Following the removal of the gray whale from the Endangered Species list in 1994, the Makah tribe of northwest Washington State announced that they would revive their whale hunts; their relatives, the Nuu-chah-nulth Nation of British Columbia, shortly followed suit. Neither tribe had exercised their right to whale – in the case of the Makah, a right affirmed in their 1855 treaty with the federal government – since the gray whale had been hunted nearly to extinction by commercial whalers in the...
