After the Makah Whale Hunt

This article examines the racist backlash against the Makah tribe for their treaty-protected right to hunt whales. It then explains some core epistemological aspects of indigenous peoples’ struggles that are outside discussions in multicultural education. This article also offers a contribution to our understanding of schools as political institutions in cross-cultural situations. Indigenous values foreground the moral principles that are presented in the interrelationships between human, natural, and spiritual worlds. Culturally responsive education from an indigenous perspective is sublimely ecological and place based. Such perspectives tend to detonate most multicultural assumptions about modernity, postmodernity, and progress while asserting pedagogies drawn from the “sentient landscape.”