Living with Whales: Documents and Oral Histories of Native New England Whaling History by Nancy Shoemaker (review)

Somehow chronologically and geographically expansive yet brief, Living with Whales details the everyday for Algonquian Indians involved in the whaling industry. Poems, obituaries, letters, photographs, journals, doodles, contracts, and, not least, original oral histories, from both abroad and off Long Island and the New England coast, are at the heart of this documentary history. Nancy Shoemaker brings together a staggering collection of life stories that whaling shaped, stories that span the lives of those in seventeenth-century Cape Cod Bay to twenty-first century Maori families in New Zealand. She does so to drive home the idea that Native American value systems, knowledge, and culture irrefutably shaped an industry that exploited its workers and brought native men “around the horn,” by the Hawaiian Islands, and through the South Pacific.

The lives and deaths of Shoemaker’s native whalers, each so different, underscore the complex relationships between Algonquians and their livelihood-turned-tool of capitalism and imperialism. “Simultaneously exploitative and rewarding,” there were as many relationships between “Indians,” broadly defined, and the New England whaling boom as there were Indians involved (6). In the nineteenth century whale oil made white investors of Sag Harbor and captains from Nantucket wealthy beyond the reach of most working men. “His hands only got dirty from counting his money,” recounts Shinnecock woman Holly Haile Davis of the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum. “Please, don’t think that he ever got any grease on his fingers” (177). But when the industry collapsed and investors moved on, Algonquian descendants scattered across the world insisted upon continuing whaling work and rediscovered value and pride in it. Their voyages are a testament to “surprisingly cosmopolitan” native peoples’ active participation in the global economy, an antidote to the common notion that Native Americans lived and continue to live isolated and provincial lives (7). Shoemaker’s careful editing reveals native feelings of ambivalence, oftentimes about life-transforming transatlantic voyages articulated centuries apart.

Oral historians will find the long chronology of this book—from creation stories through nineteenth- to twenty-first-century historical memory—thought provoking. In Living with Whales, early American source material and oral histories, both lovingly researched, coexist and indeed inform one another. Shoemaker’s subjects and whose relationships with whales and the ocean precede and outlast the whaling industry, require such an approach. Wampanoag woman Ramona Peters, for example, views her own extensive knowledge and memories of whales as a history connected to, but independent of, colonization and race: “The framework of our people, the ancestors, was beyond just human-to-human communication. So I always believed in it . . .watching [whales] in the morning, no one else was around, I really felt as though I was communicating with them” (143). Such a world view blurs the lines between past and present, twenty-first century and seventeenth century, requiring historians to understand a swath of time periods before articulating and analyzing the extraordinary and varied ways past and present relate for native peoples. While recent oral history projects document crises across the world as they occur and others remain confined to living memory, Shoemaker’s work invites us to stretch ourselves methodologically and reach backwards beyond traditional historiographical bounds.

This is also a great book for an environmental or oral history practicum or an early America survey. Shoemaker’s narrative is minimal and spotlights the carefully edited and contextualized source material. Each oral history is edited for clarity and is easily digestible, providing a gentle introduction to the field. Shoemaker also discusses her process for collecting and editing oral histories and for integrating the input of her interviewees, useful for students and researchers alike. The documents themselves speak volumes about the continuing relevance of early American history to our contemporary identities; it would be wonderful for this and like volumes to maintain an online and accessible presence for oral histories and other primary source material. The whales themselves...