The Whale Hunt at Neah Bay
A Novel of the Makah's Return to the Sea

About this book:

At the northwestern tip of the continental United States, the Makah people are carving a canoe from a two-hundred-year-old cedar, preparing to hunt the gray whale for the first time in seventy years. It is their treaty right, affirmed by the Supreme Court—but in Neah Bay, the law is the least of the obstacles. Protesters are chartering speedboats, fish buyers are threatening boycotts, and the village is fracturing along fault lines between survival and sovereignty. Micah Swan, twenty-four and tired of watching his people disappear into addiction and exile, has signed on to the crew. His childhood friend Ronny sees only ruin in the hunt: lost contracts, drowned men, a tribe made a spectacle on the evening news.

As the cedar takes shape beneath drawknife and adze, the novel plunges into the rain-lashed world of Cape Flattery, where the forest meets the Strait of Juan de Fuca and every decision carries the weight of ancestors. The training is brutal—three-mile beach runs at dawn, hours on the oars, a harpooner's burden that blends spiritual obligation with a .50-caliber failsafe. Elders whisper that a people who don't feed their history end up eating themselves; fishermen count gear payments and watch the market collapse. Meanwhile, federal judges, environmental coalitions, and the Coast Guard circle the water, each with their own definition of what the treaty means.

*The Whale Hunt at Neah Bay* is a novel of collision: tradition and modernity, law and spirit, the hunger for identity and the price of claiming it. With prose as sharp as a carver's blade and as deep as the gray water beyond the breakers, it asks what a people will risk to remember who they are—and whether the ocean will let them.