Sea of Discontent Surrounds Whale Hunt

NEAH BAY, Wash. —  The moon was low on the water that night, and the silvery barnacled back of the whale slid by the boat only for a moment before sinking back into the deep. You could smell him, though, the rank salt odor of bottom slime hanging on the wind.

The men in the canoe slipped their oars into the water and pressed forward. This time, he blew farther in, and then farther still. Soon, the whale was backed up against the beach, pulsing uncertainly in the kelp beds in 17 feet of water. “They say the gray whale can turn like a cat and attack like a dog,” said Wayne Johnson. “We got stealth, though. . . . And we also have the .50-caliber.”

In the end, the hunters backed away, leaving the whale to regain the deep and press on toward Mexico. But there’s another one out there, and that’s the one Johnson and the others think of now when they’re bathing down in the river, praying in the sweat lodge, sleeping on a wild beach next to the canoe, imagining the electric charge of the whale’s life climbing up the shaft of the harpoon and settling on the hunters like a carpet of glory.

“We’re getting into our spiritual potential now, starting to fast, bathing in the creeks and the rivers and the ocean,” explains Donnie Swan, 22, one of the younger members of the whaling crew. “Going out there, it’s like paddling down and seeing my grandpa’s reflection in the water. . . . It’s a real touching feeling, real strong.”

The midnight practice hunt, recounted on a recent afternoon, was but one of many oceangoing trials the Makah Indians will make in the coming days before finally lodging a harpoon in the back of a gray whale, marking the first legal whale hunt off the American mainland since the leviathans nearly disappeared from the oceans in the early part of the century.

The hunt, which could begin at any time, will not go unmarked. Someone recently mailed a photograph of Makah Whaling Commission Director Keith Johnson with red-inked blood flowing out of his eyes. Someone else telephoned and fired off a gun.

The blustery waters of the Strait of Juan De Fuca off Neah Bay are growing into an uneasy battlefield as a swelling flotilla of anti-whaling boats joins vessels from the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Marine Fisheries Service working to aid the hunt. Whale enthusiasts from as far away as Germany, Australia, Scotland and Israel have traveled to Neah Bay for the showdown. Some enthusiastic young women have even vowed to throw their bodies in front of the whale’s, rather than see it fall victim to the Makah harpoon.

On this tiny reservation--slung on a windy cape that marks the northwesternmost reach of the continental United States--there is confusion and more than a little resentment about the growing international outcry over a tradition the Makahs have practiced, with 70 years’ interruption, for about 15 centuries. It is a tradition whose renewal, they hope, will undo the effects of a century and a half of forced assimilation, of land given up and of the modern-day ills of drugs, alcohol and a 50% unemployment rate.

The historic paintings and baskets of the Makah nearly all depict stark geometric arcs and lines around a black center, the dark eye of a whale. Songs, dances and stories recount the exploits of the Makahs who set out on wooden canoes and harpooned the mighty humpback whale. While commercial whaling has been banned in most parts of the world since the 1930s, the Makahs, who fall into a small exception granted aboriginal hunters, are the only U.S. tribe with a recognized treaty right to hunt whales.

“Some people even describe these people [opposing the hunt] as the second missionaries. Telling us our way of life is wrong, inferior, our attitudes are backward and incomplete,” said Janine Bowechop, director of the Makah Cultural and Research Center. “This is probably the only resource that has such emotional and sentimental value for Americans. We appreciate the fact that the world was able to restore this resource. But it’s restored. And people are having a difficult time letting go.”

It’s Three Hours to Nearest Mall

There is hardly a spot on the U.S. mainland so remote and so wildly lovely. It is a four-hour trek from Seattle, first on a ferry across Puget Sound, then driving across a connecting island and small peninsula, across a large floating bridge onto the Olympic peninsula, up through the farmlands of the northern peninsula to the mill town of Port Angeles, and finally another hour and a half of winding, two-lane road suspended on bluffs that face the looming hills of Canada on the far side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Rising over a small fishing marina, the town of 2,000 Makahs is little more than a general store, a VFW hall, a school, a cafe and several streets of makeshift housing. The closest movie theater is a 1 1/2-hour drive away. It’s three hours to the nearest mall.

In the years since whaling ebbed away, the Makahs have scratched out a living fishing and logging. But many of the hills now are cut bare, and stocks of salmon that were once plentiful have crashed all over the Pacific Northwest.

In the best of times, when the boats are out and the few tourists are trickling in, half the town has a job, and the half that’s fishing isn’t bringing much back. In the winter, unemployment hits 75%.

“Unemployment on the reservation is not just somebody who would like a job. It’s measured by those who return home [from outside], people who say, ‘We don’t have any shelter, we don’t have any food, we don’t have any gas to look for a job,’ ” said Ted Noel, head of the tribal department of health, education and social services.

The community food bank that Noel’s department operates serves 500 people a month--a quarter of the town’s population. Now the food bank has opened up a large freezer ready to receive whale meat. But the aboriginal whaling quota of five animals per year was granted to the Makah by the U.S. government last year as part of the worldwide quota authorized by the International Whaling Commission. It doesn’t assume the tribe--unlike Eskimos in Arctic Alaska that hunt the bowhead whale--needs the whales for subsistence.

Instead, the Makahs are seeking to whale on the basis of cultural subsistence, the survival of their culture, its traditions and social structure. It is an exemption that hunt opponents view as particularly onerous, because they fear it could open a loophole for nations like Japan and Norway to effectively reopen commercial whaling disguised as aboriginal whaling.

Noel’s older sons have left the reservation: his eldest raising a family a few hours away, the second-oldest working as a security guard in Seattle. Andy, 19, had been unemployed and largely without direction until he took up seagoing canoeing a few years ago. Now, like his great-great-grandfather, he is going to be a whaler.

“As any teenager, he did go the route of drugs and alcohol. But since coming onto the canoe, the commitment has been there to lay off the drugs, to quit the alcohol and actually, if you can believe this, he’s even talked about getting patches to lay off the smoking,” Noel said.

“On that first [canoeing] trip . . . when he left here, he was a boy. But sometime on that whole month trip, he was a man. I can’t put it into exact words, but the manner in which he addressed himself was so respectful, because he was respected for what he had done. . . . My son from the age of 14 decided this was what he wanted to do, that he would stay with it. And he’s grown in ways I never could even have imagined.”

A few streets away, in a trailer with flowers outside, Alberta Thompson sits in a living room adorned with images of the whale.

“I don’t know why they call it subsistence; subsistence means something we’ve eaten and can’t go without. People here don’t want to eat whale meat. Even when it’s fresh, it’s got a foul smell to it,” Thompson scoffed.

The 72-year-old tribal elder has been one of a few Makahs speaking out against the whaling plan, arguing that it is a waste of a beautiful animal that no one will want to eat. For her outspokenness, Thompson says she lost her job of 15 years at the senior citizens’ center a few weeks ago. A short time later, her dog was found dead several miles from home. Her daughter was forced off a piece of tribal land on which she had been living.

Then an FBI agent visited and began questioning her about her relations with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the Los Angeles-based anti-whaling group that has been a leader in the efforts to halt the Makah hunt.

When asked why she was opposed to the hunt, she told him, as she tells everyone, about the week she spent in the lagoon in Baja California where the gray whales migrate each year to calve. She told about sitting in a small boat as a mother whale loomed up beside it, her calf in tow.

“It changed me forever,” Thompson said. “What the baby conveyed to me, and the mother, was just a spirit of trust. I can’t see killing something just because of tradition, just because it’s a treaty right. We don’t need it, we don’t use it, why should we kill it?”

They Lie in Wait for Makah Boats

A half-mile or so off the outer breakwater, an old fishing vessel equipped with a high-powered water cannon and a one-man submarine painted to look like a killer whale waits, binoculars trained onshore for any sign that the Makah canoe and chase boats are heading to sea.

The Sea Shepherd, along with the Sea Shepherd Society’s sister ship, the 95-foot Sirenian, have been joined by a third vessel sponsored by the Progressive Animal Welfare Society and a constantly changing armada of small cruise boats, whale-watching ships and inflatable dinghies bent on scaring away the whales before the Makahs’ harpoons and rifles can kill them.

The National Marine Fisheries Service plies the waters looking for signs that members of the annual 10,000-mile gray whale migrating community have appeared, in addition to the small local population of gray whales the Makahs have agreed not to pursue. The U.S. Coast Guard is enforcing a 500-foot perimeter rule around the Makah hunting boats in the hope that the mixture of rushing boats, screaming protesters, thrashing whales and .50-caliber guns does not become fatal.

The upshot is that the normally empty sea off Neah Bay looks like Newport Beach on regatta day. Except no one is smiling; everyone has binoculars raised to their eyes and radio microphones held nervously to their lips. They scan the sea for whales, they scan the sky for approaching storms and most of all, they scan each other.

Every day since Oct. 1, the Makahs have set out in their canoes and in chase boats to be pursued by armies of small vessels, with the thwumping patrol ships bringing up the rear. The Makahs have made no secret of the fact that many of these forays are decoys, aimed at running the Sea Shepherd Society out of gas money before they run out of money themselves.

“We can sit out here as long as we need to,” said Lisa Distefano, the expedition leader, on a recent afternoon aboard the Sea Shepherd.

“Out of all the issues we’ve covered, whether it’s the baby harp seals or the dolphin killing, this is the one we’re getting calls about every single day. This issue’s really gripped people. I think they’re finally realizing . . . that this isn’t just about the Makah--this will be the beginning of commercial whaling globally.”

Joining the boat this day are a 20-year-old student from Tel Aviv, an astronomer from UCLA, a fisherman from Port Angeles, an environmental activist from Brazil and a museum worker from the San Juan Islands.

“When they say they’re gonna take the whale in one shot, it ain’t gonna happen like that,” said Chuck Owens, a fisherman and former fish buyer for the Makah who has made a living off these seas for much of his life. “When you’re in a canoe that’s bouncing around like this, and you’re trying to hit one spot like this to sever his spinal cord? It almost can’t be done.”

“They’ve been practicing with the harpoons on harbor seals,” added Sue Miller, another volunteer from Friday Harbor, Wash. “They harpooned one of them, and the thing kept them awake all night, screaming and crying.

“And to think of the [whale’s] pain and the writhing: I think a quick death for a whale is 20 minutes, and [otherwise] it goes on for hours. I’m so ashamed of my species when I think of that. Even though I’m a grandmother, I’ve been a 911 operator, I’m a cantor at a Jewish synagogue and I’m willing to incur a felony, or at some point put my life on the line. I don’t know if it will come to that. But I’m ready.”

Dead Whale Is Seen as the ‘Chosen One’

The Makahs have heard affirmations like this, and they seem at a loss about how to respond. To them, the whale is one of the Earth’s animals, a magnificent creature to be sure, whose life will be laid down as a blessing on the tribe, but nonetheless a sea animal resting at a point somewhere down the food chain below that of the human being.

“The animal rights people, the anti-whalers, they will say and do anything to stop the killing of one animal, and they’ve chosen to pick the whale, because it’s a beautiful, beautiful creature. Nonetheless, it is our native food, that we have been without for 70 years,” said Johnson of the whaling commission.

“The whale that gives up its life for us is going to be the chosen one, and when that whale gives itself to us, the prayers, the rejoicing and the humbling event will strengthen us.”