If you’re a white man of non-indigenous heritage or someone who believes conservation decisions must be based solely in Western science, you may not get much out of this piece.
I was looking through the 2021 annual report for The Fund for Wild Nature, and there it was, on page 15, staring me in the face. A $3,000 grant to Sacred Lands Conservancy, the Lummi nonprofit that you likely know by its operating name “Sacred Sea.”
The grant was “To safeguard the Southern Resident Killer Whales from the ongoing trauma of colonization by promoting Indigenous stewardship.”
When I saw this, a sense of pride overcame me.
Here’s why.
I’m a bit of a mutt. Eastern European stock filtered through Mexico (due to immigration quotas to the USA) and finally to the states. My dad was born in Mexico City, and through my late Abuela, I am of Azteca heritage. But through the decades and centuries, the Spaniards and the French did a remarkable job of almost killing off the culture.
My best friend comes from the state of Michoacán and is part of the Otomi people. We’ve spent a lot of time together researching the traditions and stories of historic Mexican nations.
Having worked for years for a Canadian company, I get most of my news from the CBC. About the same time the network started reporting on the epidemic of missing indigenous women and children, and about the same time the country started taking a look at the damage caused by residential schools, I attended a museum conference where the keynote speaker was a member of the board of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. I was familiar with residential schools in Australia, but grossly negligent about them in North America.
When I was working on a project to acquire the Canadian orca Kiska from a theme park, I began thinking of the concept of orcas in tanks and how they compared to indigenous youth in residential schools. The analogy worked well for Kiska. It works even better for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut.
In the Point Eliot Treaty of of 1855, the Lummi gave up much of their land and moved to reservations. In return, they were recognized as soverein and attempts at residential schools by the Catholics and the Protestants were cancelled.
About fifteen years ago, I worked in administration at The Magic Theatre in San Francisco, internationally renowned for fostering the development and works of playwrights from numerous cultural backgrounds (among my favorites – Betty Shamieh, a Palestinian-American playwright).
We had one young man come in for a few days who was a Hopi playwright. I’ve stayed in touch with him on and off. He gave me a gift. He would email me every once in a while with the names of indigenous poets. I lost touch with him a few years ago, but one of the last that he shared was Rena Priest.
I was looking for one of her poems to share how I feel about the Lhaq’temish. I feel there are a colonizers about, and tricksters like the Hopi coyote, who may know how to tell the people what they want to hear, but don’t tell them what they need to know. Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut is strong. She deserves to return to her home waters, but with millionaires and billionaires on board, why is she being kept in a tank that’s leaking and falling apart through yet another hurricane season? Going the cheapest route denies her her dignity. Where is the love in that? These colonizers, these white men, seem to have a sense of pride in the way they do things. I like what Rena Priest wrote about pride.
In the archives there is a drawing
of a colonizer’s dream, never realized.
The National American Indian Memorial
was meant to testify to our existence
as a once noble people after
we’d all died, leaving behind
the entire western hemisphere.
(We’re not supposed to be here.)
We were all supposed to vanish
(be vanquished)
in the face of progress
(genocidal campaigns).
Now they call us other names,
but at one time they called us a
proud and vanishing race.Pride. What is pride? In my language
the word for boogers is smeteqsen,
while smetsqen are brains,
and smatsqen is the word for pride.
I think in the ancestors’ eyes
they may as well all be the same,
for all the good they do
without the spirit.
Ah, the spirit—your se’li,
it sounds almost like sa’le
which is the word for heart,
or sa’les which are the hands.
Words reveal much
about a people’s beliefs.
Pride and brains are on par
with snot, while hands and heart
are the tools of the se’li. This, I think,
is why we never went extinct
according to design, why they never
got to build a memorial to our doom,
a monument, taking pride in absolute
success at genocide.
I was very surprised when I came across Priest’s account of encountering Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut. It spoke to me. There are those who believe her return must be mandated by science. Science is a tool. It’s time, as many states, provinces, and nations have determined, that indigenous knowhow be applied to stewardship of the natural world. That knowledge and stewardship was here before the colonizers screwed things up and it’s the right way to fix it. Besides, science, as a tool, did little to improve Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s situation over the past five decades.
I’ll be presenting three excerpts from Priest’s essay. The full account can be found here.
I arrived at the Miami Seaquarium on a sunny Saturday in December, during peak tourist season. I wanted to see for myself the whale I’d read so much about, and the place where she has spent the last 49 years.
I surrendered $51.35 for a ticket and made my way toward the orca arena. The area was shuttered by metal roll-up doors, and the wide concrete hallway was devoid of other patrons. A walk through the rest of the park revealed that it was just as sparsely populated: Vendors stood idle at concession counters, waiting to sell dipping dots or French fries. Grade-schoolers on a class trip splashed about at the underwater touch tank. At the penguin exhibit, an elderly couple stared into the display window, viewing penguins that stood listlessly in the 80 degree heat. Nearby, two children, completely oblivious of the penguins, played with their stroller.
At the edge of a concrete ditch, I leaned against a rail. When I looked down, I noticed two giant sea turtles swimming in the shallow water. One of the turtles swam toward me, bumped into the wall, turned and swam away. When he reached the other side, he bumped into the wall and turned back again. Swim. Bump. Swim. Bump. I wondered if he had been swimming in circles and bumping into walls all day. Or maybe all day, every day, for decades.
As I wandered through the park, I realized the most astonishing thing about the place wasn’t the captive wildlife. It was that on this beautiful waterfront, in this coveted real estate market, in this era of enlightened consumers, Seaquarium continues to exist at all….
….In 1925, more than 60,000 Native American children were removed from their homes and placed in boarding schools. Many experienced treatment tantamount to torture. Many ran away. Some died, trying to find their way home. Between 1879 and 1918, nearly 200 children were buried at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. There were at least 150 other such schools in operation during the same period.
A disproportionate number of Indigenous women go missing every year, enough to spark international outcry from tribal communities across the United States and Canada. Many of the women are never found, and some are found murdered. The movement to raise awareness of this horror is referred to as the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. At a recent Lummi Nation gathering, women sang and danced in honor of our lost sisters. Little Lummi girls held signs saying, “MMIW — I’m not next.”
If vulnerable people are taken from their families against their will, and they die, the charges against the perpetrators are kidnapping, and murder. If orcas are my relations under the waves, and if Tokitae dies alone, 3,400 miles from home, and if her body is quietly disposed of after a lifetime of exploitation for profit, are kidnapping, enslavement and murder the crimes that have been committed?….
….When I entered the orca arena, I walked up to the edge of Tokitae’s tank. She swam close — right up against the wall — and stayed there, suspended at the surface. A couple of Seaquarium employees stood watch, but aside from them, I was alone with her. I sang her a song, and she made vocalizations back to me. Eventually, a noisy school group and other people trickled in. I took a seat to watch the show. Rock ’n’ roll blared through the loudspeakers, a young woman in a wetsuit tossed fish into Tokitae’s mouth, a video on a Jumbotron talked about how Tokitae was loved and cared for while her wild relatives were going extinct. I felt horribly sad.
Then, there was a new feeling. Seeing Tokitae there in that tiny pool, knowing she’d spent nearly five decades there, raised doubts. What if returning her to the Salish Sea was the wrong thing to do? Even with the sea sanctuary proposed for her retirement, how would she adjust? I stayed until the young employees told me to leave, but on the way to my hotel, the question split me in two. It was wrong that she was there to begin with, but what if we were wrong on all sides on what to do with her?
I drove out to the lighthouse on Key Biscayne. I rolled up my pants and waded in the ocean. I looked out to the water and asked for an answer. As rarely ever happens, an answer came: In 1970, when Tokitae was taken, the courts didn’t see her abduction as a crime. But if the capture was carried out today, the perpetrators would be arrested and prosecuted, and the whales would be released.
We have ended the practice of orca abduction because it is brutal. Now it’s time to take another step. If the blackfish want their whale moved, and we move her, they will grant us power; the power to heal our relationship with the natural world.
Thank you Rena Priest. Thank you to the Lhaq’temish and all indigenous peoples. As the Azteca would say, “Quicemitqui in yollotl” – The heart rules all.
