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Eleven. Killing the Whale: Sightings and the Makah Hunt
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
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A whale passes. From dark strands of water it calls its children by name. Light, Smoke, Water, Land —Linda Hogan, “Fat” C HAPT E R E LEV E N Killing the Whale Sightings and the Makah Hunt In 1999 a group of Makah whalers killed their first gray whale in some seventy years, and in so doing, they reestablished or reinitiated a long dormant tribal tradition. Members of the hunting party were from traditional whaling families among the Makah Nation in extreme northwestern Washington State who, despite historical family connections, had to earn the right to be a part of the hunting party and actually hunt the whale. Basing their canoe and harpoon designs on artifacts collected in the museum on the Makah reservation in Neah Bay, Washington, they built their own canoes, fashioned their own harpoons modeled on those of their ancestors, observed some of the traditional rituals as they trained for months, and—to some degree in the traditional way but against great political and social opposition—successfully hunted a gray whale. One of the outspoken opponents of the hunt was Linda Hogan. In a Seattle Times editorial, however, she qualifies her opposition by insisting that the treaty rights of the Makahs, as of all Indian tribes, must be upheld : “I think of my responsibility as a Native woman to preserve the world for the future. It is also my responsibility to stand up for treaty rights. And here is where the conflict begins” (Peterson 102; Hogan’s emphasis). Nevertheless, she insists, there is a tradition even older than that of Makah whaling, and that tradi202 Sightings and the Makah Hunt 203 tion is listening to tribal elders, especially the old women who place great emphasis on the identity relationship between humans and whales. She argues for remembering and honoring the “unremembered story of the whales who do not belong to human beings” (Hogan, “Silencing” B9). Hogan returns to this argument in the book she coauthored with Brenda Peterson, Sightings: The Gray Whales’ Mysterious Journey (2002), writing that in “their location at the end of the continent, a people are trying to lay claim to an older world and its complex of ceremony, but which people? It may very well be the silenced older women” (Peterson 154; Hogan’s emphasis). In supporting both treaty rights and the whale’s rights, Hogan faces an apparently irreconcilable paradox, and the issue in these terms is not unlike the issue of Ama’s ceremonial hunting of a Florida panther. It also shares similarities with the literary conundrum of arguing for an American Indian land ethic while at the same time defying stereotypes of Native Americans as inherent land stewards. The issue of Makah whaling raises a number of questions applicable to a study of Native American literary responses to the environment, most immediately, perhaps, the question of how a turn from literary analysis to discussion of an actual historical controversy fits into and furthers the larger issues of the present study. That is, how might issues Hogan raises in a novel like Power be applicable in such nonacademic, nonfictional situations? And how do we read the literature that the controversy has spawned? This chapter thus looks at the specific controversy and what it stands for in legal, political, practical, social, colonial, and of course literary contexts, on both the communal and global levels. What are the historical and traditional reasons for hunting and what do they mean in the contexts of global community? How is opposition to the hunt one more example of the colonizer’s effort to destroy the lives and livelihoods of Native Americans ? What is involved in considering whaling from a strictly environmental or animal-rights perspective? That is, how do we (or can we) consider the issue out of its specific geopolitical, historical context? How should non-Native scholars of Native American literature and history consider the issue of Makah whaling as they begin to decolonize their methodologies? How might the effort to decolonize American Indian studies contribute to the discussion of issues such as those raised by Makah whaling? And finally, how might considerations of the fact that cultures evolve over time [3.83.81.42] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:40 GMT) 204 Killing the Whale affect the way one thinks about tradition in the context of what it means to be a whaling nation? In Hogan’s novel Power (published in 1998, the year before the 1999 Makah...