Makah Living Conditions
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Today\Now |
Schools now are better than schools 270 years ago because children back then got shipped to boarding school. The schools now are wonderful because there are nice teachers ,and good, nice principals too. Friends are great at the Neah Bay Elementary. Students are nice to each other, and everybody knows each other very well. |
| 70 years ago | The US Government shipped the Makah children to a boarding school. There boarding school is different compared to ours and yours, because they actually stay the night in the boarding. The boarding house was white and blue. There was a small pox epidemic when Europeans first came to this coast, and all of the villages became abandoned. |
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200 years ago
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Two hundred years ago the Makahs lived in longhouses. Longhouses were long, wooden houses that more than two families lived in. The longhouses had one big room divided into different areas like a cooking area, a playing area, the visiting area, and the sleeping areas. The side boards could be taken off for fresh air and to let the smoke out when they were cooking. The Nootkans believed in five basic ailments. The most common was "disease objects". Disease objects were sentient things that were black and about half an inch long and were not sent by anyone and just went around on their own. They entered the body and ate a hole that filled with black black blood. The gnawing of the disease objects was thought to cause the sensation of pain. Removing the disease objects was a long and involved process. Another type of disease was black blood. It was a minor ailment and was cured by sucking it out and spitting it into a box until it was red again. A more serious disease was caused by man made objects. These were often pairs of sharp bone points or other sharp objects tied together with hair. These were sent by evil shaman and few curing shaman could remove them. There was also another ailment often termed "spirit poisoning" that occurred when a person encountered an evil spirit or mistreated a good one. The spirit generally clung to the person's back in hobgoblin style and surrounded the person with a malevolent aura. If the spirit did enter the body, the victim would become hopelessly mad or die (or both). The least common ailment was soul loss. The soul was most often stolen by sea animals but sometimes an evil shaman stole a person's soul. The cure for this was the most dramatic because the shaman who was curing it had to travel to where the soul was (often under water) and bring it back. There is one more ailment that beset mortal flesh, but it is very uncommon and incurable. This is "contagious magic", and is a form of black magic that is caused by an evil witch by placing an article of the intended victims clothing in a grave box and performing rituals to seal the deal.
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