The Ozette Excavation: Tribal Archaeology on Tribal Terms

When a winter storm eroded the bluff at Cape Alava in nineteen seventy and exposed the edge of a house timber, the question of who controlled what happened next was answered immediately. The Makah Tribe said the answer was them.

American archaeology in nineteen seventy had a well-established practice of excavating Indigenous sites, shipping artifacts to university collections and natural-history museums on the opposite coast, and publishing findings in academic journals that the people whose heritage was being studied never saw. The Makah rejected that model in its entirety. Their conditions for permitting the Washington State University excavation were direct: tribal members would participate in every phase of the dig, artifacts would not leave the peninsula, and the Makah would build and operate the institution that held and interpreted what was found.

The Makah Cultural Research Center in Neah Bay opened its doors in nineteen seventy-nine, two years before the excavation was complete. It was built while the dig was still going, because the tribe did not intend to wait for the university to decide when and how the materials would be displayed.

The center became a model. It influenced how tribal consultation was written into federal archaeology law in subsequent decades, including the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of nineteen ninety, which created a legal framework for tribes to reclaim objects and remains held by museums and universities.

The Ozette excavation is still cited in archaeology education as the template for what community-controlled fieldwork looks like. More than fifty years after the dig began, the artifacts are where the Makah said they would be: in Neah Bay, in a building the tribe owns, interpreted by people whose ancestors made them.