The Olympic Peninsula is the home of the Makah Nation, more akin to the Nuu-Chah-Nulth, Tlingit and Haida than the Coast Salish. Their geographic location allowing them to harvest whales. Language families: Wakashan, Athabaskan, none (Haida an isolate), and Salishan respectively, representing 1,000s of years of close isolation with Chimakum (a 5th
language family) on either side of Neah Bay, the neighboring Quileute and Port Townsend Chimakum (now extinct) … remarkable! They, like Scandinavian Vikings, lived in longhouses: a type of extended, proportionately narrow, single room. Around 1560, via radiocarbon dating, a mudslide engulfed part of a Makah village 110 miles to the west of the Living History Farm. After a 1970 storm, tidal erosion exposed wooden buildings. Excavation using pressurized water hoses to remove the mud (university students under the direction of archaeologists) uncovered 6 buried longhouses. 50,000+ artifacts were found over 11 years, many on display today at the Makah Cultural and Research Center in Neah Bay. Houses like these hosted potlatches, tribal parties where the wealthy gave away their possessions to the less fortunate, typically coinciding with births, funerals, and marriages. Canada’s view was that this caused the First Nation’s people to be wealthy, but always appear poor; a problem for governments financed by property taxes. Their solution was the Potlatch Ban passed by the Government of Canada in 1885, lasting until 1951, quietly mirrored (rarely mentioned) south of the border (1884-1934), reshaping peoples’ concepts, including the Makah, of social concern, governance, culture, and wealth. Other notes: in 1776 the Makah at Neah Bay, saw the 1st foreign military installation on the West Coast built adjacent to their village at the entrance of the Strait Juan de Fuca. This was the first European settlement in what is now the State of Washington with barracks, blacksmith shop, bakery, church and infirmary. Two different ways of life meeting: the Spanish and English independent living and the Native American (and Norse) large family longhouses. (The photo is the Lofoten Viking longhouse, located a few miles from where this writer’s grandmother, Jennie, was born (1886): Eggum, Norway.)
https://www.donsmaps.com/potlatch.html
https://www.slowfoodseattle.org/makah-ozette-potato
https://content.lib.washington.edu/aipnw/renker.html
http://homework.sdmesa.edu/drogers/Art%20120/NWC%20potlatch.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozette_Indian_Village_Archeological_Site
http://www.plc215.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Makah-Norse-Longhouse.pdf
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220605-ozette-the-us-lost-2000-year-old-village
https://text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2017/10/19/establishing-and-disbanding-the-neah-bay-settlement-1792/
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g17606618-d1798393-Reviews-Lofotr_Viking_Museum-Bostad_Vestvagoy_Lofoten_Islands_Nordland_Northern_Norway.html
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