....Five whales a year for ceremonial and subsistence purposes is what tribal
chairman Hubert Markishtum wrote in his May 5 letter to the State Department.
Subsistence. Not subsistence as in people are going to starve without whale meat
or whale blubber, not on a reservation stocked with frozen pizza and foil juice
pouches with gluedon straws. More like, subsistence as in survival of a culture. As
in, half the teenagers know hip-hop better than their traditional family songs, half
the adults on the reservation are unemployed, half the families have incomes
below the poverty level.
"Maybe of our young people have become victims of crime and drug or alcohol
addiction..." he wrote. A whale hunt wouldn't solve all these problems, and maybe
it wouldn't solve any of them, but there are things it could teach. Discipline.
Cooperation. Spiritual things. An appreciation for old ways at a time when being
Indians is as much a matter of public relations, politics, peer pressure,
congressional budgets, fishing rights as it once was harpoons and cedar canons....
....To understand why a hunt for five whales is so important to the tribe today is
to know something about the Treaty of Neah Bay. The 1855 document secures the
tribe's right to whale. It is more than a contract, a land settlement, a legal
agreement. It is what sets the Makah apart from other tribes, from the rest of
America. It holds the Makah tribe's sovereignty, their identity. The old guys have
up a lot for that.
"This is the way our people see it," says Greig Arnold, a Makah carver who
helped start the tribe's museum. "It's like I poked my finger and got blood, and
you poked your finger and got blood and we made a deal." To the Makah, the
deal involved losing land and language and the right to practice their religious
songs and dances. Their children got sent away to Christian boarding schools.
Three-quarters of the tribe died from smallpox and measles, pioneer disease to
which they had no immunities. (These days there are about 2,000 Makah; about
half live on the reservation.) Government gents tried to convert Makah fishermen
into farmers, but when their crops failed in the incessant rain, the fishermen bent
their pitchfork tines into halibut hooks and harpoon tips. Over the years, fishing
collapsed, and regulations were piled on. Whaling was the first to go, then sealing,
and now the salmon are scarce. In 1987, tribal members took in $4 million from
fishing. Last year, they netted half that amount.
"So you do all that to our people, put us in a big bag, shake us all up and tell us
we can't be who we are and somebody else is going to be controlling our life, and
our people say,'OK, if we're going to have to give up stuff, this is what we want
for it'. "They wanted schools and doctors and $30,000. Most of all, they wanted the
ocean's resources. They wanted whales.
Flanked by his son's Playskool trucks and a black satellite dish, Arnold sits in a
lawn chair watching the afternoon fog roll onto the reservation. Pretty soon he'll
go return a video, "Pulp Fiction." "Now THAT is a statement about American
culture," he says.
American culture - Disney's Pocahontas, Sen. Slade Gorton's budget cuts, car air
fresheners, commodity cheese, HUD housing, microwave ovens - this is all part of
contemporary reservation life, but it does not define what it is to be Makah.
For 4,000 years, the tribe has lived on the edge of the continent, where cedar
meets sea. Legend has it that the Makah people were conceived when the stars
mated with the animals. Thunderbird brought the first whale to the people when
the ocean was so rough they couldn't get out. They had no fish, which in the
Makah language translates as having no food. Morning came, and they found a
whale on the beach. Since then, up until 80 years ago, "The people Who Live Near
the Rocks and The Seagulls" always had whales. They hope to again.
"How do you identify as a tribe? Who are the Makah?" Arnold asks. "Whalers.
That's the first word out of the mouth".....
....The whale hunt is planned for November, a year from now. Traditionally, the
Makah hunted gray whales in the spring and summer, when the cetaceans travel
north from their Baja breeding grounds. These days, it would be bad publicity to
kill a pregnant cow or a baby, so the Makah have decided to wait until fall, when
the whales have finished calving and are on their way south. Traditionally, the
Makah got rich selling excess whale oil. The tribe hasn't ruled out commercial
whaling in the future but says it's focused on a subsistence hunt for now.
Beyond that, much is upin the air. The tribe hasn't decided who will whale,
whether they'll paddle out in canoes, use motorboats, where they hunt, or which
whales they try to harvest. A handful of gray whales hang around the reef front
of Greene's office almost all year. They're smaller then their migratory cousins
and are not spooked by people. They let boats get close enough to smell their
dark, oily odor, near enough to be speared with a ballpoint pen. Maybe not those
whales, Greene says; nothings been decided yet.
Between now and then Greene expects to be on the phone a lot. By the time the
International Whaling Commission meets in Aberdeen, Scotland, next June, the 40
member-nations need to understand a few basics. First, the Makah are not the
same as the Inupiat of Alaska, though they have equally strong whaling traditions.
Second, whaling is a treaty right; the tribe is going through international channels
as a courtesy to the U.S. government and to stave off costly lawsuits. And third,
commercial whale-watching, or any other tourist-based venture, is unlikely. It
rains 110 days a year; Neah Bay is too far from anywhere to depend on tourism.
"I heard references to Neah Bay being right outside Seattle," said Margaret
Frainley Hayes, an attorney for the U.S. Commerce Department who trekked out
to the reservation in September. It took her less time to fly from Washington, DC.,
to Sea-Tac Airport than it did to drive from Seattle to Neah Bay, "By the very long
time it took to get out there, I was disabused of the notion."
Hayes and others will take the Makah case to the international meeting, where
most countries are opposed to commercial whaling and reluctant about
subsistence and ceremonial whaling. It's hard to say what they'll decide about the
Makah. The commission has allowed other native peoples to take whales: the
Aleuts in Russia's Far East, native Greenlanders, the Bequians of St. Vincent and
the Grenadines.
Meanwhile, Greenpeace tentatively agrees not to interfere as long as the whales
are hunted for subsistence and not sold. Other groups promise to raise a stink.
The media calls. NBC. A reporter from a little paper in Minnesota. Columbia
Pictures. Everyone wants the same thing, to go on the whale hunt. Greene jokes
about inviting the press, charging for parking, jacking up hotel prices - and then
delaying the whale hunt for oh, say, two weeks while the producers ruin their
good shoes in the mud. Just kidding. Actually, he says, the Makah don't want
media voyeurs hanging around. The tribe has already figured out ways to avoid
them....
MEMORIES OF WHALING
No Makah alive had participated in an actual whale hunt because the last one was
so long ago, but a handful of elders handed down what their parents and
grandparents had told them.
March was the time the whales came north from California on a journey through
the Bering Sea in icy Arctic waters. The whale hunt really began long before that.
Spiritual preparations was the most important part. The Makah were asking the
whale to give its life.
Not everyone could whale. The right and rituals were passed down in families
through 1,500 years of Makah whaling history. The crew bathed in cold streams
and lakes all through the winter when the moon waxed. They rubbed their bodies
with hemlock twigs until they bled, and then used nettles to further toughen the
skin. They abstained from sex. They fasted. They dove under water, held their
breath for increasingly long periods, practiced the quiet, undulating movements of
a whale. There were other rituals, too, but these are private Makah matters,
nobody else's business.
When the time came, a whale would appear in a dream to the head of the
whaling family. The whaler and his seven-man crew would paddle several miles
offshore, riding the swells in a cedar canoe stocked with two days of drinking
water and food, harpoons tipped with mussels shells, alder bailers, seal-skin floats,
fathoms of line made from hand-twisted whale sinew and pounded cedar boughs.
Their pointed paddles made no splash when dipped in the waves. They prayed,
waited, watched. A small school of fish. A dark shape. The whale. It would come
up for a breath, roll forward out of sight, then blow. When the whale's bead
submerged again, the canoe pulled along the whale's left side.
The harpooner stood in the bow, swung a 16-foot harpoon over his head, struck
downward. Ropes uncoiled, men threw sealskin floats overboard. The whale
towed them, sometimes all day, out of sight of land, until finally it tired. As
oarsman dove into the cold, salty water to sew the whale's lips closed so its body
wouldn't sink.
Back on the beach, the whole village turned out to receive the whale. They sang
the harpooner's family songs, performed dances and ceremonies, placed eagle
down on the whale's hump and blow-hole. A year of spiritual cleansing paid off.
The whale gave its life. Everybody did his job. In a whaling canoe, there was no
room for dissent.
Caption:
"The Makah Whaler," photographed by Edward Curtis in 1915, is the late Wilson
Arnold, an esteemed harpooner whose family still lives in Neah Bay. A year from
now, Arnold's great-grandson, 44-year old Greig Arnold, hopes to participate in a
traditional whale hunt. Arnold's 17-year-old great-great-grandson, also named
Wilson, hopes to be studying sports medicine in college, someplace closer to the
mall and movies.