Aspiring Whalers Practice, Proselytize Their History

They gather before dawn at the marina to practice paddling, mumbling sleepily to each other as the sky begins to brighten in the east.

They carry slim, hand-carved paddles made from cedar or yew down to the dock where their 32-foot practice canoe, the Hummingbird, awaits. Stripping off sweatpants and shirts in the crisp morning air, the eight-man crew sets out bare-chested for a three-hour run out around Cape Flattery--the extreme northwest tip of the contiguous United States--to Hobuck Beach on Makah Bay, just south of the looming rocky cape.

The sea is smooth and silky, and the canoe shows black against the opal colors of the water and the dawn sky. The Makah sing sometimes, whaling songs that help set the pace or urge the whale to swim closer to shore.

This is only practice.

When the Makah Indian Tribe goes after its first whale in 70 years later this fall, the air and water will be colder and the seas rougher. Wet, dark, windy winters are the downside of living in this spectacularly placed community at the heart of the Makah reservation.

“The weather can change like that,” says crew member Micah McCarty with a snap of his fingers. “We watch the behavior of the birds” and other cues to impending change.

The idea is to intercept the fall gray whale migration as the great mammals head south from Alaska’s Aleutian Chain to the warm waters off Mexico, and strike a bull or a calfless female. For thousands of years, Makah whalers relied on these spring-fall migrations to feed their people and now--after a 70-year lull--they are preparing to hunt whale again.

The first strike will be made with a steel-tipped harpoon, but the Makah plan to follow up immediately with a .50-caliber coup de grace--a modern variation intended to make the hunt as humane as possible. The old way would be to strike the whale repeatedly, chasing it to exhaustion and tracking it when it dives using air-filled skin bladders attached by rope to the harpoons.

“We have traditions of being towed by the whale,” says McCarty, a carver of traditional masks.

The harpoon the Makah will use this fall has a steel point and barbs. The tribe’s traditional harpoons had mussel-shell barbs attached to a cedar shaft with cherry bark.

The 38-foot whaling canoe being built at the tribe’s museum will be accompanied by one or two motorized chase boats on the hunt--to help in a crisis and to tow the whale home.

The modern touches give the crew some advantages over their forebears, but the hunt still is a risky proposition. New England whalers of the 19th century called the gray whale “devil fish” for its tendency to fight attackers rather than try to flee.

“I would say the whale definitely has the advantage,” said Rich Closter, commander of the Coast Guard’s Neah Bay station and a veteran hunter who says that he wouldn’t take part in this quest for anything--in part because of the icy waters.

“Whales are very dangerous when they’re wounded,” Coster said, and the man firing the .50-caliber gun “better make the first shot count.”

The Makah “must feel very strongly about this part of their heritage to engage in this operation,” he said.

The crew members--ages 18 to 35--feel that they are helping to unify their community with this return to proud tradition. They say their own bonding on the canoe has helped heal some old rifts, and wide-eyed kids show up at the dock to watch when they head out for evening practice.

“I’m hearing drumming from houses where I never thought I’d hear drumming,” says crew member Darrell Markishtum, 35, who works in tribal fisheries, studies the tribe’s fading language at the Makah Museum and sings and drums with other men on special occasions.

No living member of the tribe has whaled, but the crew members have heard stories all their lives and watched the whale migrations pass. The whale symbol can be seen on an outer wall of the high school and on private homes, and there are bones from one of the huge animals in front of Makah Whaling Commission president Keith Johnson’s house.

Eric Johnson, a muscular young father who works in the Head Start program and as a fisherman, has been named captain of the Makah whalers. He, McCarty and others have been practicing with the harpoon, hoping to be chosen to strike the tribe’s historic first whale since the 1920s.

Wayne Johnson, 45, who oversees the training from a motorboat, also has been familiarizing himself with the gun.

Tribal protocols for the hunt require that all the meat and blubber be distributed within the community or set aside for a feast before another whale is taken. Just one hunt is planned this fall, with more set for next spring when the whales head north again.

The bones of the first whale will be strung together to display the animal’s size and might, Keith Johnson said. Those from future whales may be used by Makah artisans.

“Traditionally, there was a different use for every bone of the whale,” Markishtum says.

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A Primer on the Whale Hunt

Here are some basics on the gray whale hunt planned by the Makah Tribe this fall:

When: The hunt will take place sometime after Oct. 1--probably several weeks later, since the whales usually do not head south from Alaska until early October. The tribe has agreed not to target animals in a small resident population of gray whales that frequents the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound.

Where: In the Pacific Ocean off the reservation, possibly within the boundaries of the offshore Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary.

What: The tribe hopes to take one whale this fall. Under a U.S.-Russian agreement approved by the International Whaling Commission, they may take up to five whales a year from 1998 through 2002. Under Makah protocols for the hunt, meat and oil from each kill must be distributed to tribal members before another whale is taken.

How: Members of a Makah whaling crew, paddling a 38-foot cedar canoe, will try to intercept the southbound gray-whale migration. They plan to strike first with a harpoon and then with a .50-caliber rifle--a concession to modern capabilities made to ensure the hunt is as humane as possible. The canoe will be accompanied by at least two motorized chase boats to help in case of emergency and to tow the whale ashore.

The Target: Gray whales are baleen whales that eat small fish, plankton and microscopic organisms from the ocean floor by straining water and sand through baleen--hundreds of thin bony plates in their mouths. The whales are gray or black and some have white patches on their skin made up of colonies of barnacles. They measure up to 50 feet long and can weigh more than 40 tons. Mostly solitary, they migrate every spring and fall between summer feeding grounds off Alaska and the warm waters off Mexico.

The History: Grays were hunted to dangerously low levels by 19th century New England whalers who reduced their numbers from about 30,000 animals to about 4,000 in the early part of this century. Gray whales, listed on the first endangered species list in 1973, were removed from the list in 1994. Federal officials estimate the current population at 22,000.

The Change: Virtually all commercial whaling has stopped in the last 30 years. This year, about 1,300 whales will be killed--1,100 of them by Norway and Japan, where whale meat is considered a delicacy, and the rest by aboriginal people in Russia, Alaska, Canada, Greenland, the Caribbean and, possibly, the Pacific Northwest.

The Opposition: U.S. District Judge Franklin Burgess in Tacoma, Wash., dismissed a lawsuit Sept. 21 challenging the process used by federal authorities in deciding to support the Makah hunt. The plaintiffs--British, Australian and American animal-rights groups, kayakers, whale-watching-boat operators and whale buff U.S. Rep. Jack Metcalf (R-Wash.)--were appealing. The Seattle-area Progressive Animal Welfare Society, PAWS requested a restraining order to stop the hunt until the matter is resolved.

The Neutrals: Some major environmental groups--Greenpeace, the National Audubon Society and the Wilderness Society--are not taking a position against the Makah.

The Authorities: Local law enforcement--including Makah Tribal Police, the Clallam County Sheriff’s Department and the Washington State Patrol--have formed a task force in the event of protests or hunt-related confrontations.

The Wild Card: The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a Los Angeles-based group that specializes in “interventions” to stop commercial whale hunts and claims to have sunk two whaling vessels, is planning to try to disrupt the hunt. Group leader Paul Watson has been in the Seattle area for weeks preparing his two vessels--the 180-foot former Norwegian research ship Sea Shepherd and the 95-foot former Coast Guard vessel Sirenian--and a 36-foot two-man submarine painted to resemble a killer whale that will broadcast sounds of an attack on a gray.

Associated Press