Discuss: Savage Disobedience

Thanks, Eric.  I feel that I have a good sense of what happened and the context in which it occurred.  And was only possible because you took the time and Orion gave you the space to share this with us.

I have 3 immediate reactions to the story.

First, sadness that almost everything seems to have gone wrong and that, when the Coast Guard became involved it only made things worse, by prolonging the suffering of the whale.

Second, we, Americans, like to speak of how we live by the rule of law and, yet, here is a panel of judges—a Court of Appeals, no less—that shows little regard for clear precedent AND WILL NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE because of lifetime appointments and no mechanism for holding them accountable.

Third, just before this, I read of how the WTO will rule on complaints by Mexico and Canada that the US’s Country of Origin Labeling requirements violate our responsibilities under the treaties creating the WTO.  In that case, the WTO, a group outside the US, has the authority to rule on whether the US has kept its obligations whereas in this case the Makah are stuck with US courts. 

I suggest that the Makah appeal its treaty to the World Court.

For the Makah, whale hunting obviously has deep cultural and even religious significance.For our institutions (courts) to deny them this activity, wouldn’t it be comparable to some outside authority denying Christians the right to communion, maybe because of some people not having enough food to eat, and therefore it is a waste of bread and grape juice? OK, maybe I am stretching the point here, but you get what I mean.

We are so civilized that we designate poor laborers to do our killing for us so we can have animal meat (those of us who are not vegans) in our diets.

Furthermore, most people in our country are so nature deprived that we don’t appreciate that nature is all about one species killing another for food, and that man, in fact, is part of nature. The court felt that killing whales was “kind of icky” and the author, Eric Wagner, states that he found whale killing “distasteful”.

Can anyone make a serious argument that an occasional whale killing by Native Americans has any significant impact on whale population? After all, white man’s activities in the past, and in the present with our pollution and other activities which harm the ocean environment are doing far more damage to marine species.

We already have such a long history of treaty abrogation that it is a habit we can’t stop. I’m glad I’m not a Native American and having someone constantly trying to make me into being a foreigner in my own country.

I enjoy the quality of writing and the subject matter of Orion. I regret that after giving gift subscriptions to all 4 of my married sons that they and especially their spouses found the subject matter too “dark” and did not renew. They are all environmentally conscious, and well educated, but don’t like to talk about many of the issues. Unfortunately, I think this problem is widespread, and hinders our ability to do anything meanful about solving environmental issues.

Thank you.

James Sauer

The Makah whaling party might most be condemned for its incompetence in whale hunting.  The Keystone Cops of whale hunting. But not funny.
The story gets turned on its side when you realize the near-sacred whale was abused and wasted by native people no less.
Better to have the whole episode sink quietly into the deep.

This was a challenging read. It’s such a charged issue, as whaling always is, but the Makah situation perhaps moreso.

My wife and I blundered onto the reservation in 1999 not knowing that their first hunt was about to happen, and passed roadblocks manned by riot police with automatic rifles, watched choppers in the air, and saw the Sea Shepherd armada bobbing offshore.

Pretty surreal.

Erik, Orion Grassroots Network

The deep irony in this “clash of civilizations” is expressed in the statement “Our modern world has a revolutionary new concept: grocery stores! We’ve adapted, and the Makah need to, also.”

In truth, we have not adapted biologically to the depredations that the modern supermarket has inficted upon both human health and the environment.

The lifeless and mal-nourishing foods we buy with our wage-slavery in little cans and boxes has contributed to pandemic chronic disease, obesity, and food obsession. The stockyards and agri-businesses that feed those store shelves have decimated our arable lands, poisoned our waterways, and turned traditional hunting and husbandry into mass inhumane slaughter. Yet it is our carefully managed distancing from the sources of our foods that keeps us “innocent” and reactive when other people seek their own food in more honest ways.

It’s no wonder that the Makah whalers were clumsy in their hunt, having had their traditions wrested from them by force. They should be commended for trying to make the best of their efforts rather than condemned for mistakes. It was clearly the Coast Guard (why are they based on tribal land?) who made the gravest errors and whose actions resulted in the waste of a great creature.

The “animal rights” people who castigate natives for exercising their natural and legal rights are not unlike the “pro-life” groups who hate and condemn rather than try to build bridges to another way of understanding and being in the world.

One has to wonder who the real savages are today.

A mural and past, premordial violence does not a right to persecture make.  This is especially true for groups or individuals who market themselves as victims, as Mitchell surely does.

Nantucket is awash in whaling detritus:  museums, harpoons, whaling captain’s mansions.  Surely cultural, and no more.  North American tribes once drove thousands of buffalo and other species off 500-foot-high cliffs.  No more.  For the heck of it,  gunners had “great fun” shooting thousands of hapless passenger pigeons from the skies.  Murals in Egypt record a history of human slavery.

Whilst condemning affronts, many deadly serious, others excessively slight, toward our own species, it is axiomatic that “progressives” simply adore savage chic:  violence and ignorance toward other species - if by the correct, chosen group - is fashionable. Victomology is turned on its head: the victims here are the perps - not the assaulted.

Killing a gray (who had learned to trust humans) to “make a point” is a cowardly, debased and narcissistic act, one that was botched, to boot.  A gray whale would never stoop to kill to make a point.  If Mitchell and others partake selectively of modern life - monitoring blogs online, for example, - evolving elsewhere seems in order.

The only “violence and ignorance” in regard to this incident is the kind that Susan Russell so self-righteously spouts.

The Makah did not engage in the hunt “to make a point” but to exercise their natural and legal rights, to honor their long culture of respectful engagement with the creatures who feed them, and to bring healthy food to their people.

The difference in cultures became stark when the Makah spoke prayers to the whale after the dominant culture’s bureaucratic delays prolonged the animal’s suffering and caused its death to be wasted.

The only thing “turned on its head” is the occupying culture’s arrogance in condemning the activities of those who live with respect for the lives of other creatures. It is the upside-down arrogance of a culture which has demonstrated a complete disregard for the web of life and its sacred relationship to our own.

Hunting for subsistence (as all natural predators do) is not a violent act. The taking and giving of life is at the core of nature’s laws. Violence is whatever violates the natural law or undermines the sacred integrity of another creature or the land itself.

It is we Europeans who brought violence to Turtle Island. Even the Native American Buffalo jumps - necessary in order to feed, shelter and clothe the people - took only a tiny fraction of the tens of millions of ruminants. It was the Spanish horses and guns and later the settlers’ “sport” of shooting Buffalo from trains and for contest and shipping literally millions of hides per year Eastward which wiped out the once great herds.

That anyone in this fundamentally violent dominant and globally-dominating culture would condemn the simple subsistence act of a few natural people is, itself, an act of violence.

Appellate courts have been wrong in the past, as they were in this case, and sometimes it is worthwhile to challenge the legal system all over again. But that is a judgement call, often tempered by whether or not the plaintiffs have bigger (or, more expensive or worthwhile fish to fry).

A larger issue for the dominant society is the persistence of ignorance about our nation’s treaty obligations, both domestic and foreign, and how the denial of justice to any group, no matter how small, jeopardizes the prospects for justice for all.

The greatest crime in the events recounted in Eric’s article is the absence of recognition of the vital importance of cultural diversity to the evolution of humankind, and the co-evolution of the rest of the biosphere.  While the news media are quick to recount instances of discrimination due to race, age, gender, or sexual preference, who is questioning the genocide implicit in denying Makah or Inuit whaling?