I give up! You already win!
:biggrin:A while ago I used to be real big on the pow wow circuit, traveling around the country making and selling knives and traditional regalia and jewelry and I made a lot of friends from different tribes. Since I made extremely traditional old school crafts and medicine pieces using stone and bone tools, I made a lot of friends amongst the medicine men and women and the elders. I was making things the way that their grandparents and great grandparents did. This was considered a very honorable thing to do as the younger generations didn't want to learn these old crafts and they began to die out with the elders.
Well, one day I met a Makah Medicine man and Thee mask carver for the tribe and he asked me to make some beaver tooth chisels and a whalebone d- adze for a special project he was doing for both the Makah Nation and the Smithsonian. I told him that it would be a great honor and that I would do it just for that reason only. We shook hands and that was a done deal. A few months later after collecting everything I needed I finally was able to present him with the finished pieces. That's when he told me what the pieces where for. It seems that the Makah were finally going to be allowed by the federal government to hunt a whale using traditional methods. Wooden canoe and handmade shell tipped harpoon. My tools were going to be used to make the adornments on the canoe and some of the gear. Well they went out and got their whale and it was the first one in over seventy years i believe.:thumbsup:
After winning the right to continue a tradition that the tribe had been doing for thousands of years there was a huge celebration. The whale was divided up amongst the tribal members and a giant feast ins-sued .:knife: A couple of weeks later the Medicine man and a few tribal elders showed up at a show I was doing and presented me with a gift. A nice big chunk of two week old fermented whale blubber. They unwrapped it from its skin wrapper, right there at the show table and began cutting off chunks and passing it to me to eat. What can you do, when elders bring a gift like this you smile and choke it down. It was rough. I ate four pieces before I realized that they were waiting for me to offer them some, which I gladly did. I made sure that they ate all the rest, the generous host that I am.
Taste: Think old stinky sardines mixed with bluecheese,salmon oil, rotted rancid fat, toasted almonds and the consistency of a slimy rubber band and you might , just might have an inkling of what this tasted like. I imagine if it was fresh it might not have been so bad, but leaving it in a bloody seal hide wrapper in the sun for two weeks and only brushing off the maggots from the surface really makes it special.
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