The last time Edgar visited before he died, McCarty woke up around 3 or 4 a.m. One of McCarty’s mentors, Carl Edgar, an elder from Ditidaht First Nation on Vancouver Island, used to stay with him for Makah Days, the tribe’s annual summer celebration. Cedar’s smooth, straight grain is ideal for carving, but the dust is toxic. “I’m gonna fire it up,” he warned, putting on an N-95 respirator. With the drill, McCarty cut through the creamy yellow mask’s elongated mouth. “My son tries to come in and clean my stuff every now and then, and then I don’t know where anything is,” he said, laughing. His 52-year-old wrists needed a break after chiseling. Shelves held unfinished paddles, a bentwood box, a Thunderbird headdress, knives, chisels, and scraps of redcedar, yellow cedar, yew, alder and whale bone. In his wood shop next to his home in Neah Bay, McCarty stood with a chisel in his hand, studying a partially carved moon mask made of Alaska yellow cedar. “I don’t know too many families that have that kind of history.” “It’s a huge family pride thing,” he said, and smiled. That changed last August when he finally started, building two puppets: one for relatives from the Pacheedaht First Nation on Vancouver Island, the other for McCarty’s five children. But for more than a decade, life and other projects got in the way. Since then, McCarty has told friends and family that he wanted to make another puppet to honor his great-grandfather and Wa-atch village. Hishka’s puppet, known only from memories, became something present, tangible. Along with other tribal members, father and son performed with a 30-foot-long black, white and red puppet in an elaborate display of song and dance. McCarty, serving on the tribal council at the time, spent five weeks building a whale puppet with his dad, John. Then, in the summer of 2010, the Makah hosted Tribal Canoe Journeys, an annual celebration held by the region’s tribal nations. regime, with potlatches outlawed, McCarty’s family couldn’t create new puppets or other ceremonial artwork. Elaborate art, including the whale puppets, was reserved for these ceremonies. During potlatches, chiefs gave away food, money and artwork that came with rights to songs and stories owned by families. In the decades after Hishka’s ceremony, the United States government banned potlatches, the central political, social and economic system of the Makah and other Northwest Coast peoples. “It was a theatrical thing,” McCarty said of the performance, “to send a message to the people that we’re still gonna be who the fuck we are.” With tall ship rigging, he engineered a system of ropes and pulleys so the Thunderbird could fly down from the cliff and pick up the whale. Hishka made the whale puppet from canvas and linen, tying cedar branches together in big hoops to give it the right shape. The puppets, McCarty thought, were a way for Hishka to “commemorate and honor” Makah identity, “who we are and where we come from.” “He knew it was going to be different forever,” Hishka’s great-grandson, Micah McCarty, said, as he waited for paint to dry on a redcedar mask he’d carved in his woodshop in Neah Bay, home to the Makah Tribe in the northwesternmost corner of Washington. The tribe wouldn’t hunt whales again until the late 1990s. Meanwhile, state and federal conservation laws legislated the people out of their own coveted waters, where halibut, salmon, seals and whales sustained them - an entire nation - and made them wealthy. Commercial whaling drove the animals to near-extinction, and, by the 1920s, the Makah voluntarily stopped hunting them. He was among the last hereditary chiefs to do so. Hishka, born in 1845, harpooned humpbacks and gray whales from canoes he carved himself, like other Makah chiefs before him. government sent so-called Indian agents to assimilate the people of the cape, now known as Makah. That was only three generations ago, not long after the U.S. ł, or Hishka, stands in front as the dancers perform the last song of the potlatch near the Wa-atch River on a late-summer evening.tx̌ to do in the beginning, when they first hunted the giant sea mammals.Ĭhief Hiškʷi.Thunderbird swoops down and snatches the whale puppet in his talons, just like he taught the Qʷidiččaʔa
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