Elder Opposed to Whaling Finds Resistance at Home, Reverence Outside

Makah tribal elder Alberta Thompson initially opposed renewed whaling by her people because nobody asked her.

The vote that sparked renewal of the ancient Makah whaling tradition did not involve all 600 voting members of the tribe, says Thompson, 72, who has been called “Binky” since childhood.

“Seventy percent of 124--it’s not exactly the whole tribe,” she said on the front porch of her tidy trailer a block off the main street.

“I was angry about the way they handled it.”

Also, Thompson says, after 70 years, “none of us knows what it tastes like or likes what it tastes like.”

The Makah traditionally preferred humpback whale, she says: “Gray whale is hamburger, and humpie is steak.”

The Makah are not a monolith, and Thompson is not the only tribal member who opposes or has reservations about the plan to resume whaling this fall.

But she is the best known, and has been flown around the globe--to Scotland and Monaco for the last two International Whaling Commission meetings, and to Australia this summer--by those who revere whales.

And her initial concerns about tribal protocol and the taste of gray whale now are transcended by her personal encounters with the whales at their nursery in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez.

Since her meeting there with a female and calf, Thompson said, “I’m in it to save the whales.”

Her mission carries a price. Townspeople walking past her trailer in August didn’t give Thompson a second glance as she chatted with an Associated Press reporter and photographer.

But a week later at Makah Days, the tribe’s three-day gathering in late August, she disclosed that she had lost her 15-year part-time job at the tribe’s senior center for her activism.

She can reapply in a year, and can appeal through the grievance procedure. But it was a tough blow for a widow living on a retirement income, Thompson said.

Tribal Council member Marcy Parker said Thompson had been warned about proselytizing at work. Some of the elders had stopped going to the center to avoid hearing her spiel, Parker said.

Thompson said the incident that prompted her firing involved a toll-free long-distance call that she made while trying to help arrange a meeting between tribal police and members of the anti-whaling Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

“If that’s not tribal business, I don’t know what is,” she said.

The call was her third transgression, said Keith Johnson, president of the Makah Whaling Commission.

The Sea Shepherd group plans to employ Thompson at her tribal salary, group leader Paul Shepherd said in a recent interview.

But although she’s on the outs with some tribal officials, Binky is clearly still a member of the family.

At the raising of flags that marks the official start of Makah Days--a celebration that dates back to the first raising of the U.S. flag here in 1917--Thompson was among those chosen to raise the tribal flag.