Celebrating Makah Days in Neah Bay, Washington

Makah Days happens annually in Neah Bay during the second-to-the-last weekend of August. People greet each other with "Happy Makah Days!" Frybread, Indian tacos and strawberry shortcake with jam made from hand-picked wild blackberries are offered all along the glittering midway. Many booths feature clothing beautifully decorated with native designs.

Performances of native dances include The Welcome Dance, to the beat of a canoe paddle. One of the most popular dances is The Snipe Dance, that imitates the flight of shorebirds over the sands. It's a very fast dance and takes sharp coordination.

The Makah Days fireworks are held on the east end of town, near the Marina and Council Center. A lot of people travel in for the celebration and camp all over the Senior Center beach, on the west end of town, as far away from the fireworks as possible. The thin fabric of the camping tents would be threatened by falling sparks.

The fireworkers are always coming up with something different. Their newest was a sky-wide display of long-lasting silver showers. At Clallam Bay's Fun Days they introduced a giant whirling red flame fountain.

The canoe races are a much-anticipated event, for which teams from all over the northwest train all year. The Makah Women's Eleven is a fierce team, taking turns sharply and paddling hard, digging deep. Fans line up on the beach, cheering and wearing t-shirts that say, "We be strokin'!"

One of the big attractions of Makah Days is the Slahal, or bone-gaming, tournament. Teams line up inside the Community Center, whole families and their friends on each side.

The teams guess at the hand location of marked and unmarked markers, still called "bones" regardless of their actual substance. The point is to bring into play and win ten point sticks and a kick-stick or king-stick. The wild pounding of the flat drums and ululating singing help to throw off the guesses of the opposing side. Team members made power movements with their hands to disturb their opponents' concentration.

Players need stamina, voice, concentration, cleverness and spirit power. The songs are revealed to individual players -- often in dreams -- and shared with the community. The songs soon become part of the game tradition, sung long after the players who brought them have passed on.

Unlike the more measured, dignified songs of the Makah songs and dances, reflecting the dipping of paddles from canoes, the Slahal songs resemble the driving drumming and yells of the horse-riding plains peoples. Teams laugh and smile as bones exchanged, as the point-sticks and the bones fly back and forth across the space between the teams.

When the volume of singing and drumming of multiple tournament teams - all playing to different beats and songs -- is enclosed in a longhouse, it becomes a single throb, like a giant's heartbeat.

The game is often referred to as simply a gambling game, but it is part of a much deeper tradition that brings together families and clans in support and competition, and displays a tribe's strength to its neighbors. Elder George Hottewe, whose sister Edie is a fearsome Slahal competitor, said the game is played under the tutelage of a spirit specifically related to bonegaming, called Tomanwas (prounounced "Toe-main'-wass"). The game is as much about fate, faith and family as it is about currency.

A tradition among Canadian tribes says the game was originally played between humans and bears, in place of a long war between the two species. When humans won, they kept playing Slahal. This may reflect the history of a game originated to replace lethal battle. Slahal is as fierce as any football game; the tournaments are watched as intently, and can run until 3:00 in the morning, depending on the length of games. Individual games can be over in 15 minutes - or take hours.

The toughest competitors are elders, because they've been playing for a lifetime. The loudest drums are pounded by the men, with their wicked elastic beater-sticks, but the most piercing voices rise from the women. A man's concentration can be blown completely when an opponent's team's female family member glides in behind him and lets loose with a gimlet yell; all part of the game.

One young man, drumming earlier on the beach, who wasn't doing so well against a grandmother said, "I'm respecting my elders, is what I'm doing. Yeah, that's it -- I'm respecting my elders."