Spirits of our Whaling Ancestors (Capell Family Books xx)

I ordered this book because I know some Makah people and have heard of the old whaling traditions of the past. It chronicles the attempts of the Makah people to bring back something that was almost lost to them and affects all of our Native American people.

This is another good book covering Northwest native Americans. It did not grab my attention as well as I expected, but the information covered is not likely be be anywhere else. Its strength is that of personal history, either as experienced or directly from her immediate forbears.

A great book that further expands knowledge of Native American history.

While this book focuses on cultural revitalization, I will be using it in my Tribal Natural Resource Management course in the fall. This text makes it easy for me to combine converging concepts: Native cultural traditions and natural resource management.

just what i thought it would be

This book provides an overview of the history and culture of the Makah and Nuu-chuh-nulth, two related nations on the west side of Vancouver Island and the northwest tip of Washington State. Coté gives special attention to cultural practices associated with whaling, which many outsiders have misunderstood as a result of the Makah’s renewed whale hunt.Coté is particularly well-placed to tell this story. She is a member of the Nuu-chuh-nulth (Nootka) nation, and has relatives at Neah Bay among the Makah. She earned degrees in both Canada and the United States, and she is now an associate professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. To write this book, Coté uses oral history and interviews, her own cultural knowledge, and written sources, both historic and contemporary.Coté has written the book to speak to people who live on either side of the US-Canadian border. She highlights both common elements of the two modern nation-states, and differences in their law and policy. In places, she backtracks from one topic to introduce another, sometimes leaving the chronology unclear, or failing to tell the entire story. In addition, some chapters seem to have been drafted as stand-alone papers, and there is still some overlap and repetition among them.Other than those minor issues of drafting, she has written a very readable account of these visible Native peoples. The book connects to broader issues of cultural renewal, natural resources, and Indigenous studies. It’s accessible to a general public if you are the kind of person who reads history books for pleasure.

Exactly what was needed for the course.