Tenure of the Makahs Joshua Reid Traditional scholarship on American Indian tenure remains limited to examining the relationship of a particular tribe to its land and related resources. These studies often explore how land is the foundation of tribal identity, explaining that the expansion of settler-colonists across North America resulted in conflict over Indian land. Through a combination of colonial processes, institutional mechanisms, and shifting balances of power, non-Natives dispossessed the former occupants. Most scholarship about current self-determination struggles continues this trend by focusing on land. This terrestrial perspective overlooks those American Indian nations, such as the Makahs of Washington State, who vested— and have continued to vest—marine rather than terrestrial spaces and resources with their most valued tenure rights. This essay explores the characteristics of Makah marine tenure during the first half of the nineteenth century. These American Indians expressed ownership of nearby ocean waters and resources through indigenous knowledge of their marine environment and through customary practices such as whaling, sealing, and fishing. Additionally, these cultural performances reflected a sentimental connection to the sea and a spiritual dimension of their marine tenure. Based on reciprocity and respect, a Makah 244 | Joshua Reid spiritual worldview—rooted in the perception that marine creatures such as whales, seals, and fish are people—enabled them both to exploit and to conserve their rich marine resources. Through place-naming, applying indigenous knowledge, and pursuing maritime practices, the Makahs made the sea their country. Becoming increasingly entangled with the non-Native world from the mid-nineteenth century on, they both asserted and reshaped their tenure concepts to retain core Makah values and to respond to challenges. Their current revival of an active whaling practice reflects their efforts at reclaiming the sea. According to the doctrine of property that predominates in the United States, tenure means ownership of land. Understood to be exclusive, ownership gives the owner the right to buy and sell her or his property and to manage the land as she or he sees fit. Colonial empires and settler-colonial nations have used tenure concepts to their advantage in order to dispossess American Indians of lands and terrestrial resources.1 For example, during the colonial period, expanding empires acknowledged varying degrees of indigenous tenure in order to purchase Indian lands or to seize vast tracts through “just wars.” During the treaty era, the United States recognized Indian tenure in order to negotiate for land cessions. Congressional legislation , such as the Dawes Severalty Act (1887), granted ownership rights to individuals, thereby fragmenting tribal holdings and transferring more land out of Indian hands. Like other Western concepts applied to indigenous peoples, tenure has a long history of being used to the advantage of the colonizer.2 Therefore, when discussing indigenous tenure, it is necessary to differentiate it from the version of tenure that predominates in the United States. In North America, indigenous tenure concepts and protocols varied from one society to the next and over time. For generations, Makahs have embedded their tenure concepts in the marine space around Cape Flattery , the most northwestern point of the continental United States. While Makahs exercised tenure over terrestrial places and objects such as cranberry bogs and stands of timber, tenure rights over marine spaces and resources were among their most valued possessions. Calling themselves qw idičča?a·tx̆ (pronounced “Kwi-dich-cha-at-h” and meaning “the People of the Cape”), they have rooted their marine tenure rights within the very fabric of what makes them Makahs—their cultural practices and performances related to their marine environment. Makahs expressed tenure over these waters through their indigenous, local knowledge of this space. For example, during the 1855 negotiations for the Treaty of Neah Bay, Kalchote, the first Makah leader to speak on Marine Tenure of the Makahs | 245 behalf of his people, connected knowledge to tenure rights. When introducing himself to Governor Isaac Stevens, the head of the U.S. treaty commission in Washington Territory, Kalchote stated, “I know the country all around and therefore I have a right to speak” about Makah ownership of the sea and their fishing rights.3 As one of the highest-ranking Makah chiefs, Kalchote owned important marine resources, such as some halibut fishing banks just off the coast, and he and his family had fished them for generations. The “country” he and other Makahs described was the ocean around the...