The sun had not yet risen when a crew of seven Makah Indians launched its hand-carved cedar canoe into the frigid waters around Neah Bay, Washington. The crew paddled west through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and rounded Cape Flattery—the westernmost point of the continental United States—before settling into the Pacific Ocean. The water was calm that morning of May 17, nothing like it had been earlier in the year when furious waves smashed a freighter to pieces off the coast of Oregon. The hunters tacked southward. Hugging the Washington coast, they piloted the canoe through the same hunting grounds that, according to tribal history, the Makah have stalked for 2,000 years.

The hunting party had not gone unnoticed. A platoon of reporters, bivouacked at Neah Bay, waited for word on the hunt. News helicopters trailed the canoe from above. Under normal conditions, a band of Indians prowling America’s coastal hinterlands in a dugout canoe would probably not qualify as “news”—not unless an English princess or a Hollywood actor were also on board. But this hunting party was special.

Shortly before 7:00 A.M., local television stations in western Washington carried the breaking news live, as a beefy Makah Indian heaved an enormous harpoon into the back of a gray whale. In the ensuing struggle, the whale could have flipped the canoe and sent its crew airborne with a swipe of its powerful tail. It didn’t, and two more harpoons followed the first. From a motorized support boat, a Makah gunner added two walloping hits from a .577-caliber rifle to make the kill as quickly and painlessly as possible. In less than ten minutes—slightly longer than it takes some fishing enthusiasts to reel in a spirited bass—the whale floated quietly in seawater thick with blood.

For news organizations, gory footage of the return of whaling to the continental United States was a brilliant way to kick off the day. For breakfast-eaters held captive by the tube, the coverage probably ruined a few appetites. For the Makah nation, its first successful whale hunt in over seven decades represented a major step forward in its struggle to reclaim community spirit and cultural heritage.

Like most Indian nations that aren’t serendipitously located near a major population center from which vast fortunes can be sucked through the hoses of gambling, the Makah nation languishes in remoteness and poverty—both in relation to the rest of the country and to its cultural past. (Not that communities which are situated beyond the horizon of a strip mall and are too poor to support a McDonald’s are a bad thing.) But once upon a time, before the days of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and welfare checks, the Makah nation had been wealthy and powerful by aboriginal standards.

Whaling was a dominant feature of Makah culture. The tribe’s best hunters faced the giant beasts armed with primitive weapons and courage. The combat was mortal; not infrequently, the whale was the one who swam on. There was no OSHA to insist on worker safety, just a community that counted on its star hunters to provide. Yet by the 1920’s, the Makah found providing to be nearly impossible. Commercial whalers from all over the world had hunted grays and other species to the brink of extinction. To make matters worse, the Makah were nearly extinct themselves; disease had culled their number to only a few hundred. Faced with diminished stock of both prey and hunters, the Makah suspended whaling.

The Makah nation steps into the 21st century chained to the staggering burdens it accumulated in the 20th: drug and alcohol abuse combined with the usual mixers of extreme poverty and unemployment. A vast majority of Makah believe the way to reverse the nasty effects of modernity is to revive the traditions and customs of centuries past. Whaling is paramount.

Shortly after the hunting party had slain the tribe’s first whale in 70 years, news reports indicated that the whale had filled with water and sunk. (One of the hunters was supposed to leap into the icy water and sew the whale’s month shut before it filled.) But these reports turned out to be bogus, and by 5:30 that evening, five canoes—the victorious hunting party, and four canoes representing other area tribes—towed the carcass to a beach lined with hundreds of cheering Makah at Neah Bay. Supervised by an Alaskan Inuit, the butchering commenced. The meat was packed off to family freezers, and Makah leaders made plans to host a potlatch that would include tribes from the western United States and Canada.

Four hours southeast of Neah Bav, however, reaction to the hunt in Seattle and its surrounding boroughs was anything but celebratory. In this region, where a sizable population regards Saving the Whales as man’s principal calling, the hunt unleashed a firestorm of wrath. As Air Marshal Clinton’s Luftwaffe continued to menace Yugoslav civilians, the hearts and minds of the Northwest’s humanitarians were with that poor whale.

Native American influences are found more in the Pacific Northwest than in most regions of the country. Roads are festooned with totem poles, and people sympathize with Native American causes. From this pool, the Makah enjoyed their share of supporters, people who asked, “What’s the big deal if they kill a few gray whales each year?”

This sentiment, however, barely registered in relation to the screeching of the nature-is-more-important-than-people crowd. Environmentalism trumps cultural heritage in the Northwest. Sadly, far more people opposed the hunt than opposed NATO’s freewheeling campaign against Serbian mothers-to-be.

The Makah, one woman told a reporter, had “set the world back hundreds of years.” On the opinion page of a regional newspaper, a writer urged that we “fly our precious stars and stripes at halfmast to honor the fallen gray whale heroine and to mark a sad day in our nation’s history.” One man courageously vowed to liquidate his private holding of Makah art, which he no doubt kept in a comfortable upper-middle-class or upper-class home. Another wrote, “The sight of them eating raw pieces of the blubber bordered on cannibalism,” and concluded that the Makah had awakened “old hatreds and racism.”

On the racism count, at least, she was on to something. At best, the Northwest was crawling with cultural imperialists. At worst, it was littered with latent racists. But because it was the racism of hipsters who adorn their Volvos and Volkswagens with politically correct bumper stickers, it didn’t generate the high-profile media attention that comes when, say, a pitiful band of neo-Nazis crawls out of the woods and marches down Main Street of a small town in Idaho. Clearly, many of those outraged by the hunt considered it an act of treachery. They had been inculcated with the romantic mythology that Hollywood and public schools dispense: hi the days before Eurotrash ruthlessly conquered the New World, the Noble Indian lived in Edenic harmony with Mother Earth, neither polluting the streams in which he urinated nor bending the grass on which he tread.

But the Makah shattered that illusion when they harpooned the whale on live television in front of all those people preparing to do their eight hours for the global economy. Viewers got a bitter dose of what life as an Indian was really like, and it didn’t jibe with their sensibilities. Indians in the Northwest hadn’t spent their days whittling driftwood into totem poles: They had been engaged in a brutal struggle for survival. Native American cultures may have been predominantly communal—a fact which launches many a drooling daydream—but they were also disciplined, spiritual, and hierarchical. Clear social lines existed between the sexes, and between the weak and the strong. Cripples and weaklings weren’t sent out on hunting parties. Too much was riding on their success for egalitarian concerns.

It was strong stuff to swallow . . . too strong for many. Words like “savage” and “barbaric” were used to describe the Makah. They were called “those people” by some of the same people who boiled over with indignation when Ross Perot referred to blacks as “you people.” The Makah received death threats, and environmental activists boomed forth that they would use whatever means necessary to stop the Makah from killing again. They may have even wanted to raise an army of Indian fighters—perhaps led by the intrepid Gen. Wesley Clark, hero of Kosovo—to ride west to the coastal frontier to whip the savages into shape.

In this fight, however, environmentalists found themselves on the wrong side of the government. Most area politicians did condemn the hunt. Sen. Slade Gorton and Rep. Jack Metcalf—two Washington Republicans not known for voting with green thumbs—blasted the Makah. Even so, the Makah enjoyed official federal government support in their quest to resume whaling. After gray whales were taken off of the endangered list in 1994, the Makah made it clear they were going to whale again, citing their rights under the Treaty of Neah Bay, which had been signed on January 31, 1855, by Territory’ of Washington Governor Isaac I. Stevens and representatives of the Makah tribe. The treaty granted explicit whaling rights to the Makah, the only tribe in the continental United States so privileged.

Whaling opponents argued that the treaty no longer applied because, in 1946, the United States signed the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, which established the International Whaling Commission (IWC). In effect, whaling opponents said, the United States could not honor its obligations to the Treaty of Neah Bay because it had signed away that right to the IWC.

The IWC’s original mission was to provide for the “optimum utilization of the whale resources” and to safeguard “the interests of the consumers of whale products and the whaling industry.” The convention never defined what qualified as a “whale,” and the convention’s Final Act listed only the names of a dozen species—the “great whales.” But as William Aron, William Burke, and Milton Freeman pointed out in the May 1999 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, today’s IWC is controlled by members who “act as if the convention covered all whales—and even all cetaceans.” In 1982, the IWC placed a moratorium on commercial whaling, effectively strangling the industry it was created to nurse. Now guided by an animal-rights agenda “based on moral judgments rather than science,” the IWC violates the international rule of law and the convention’s spirit.

A loophole to the 1982 moratorium allowed aboriginal peoples non-commercial whaling rights if they could demonstrate subsistence needs and an ongoing tradition of whaling. Anti-whaling forces believed the Makah didn’t qualify because they had not whaled in 70 years. But nobody could deny that whaling, and the spiritual activities that revolve around whaling, had remained central to their heritage and cultural identity. It wasn’t as if the Makah, flush with the hope of the Industrial Revolution, had abandoned whaling in the 1920’s to open an automobile company to compete with Ford.

Whaling foes also argued the Makah had done just fine for 70 years without putting whale on their dinner plates. Though true, this argument ignored the tribe’s future subsistence needs. The Makah had not needed whale because they had fallen into the viper’s nest of government-assistance programs. Rather than applauding their efforts at becoming more self-sufficient, those opposing the Makah seemed to be saying, “Let them rot on welfare.”

In 1997, the IWC approved a deal in which the United States exchanged a portion of its quota of bowhead whales, hunted by Alaskan Inuit, for a portion of Russia’s gray-whale quota, which Siberian natives hunt. According to anti-whaling groups, the U.S. delegation then pulled a fast one on the IWC by giving the gray-whale quota to the Makah, allowing them to kill up to five annually until 2002. Anti-whaling groups complained that the IWC never recognized the Makah’s aboriginal claims, a fact which both the U.S. delegation and anti-whaling delegations to the IWC confirm. In 1998, U.S. IWC Commissioner James Baker told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that the IWC “grants quotas; it does not identify people” who will do the hunting, a decision which is left up to the discretion of the member nation with the quota. That the IWC recognized the quota, continued Baker, “is sufficient legal support for the Makahs to do their whaling.”

Anti-whaling groups refused to accept Baker’s take. As the Makah prepared to launch their first whaling party in the fall of 1998, the anti-whalers vowed to put a stop to the “illegal” hunt. They descended upon Neah Bay en masse. Led by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society—die-hard environmentalists who consider Greenpeace and the Sierra Club to be sissies—a motley armada dropped anchor in the waters outside Neah Bay to confront the savages. The Coast Guard decided to head off trouble by proposing a 500-yard exclusion zone around Makah whaling vessels that would keep protesters at bay.

At first, the showdown attracted gangs of reporters from all over the world. But interest soon dissipated when the two sides drifted into the doldrums of a routine that went something like this: By late morning, a few dozen or so Makah would gather at the beach near their marina. The pantheist fleet would steam into the reservation harbor shortly thereafter and float a stone’s throw from the beach. From that point on, the two sides would exchange insults, often aided by bull horns. The Makah generously employed the f-word and referred to the “eco-colonialists” as “walruses,” which to them is evidently some kind of putdown. The whale saviors held an obvious educational advantage over the Makah. Between ear-shattering blasts of taped whale screeching over a ship’s speaker system, the environmentalists belittled the Makah with such insults as, “You speak like an eight-year-old. Blah, blah, blah.”

Though the two sides detested each other, the confrontation didn’t degenerate into a full-scale bloodbath. The worst day came on November 1, when the Makah captured an inflatable Zodiac that had ventured too close to shore. The crew was ceremoniously dunked in the water to the cheers of over a hundred Indians, and then hauled away by police. A protester who came ashore to save his comrades was wrestled face-first onto the cement by tribal police officers. Among the rewards for his bravery was a front page picture of his bloody face on a Seattle newspaper and a scar across the forehead that will probably be regarded in his circle as a status symbol.

The Makah never mounted a serious hunt in the fall of 1998. Fierce weather kept the hunting party close to home. The next opportunity to bag a gray whale would not come until spring, when grays migrate from their breeding grounds off Baja to their feeding grounds in the waters around Russia and Alaska.

A week after the Makah brought home one of those migrating grays —and the scorn and abuse that accompanied it—word came that gray whales were destroying fine beachfront property up and down the western coast of the United States. Naturalists called it an unprecedented die-off, but those who found their favorite beach planted with a rotting gray whale carcass called it disgusting.

In the first six months of 1999, 83 dead grays washed ashore, compared with 38 during the whole of 1998. Stephanie Dorenzas, a spokeswoman for the National Marine Fisheries Service, said that a government committee was studying the problem. She refused to speculate on whether the whales were starving to death. But other naturalists aren’t waiting for committee reports. They point to the burgeoning gray whale population, which stands somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000, as evidence that grays are overwhelming their ecosystem. Some naturalists claim there are more gray whales today than ever.

It’s common practice to thin land animals with selective hunting. Yet if a person in downtown Seattle proposed selective hunting as a way to trim whale numbers, he would be in immediate danger of being lynched. Many people here have the sort of moral fervor for whales that mullahs have for Allah. The Makah are aware of this. When their hunting parties venture into the Pacific Ocean looking for grays, they’ll remember that not a few people here would prefer seeing a crew of Makah Indians floating in the water over the sight of another harpooned whale.