No to the Makah
The Makah Indians of Washington state are trying once more to conduct a
whale hunt. It's a bad idea, and I hope their lawsuit is unsuccessful.
A little background. The Makah live on a reservation at Neah Bay, Washington, the northwesternmost point of the continental United States, and a forbidding place. (I visited there in 1998 for
an article I wrote about the Makah for Mother Jones magazine.) They used to live on more land, but in 1855 they ceded most of it to the U.S. government. One of that treaty's stipulations was that the Makah would have a right to whale, as they did at the time and continued to do until the 1920s, when the tribe abandoned whale hunts because there were so few of the animals left.
But a few years back, a few members of the tribe began pushing for a return to whaling. The original incentive was probably economic, a hope that the whale products could be sold to Japan. But since that's illegal, and the government would never approve a commercial whale hunt, the drive to restore the whale hunt morphed into a kind of cultural pride thing. It is not a subsistence hunt, which is the only kind traditionally allowed for indigenous peoples; the Makah aren't rich, but they don't need the whale meat for food.
The Times piece linked to above doesn't quite capture all the subtleties of the situation in Neah Bay; it is complicated, and internal tribal politics have shaped the debate. (At least when I visited, many people who opposed the hunt were reluctant to speak against it, because several of the tribe's more senior authority figures supported it.)
It's a shame that some members of the Makah tribe feel that the best way to reinvigorate their tribal culture is to slaughter beautiful animals. (Take a look at the horrifying picture.) Wouldn't the tribe benefit by coming up with new traditions, like peacefully interacting with the whales that migrate past their part of the world? Particularly upsetting to me is the fact that the gray whales being hunted have become so accustomed to interacting with humans, they're essentially tame; the Makah's idea of a whale "hunt" is paddling up to a stationary animal, harpooning it, and then shooting it to death.
Visiting the reservation, with its lonely beach and craggy coastline, I couldn't help but wonder if the real reason some of the Makah wanted to start whale hunting wasn't boredom. There just wasn't a lot else to do there at Neah Bay.....
