A Whale Hunt

DECOLONIZING YOUR NEWSFEED



	An adult gray whale swims off the coast of Baja California Sur. (@meghandhaliwal)

A WHALE HUNT | 5.01.21

I’m on a mini spring break in the Pacific Northwest which has me thinking of whales. The gray whale is making its extradorinday migration from Baja, Mexico to the North Arctic right now - one of the longest journeys by any other mammal. For centuries this has meant subsistence hunting for the Makah Nation, tucked into a small cove in Neah Bay on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. But their harvesting has mostly subsided due to over-hunting by others, along with plain-old racism, and the recent and mysterious morbidity of gray whales. That last issue has scientists flummoxed.

Experts can’t tell, in the last five years, if climate change is to blame for a depletion of nearly a quarter of the Eastern North Pacific (ENP) gray whale population. It could just be that the seas got to be too crowded? That would mean that with too many whales, nature just took its course.

But if you were to ask Makah whale hunters, they’d tell you that harmony among these magnificent creatures has been disrupted for some time and that’s really what the problem is: dumb colonization.

The Makah should be whaling right now.

In 1999, the Native nation reclaimed their 1855 Treaty right to harvest the ENP gray whale for the first time in some 70 years. Area tribes arrived in flotillas to sing and dance to the ceremonial strike - a 30-ton, 30 1/2-foot-long female gray whale. Meanwhile, the hunt turned into a media circus, mostly because Free Willy. In an era that was gushing over heartwarming whale tales, the ‘90s made the Makah out to be villains and many reporters made sure of it.



	The Makah voluntarily stopped hunting whales in the 1920s when commercial whaling operations were common. (Washington State Historical Society)

After the successful hunt in 1999, activists filed a lawsuit, leading a federal court to rule that the tribe needed to go through a more rigorous permitting process to hunt whales. That process has been underway ever since. But whalers grew impatient; they wanted to enforce the Makah Treaty as the “supreme Law of the Land.” Wayne Johnson, a former whaling captain, was one of five Makah arrested for hunting a whale in 2007. He ended serving five months in federal prison.

There’s a book I’m recommending later on in the newsletter that centered this treaty struggle for me. And here are some other quick resources:

The Makah Tribal Whale Hunt Chronology from NOAA is a pretty basic but fantatstic overview
Please read Wayne Johnson’s New York Times Op-Ed, “Harvest From the Sea” written shortly after the whale harvest in May 1999
And here’s a local Seattle TV news clip from last year looking back at the anniversary of the whale hunt. It’s definitely cringe at times, so watch responsibly.

In closing, I’m sure you all saw Rick Santorum’s remarks made before a group of young Republicans. The video surfaced earlier in the week and generated all kinds of Opinion vexing - all very predictable. As I ruminated about this week’s newsletter theme, I found Santorum’s remarks - that settlers somehow "birthed a nation from nothing” - to be 100 percent on point to the steady attempts that a legacy of Santorum’s have worked to erase or challenge what the treaties time and again uphold - the hard truth of the real bones of this nation. The best part is, treaties never expire.

Dawaa’e - Thank you for being here! See you next weekend,

Jenni 🐳

THE INDIGENOUS INTERNET



	@nytomjg

INDIGENOUSLY INDEX

Number of Native Nations in the U.S. with treaty rights to explicitly hunt whales: 1

Total years since the Treaty with the Makah was signed with the U.S.: 166

Approximate years that passed until the Makah harvested a gray whale in 1999: 70

Total kilometers of the annual gray whale migration, the longest of any mammal: 20,000

Population of Eastern North Pacific (ENP) gray whales as of 2019, per NOAA: 26,960

Total quota in years the Int’l Whaling Comm. allows Makah to hunt ENP gray whales: 7

Number of ENP gray whales each year, per quota: 140

Total fine for violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act: $20K

Maximum imprisonment in years: 1

Number of Makah citizens arrested for hunting a whale in September 2007: 5

Total months Wayne Johnson was sentenced to federal prison for violating the MMPA: 5

Total days behind a 2019 hearing to waive the MMPA to the Makah Indian Tribe: 7

Total months Makah’s waiver request has been delayed by more NOAA reviews: 15

Exact age of Paul Watson when he harassed a 16-yr-old Yupik whale hunter in 2017: 67

Number of episodes behind James Cameron’s Secrets of Whales: 4

SIGNAL BOOST

Much of the opposition against the Makah’s whaling has come from one incredibly entitled white guy: Paul Watson who founded the marine mammal advocacy organization, Sea Shepherd.

During the hunt, author Robert Sullivan interviewed Watson and discovered the activist had lifted an old tomahawk from bloodstained Lakota lands while ransacking the Pine Ridge reservation during the occupation at Wounded Knee 1973. He took part in a sweat and emerged, sensing a wild call to protect the whales. “The buffalo seemed to talk to me,” Watson told Sullivan.

These human portraits, flawed and all, are what A Whale Hunt delivers.

A Whale Hunt was published in 2002 (Scribner) and had been on my reading list for way too long. I finally read it as a quarantine read and it brought more than just a deep reporter’s notebook to the Makah’s storied struggle. It also marked a critical place in the Indigenous timeline for white society’s reaction to Treaty stands - and not that long ago. Sullivan, a friend who is so humble in person - on the page, he gives us his observations and experiences as a journalist exploring what Makah whalers like Wayne Johnson have to gain from the hunt and what it stands for - an attempt to find his place in the tribe and the outside world, much in the same way that the tribe is attempting in asserting their collective ancestral lifeways.

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FEEDBACK

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Thank you, Denis. An incubator update: I start next week for a month-long intensive on newslettering. This might include surveys, giveaways. Suprises? ⭐️

QUOTE



	The New York Times

The Indigenously newsletter is produced by Jenni Monet (Laguna Pueblo)