As grey whales embarked on their yearly migration north to Alaska, we decided to learn a bit more about the species, as well as the history of whaling, and the importance to Indigenous culture on the Island. We replay that for today’s episode in our best-of week.
As grey whales embarked on their yearly migration north to Alaska, we decided to learn a bit more about the species, as well as the history of whaling, and the importance to Indigenous culture on the Island. We replay that for today’s episode in our best-of week.
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Disclaimer: These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Jackie: Today is episode 99, two away from 100, and for those who have been following along, that means we’re in day 3 of our replays of some of our best episodes over the past few months as we countdown to the 100 mark. Today is a personal favourite of mine. It was released when the grey whale migration north was just beginning to pass the Island.
Jackie: My name is Jackie Lamport. Today is Wednesday, March 31. Welcome to the Capital Daily Podcast. Today on the show, grey whale migration north is underway, making it the prime time for Islanders to catch a glimpse of the marine giants. We speak to a marine biologist to learn more about the animal, and story-tellers to learn the history of their interaction with Vancouver Island. The annual migration of grey whales up the Pacific coast is underway. Every year, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 20,000 whales make their way up the coast from their breeding grounds in Baja, Mexico, to summer feeding grounds off Alaska. Once almost hunted to extinction, this population has since rebounded. For Vancouver Islanders and our visitors, March through May is the best time of year to catch a glimpse of these magnificent creatures as they embark on their yearly migration north. Today we start by learning a bit about the animals and their migration patterns. We’ll then hear from two different historians about their history on the Island and with Islanders. First we’ll hear from an historian who will tell us about when the whales nearly went extinct, why, and what brought them back. Then we’ll hear from a Nuu-chah-nulth professor to talk about the important part the animals play in the history of indigenous culture on the Island. First, co-producer Emily Vance joins to share what she learned in her conversation with Lance Barrett-Lennard, a whale researcher from the Marine Mammal Research Program at OceanWise. Emily, tell me about your conversation with Lance.
Emily: It was super interesting. So I reached Lance at his home in Vancouver.
Lance (audio recording): I'm the senior marine mammal research scientist at OceanWise, the parent organization for the Vancouver Aquarium. I lead a team of marine mammal researchers working on diverse subjects.
Emily: They primarily study killer whales, but he has a deep personal interest in grey whales. I got him first of all to describe grey whales. I've never seen one personally. He says they can look like big grey rocks. They're often mistaken for that. They also have big barnacles on their back that help them fight off predators. And he says that as whales go, they're a particularly feisty type of whale. Early whalers used to call them "devil fish" for that reason.
Jackie: We are talking about grey whales today because they are right now migrating past Vancouver Island. Why do they make that journey?
Emily: Yeah, it's such a long journey. And they do it twice a year. So they go from Baja, Mexico, all the way up to Alaska. And then they come back. So right now, they're on their way north. They don't take very many shortcuts, they kind of hug the shoreline, and they stay in the shallow water. It's partially for safety, they are much more comfortable there, and that's where their food is.
Lance (audio recording): Grey whales have the longest migration of any mammal, longest seasonal migration. And they swim all the way from Southern California or, more commonly, Mexico, the west coast of Mexico, hugging the shoreline most of the way up to the Alaska peninsula. That's the part of Alaska that extends way out towards Russia. They swim along the bottom side of the Alaska Peninsula, right to the tip, and they go around the tip. And then pass up into the Bering Sea. And then often, most cases go through the Bering Strait at the top of the Bering Sea into the Chukchi Sea, which is really Arctic conditions. And that's where they that's where the majority of the population feeds in the summer on these very rich beds of these arthropods. And then they do the same thing. They make the reverse migration starting in November, December and extending over a couple of months, all the way back down the coast again. So it's a phenomenally long migration. Again, there's nothing like it in the mammalian world.
Jackie: Do these types of animals cluster together? What does the migration look like?
Emily: Yeah, I have this idea of a bunch of grey whales all splashing around together playing together. We think of orcas as travelling in packs. But even though they're travelling in these massive numbers, they travel in groups of two or three. They're really solitary for cetaceans, but like many mammals, some of them are more social than others. And Lance told me there are plenty of accounts of grey whales coming up to individual boats and things like that. But within their species, they tend to stick to themselves.
Lance (audio recording): We don't usually see large groups, except sometimes on the breeding grounds down in Mexico or Southern California. So when we see them migrating past our coasts, as they do every, every spring, and then again, South Mountain and winter, that we often see them in groups of two or three, that would be sort of typical, they can be solitary, or in groups of two or three. However, they're not completely a socializer. Most of the highly social whales communicate using sound, and grey whales can vocalize. But they, but they're very, very vocally quiet compared to most species. When they do hear sounds, they're quite cryptic. They're hard to pick out against background noise, and they're sort of bongs and in clicks, and that's another reason we think that's another thing that goes along with their fairly solid solitary existence.
Jackie: Grey whales have a very long history of being hunted by humans, which we will talk a lot about a bit later in the podcast, but in the ocean with other animals. Do they have any natural predators?
Emily: They do, and that surprised me. It's one of the many things I learned researching this episode. They're actually prey for killer whales or orcas. And, yeah, Lance told me that orcas will kill roughly 1/3 of grey whale calves. So they'll hunt them as the grey whales are making their way north with their babies. And as Lance described it, it's super dramatic. Orcas will try and corner a mother grey whale and her calf while they're in that shallow water.
Lance (audio recording): On this northbound migration route, when the calves are very young, the grey whale mother has to constantly worry about the possibility of being attacked by killer whales. And those killer whales are smart enough to know that an adult grey whale is a pretty difficult prey to subdue and kill, but calves aren't. So the killer whales try to separate the cow from the mother. And if they can do that, then they can kill it and feed on the calf. So these mothers are hyper concerned about the possibility of killer whale attacks.
Jackie: That's intense. I mean, there's a reason they're called killer whales and more often known by that name than orcas. That's incredible.
Emily: That's exactly what Lance said; that killer whale was a very apt name. And when I think about it like this epic battle between these huge mammals, it's really incredible. And, the grey whales don't give up very easily. So Lance told me about this analogy that one of his colleagues uses. This is Dr. John Ford. He classifies whales into those who like to fight and those who prefer to take flight. So bigger whales like blue and minke whales cannot swim killer whales, so they'll just dart away, but the grey whales will stay, and they will actually fight it out.
Dr. Ford (audio recording): Grey whales belong to the other category, the fight category of whales, and these are the ones that can mount a pretty strong physical defence against attacks by killer whales, and grey whales are in that group. So the barnacles that stun their bodies act a bit like brass knuckles; they're very sharp, abrasive, hard. And so, if they manage to strike an attacking killer whale with their back or their fins or the tail, they can do a lot of damage. Sometimes, some of my colleagues have called them pugnacious at times when they really feel threatened. So it's a sign of grey whales that most of us just watching the migration will never see. We see these whales that are slowly swimming past our coastal spouts of breath out to sea, but if you corner them against the beach, particularly a female with a calf, they can be really feisty.
Jackie: What other threats do they experience?
Emily: We did allude to whaling, which we'll talk about later on. The number of grey whales has rebounded massively since the end of commercial whaling in North America. But of course, I mean, they still struggle with a lot of issues that affect the health of our ocean. They're not as sensitive to noise as other types of whales, the other types of very vocal whales, but Lance said that underwater noise can still pose quite a threat to them in terms of their navigation. Plastic debris is another big problem since they feed off the bottom of the ocean. And of course, climate change, which has changed the availability of their food.
Lance (audio recording): They also face threats from climate change-related effects. They're very dependent on these rich amphipod beds up in the high latitudes of the top of their migration up in the Chukchi, etc. The broad productivity of those areas varies a lot from year to year and is definitely influenced by climate change. So we've had a few years over the last, let me say, over the last 30 years or so, where we've had really high mortality of grey whales. It seems like a number of years ago, with relatively few dead grey whales washing ashore on our coast during the migration. And then periodically, we'll have a bad year. And during those bad years, whales that come ashore of the carcasses that have come ashore are very thin or emaciated. And it seems that they just haven't been able to put on enough calories up in the high latitudes up in Alaska in those years. To sustain them all the way through this very long migration. They don't feed much on the migration at all. So they have to have their blubber tanks full, I guess if you know what I mean when they leave the migration ground.
Jackie: As we said, we will dive into the history of whaling a little bit more in the part that plays with human interaction with the species. But the science started there too, didn't it?
Emily: Yeah, it did, which I found to be pretty interesting, but it does make sense. So some of the earliest Western studies of grey whales come from whalers. And of course, whaling was how the Nuu-chah-nulth here on Vancouver Island and the Makah tribe in the United States came to know these creatures.
Lance (audio recording): There were, of course, a number of many well-trained scientists whose work was connected with the whaling industry during the boom of industrial whaling following the Second World War. And the International Whaling Commission was formed with the intention really, of ensuring that whales weren't over-harvested, not with, really with the intention of preserving whale populations, for their own sake, but preserving them so that they'd be available to sustain the whaling industry. And the International Whaling Commission or the IWC has commissioned and performed a lot of good scientific work over the years. And it's evolved into an organization now that's a bit schizophrenic and that some of the member countries are still hoping to resume and, in some cases, have resumed whaling. Others are very opposed to the possibility of the resumption of large-scale whaling. And, of course, in the last 20 or 30 years, there's been a real growth in the scientific interest in whales for their own sake, and nothing to do with whaling per se. But this came along when there was in the early days when whales were caught and put in oceanariums and aquariums. And there was a realization very early on that these were incredibly intelligent animals, and in some cases, highly social. And that's led to a plethora of research studies on cognition and whales, communication, health reproduction, and matters of the general biology of these various species.
Jackie: I know that one of Lance's big things is that he studies DNA sequencing in Wales. What can that tell us about the population?
Emily: He told me that by studying the DNA and grey whale populations, you could see this bottleneck where genetic diversity disappears for a period in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And that is, of course, when they were being over hunted.
Lance (audio recording): We can learn a lot about populations that were relatively small populations using DNA sequencing about their history. DNA reveals the history of whales in many of the ways it reveals our ancestry. And so when a population of any species has been through a bottleneck when it has been reduced to a very small number and then growing again, a lot of genetic diversity is lost. That's an almost inevitable consequence of a population bottleneck. We think we can see that in grey whale DNA, but it's a bit hard to know for sure because, unfortunately, we don't have genetic samples from the whales before they experienced this huge bottleneck from whaling. So, really in the late 1800s and very early 1900s. With other species, we can tell a lot about what they're going through by the genetic evidence of bottlenecks. There's no reason to think based on the genetic work that's been done in grey whales to date that the population is in some sort of genetic crisis, though. And of course, this could happen if populations are bottlenecked and stay in the bottleneck for many generations. But grey whales still have carried a fair bit of genetic diversity through that bottleneck if you like.
Jackie: Emily, thank you so much. This has been extremely fascinating. And it's so cool to know that this happens so close to our home. I also look forward to your interview with Charlotte Coté a little bit later on the podcast. Thank you for that as well.
Emily: Yeah, no problem. I'm really excited that we covered this topic. Honestly, I think that I could have spoken to Lance for at least twice as long as I did.
Jackie: And now we'll look into some of the history of grey whales. I spoke with Jason Colby, a professor and department chair at the University of Victoria and author of Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean's Greatest Predator. Jason, thank you so much for joining us.
Jason: Thanks for having me on.
Jackie: So you've been researching the history of people and grey whales on the Pacific coast. How far back does your research go?
Jason: Oh, that's a good question. I mean, you could say it goes back millions of years in the sense of sort of thinking about grey whales history on the Earth, but it's especially focused on the 1830s and 40s to the present, which is really the period when people started whaling them intensively, especially off the Pacific coast.
Jackie: Because of that whaling, the population was actually almost hunted to extinction twice. How did that happen, and when was that?
Jason: To start off, I would say the one thing to understand is that there are two pretty discrete populations of grey whales in the West western Pacific in the eastern Pacific. So the ones I'm mostly focusing on are the eastern Pacific grey whales, most usually called California grey whales, okay. And they probably had a population of upwards of 25,000 or even 30,000, before intensive, commercial whaling started, and it started, almost by a fluke. American whalers were coming around Cape Horn and into the Pacific Ocean to go after sperm whales and right whales, and they discovered the calving lagoons in Baja, California. And this is where grey whales are really coastal species. This is where they go to calve and raise their young or at least initially and to mate. And they're these really sort of pretty tranquil, secluded bodies of water, where they're not just safe from predators, but the waters are warm and safe. Heavy bodies of water that their calves can be safe in and sort of start their lives in, and these went from being these areas of sanctuary and safety to being just these bloodbaths when American whalers discovered these lagoons. So it starts really in the 1840s. There's an American whaling skipper named Charles Scammon, who discovers what becomes known as Scammers Lagoon in Baja California, and really sort of leads American whalers to this slaughter. And over the next 60 years, it's not just the attacks on those lagoons, but whaling stations, especially along California, that really hit them hard. And so, by the 1890s, lots of naturalists assumed that they were extinct.
Jackie: And when did that turn around? When did the population start to bounce back?
Jason: There's a bit of scientific debate over when exactly this happened, but, in the early 20th century, there were so few sightings that again, as I said, many thought the California grey whale was extinct. There were minimal international protections accorded to grey whales, especially in the early 1930s through the League of Nations. By then, people basically thought this was a species on its way out. Ironically, perhaps the darkest moment for humanity, World War Two, so much of the wildlife on Earth, especially in the seas, makes a recovery. Whales get a reprieve from the really intensive commercial whaling of the previous decades, fisheries as well. And this is true of grey whales. And so they start to recover, probably in the late 30s. But especially during World War Two, and then immediately, right after, scientific observers in Southern California, especially at Scripps Institute near San Diego, start noticing that their numbers are noticing that they're there and noticing that their numbers and these migrations are growing. So they start to count them year after year. And lo and behold, they discovered that their numbers are increasing, which was stunning to all of them. And so it really, it's interesting, it's a different arc than a lot of the other great whale species that are hit horribly hard later in the 20th century, fin whales, humpback whales, grey whales are actually starting to recover before that and continue their recovery into the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
Jackie: What are they hunted for?
Jason: In small numbers, Indigenous peoples on both sides of the Pacific and also the Japanese for centuries hunted them primarily for food. But the commercial whalers, the American commercial whalers, in particular, hunted them for the range of products that most whales yield. Grey whales yield usable but not super high-quality oil. So it's not as sought after as, say, sperm whale oil or spermaceti. But they also could be processed into what's often called, like, whale meal or fertilizer. So lots of different sorts of uses of it were common with other whale species at the time. And so they're rendered, essentially, especially for oil. But also, in the late 19th century for other products as well.
Jackie: When did our view and understanding of the grey whales start to change? And when do we start to see them as a very intelligent and admirable species?
Jason: There are lots of different ways to answer that. People living on the coast and even hunting whales have long observed that whales do have familial connections and mother-child bonds that are quite relatable for people. And so even whalers and whaling skippers, like Scammon himself, noticed that there was this bond. Scammon wrote very evocatively of this sort of guilt at decimating mothers and calves even as he did it. There was this kind of undercurrent of empathy, even amidst this slaughter, that people often forget about. But I would say that it's really in the post World War Two period where we see really a transformation of environmental values and perceptions of animals that this starts to change. And there are lots of reasons for this. One of them is that commercial whaling itself in the United States and in Canada, especially on the West Coast, became much less important. Economically, there are some economic changes to the point where people are not necessarily just going out on the water to make a living; they're going out on the water for recreation. And so you see a whale, it's a source of wonder and joy, rather than looking to make a profit or feeling fear. I would say there are a couple of things to point to; they're pretty interesting. Then, when people noticed that their numbers were going up. But as early as the late 40s, early 1950s, the first whale watching sites on land started to appear in California. Point Loma, near San Diego, during their annual migrations, and grey whales have this amazing annual migration they do from the Bering Sea to Baja, and they do this every year. And so they're pretty reliable about when they go by, especially southbound; they go by pretty close to shore. And so people were out there in November and December in San Diego, for example, watching them go by, so this sort of creates a sense of connection with them. But there are also other factors that play a role. I've written about this in my book Orca, about a different species but people start to not just go out on the water and see wildlife, but they start to see some species, certainly cetaceans in captivity, in, in, in facilities, certainly in Southern California. And actually, there's a brief captivity of a grey whale calf in San Diego at SeaWorld that has been forgotten but was really high profile at the time in 1971. SeaWorld and the Navy, the US Navy actually go down and capture a calf and bring her back to SeaWorld, a young calf that they named Gigi. And she's in captivity for a year in San Diego. Scientists do the very first studies of a live grey whale they've ever done. Lots of kids and thousands of people come to see her. And then, after a year in captivity, she's released back into the wild. For years after that, there's all kinds of speculation in Southern California about whether a fisherman or a whale-watching vessel had seen Gigi, and if you think about it, human beings do bond and change in their perceptions towards other species, especially when they're allowed to enable to relate to them one on one and think about another an animal as an individual with a personality. That's one of the reasons why pets are so evocative to us. And so I think that Gigi was quite important with that. And it's at about that same time in the early 1970s that the first commercial whale-watching of grey whales started to take off along the Pacific coast. And so you see, that starts to develop, and then it's eventually going to develop in Oregon, all the way up to BC. That's sort of the heart of that change.
Jackie: And what kind of protections exist now for grey whales?
Jason: It depends on where you're talking about the, in many ways, the strictest protections of grey whales are in the United States, in the US coastal waters, because the United States has legislation called the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which doesn't have an equivalent in Canada. But it bars approaching close harassment and obviously capturing or killing of marine mammals in general, but certainly of grey whales because they were so endangered earlier in the 20th century, they had very special protections. What's interesting is that, in 1994, they became the very first whale species to ever be removed from the endangered species list in the US. And so, they actually were considered sufficiently recovered to be removed from that list. Having said that, there are still lots of sort of environmental perils and dangers created by growing commerce and all that. Probably the highest-profile, perceived danger to grey whales actually happened in the late 1990s, when the Makah First Nations in Washington State tried to restore its whaling hunt and received permission from the US government and from the International Whaling Commission to conduct a small-scale hunt. It just resulted in the killing of one female grey whale wasn't didn't have any kind of ecological impact on the population. But it was a flashpoint for people who saw grey whales, like other whales, as sort of a celebrated group of animals that should never be harmed. It clashed with a reassertion of First Nations and Indigenous rights and claims to fisheries and whaling.
Jackie: Jason, thank you so much. And finally, co-producer Emily Vance speaks to a Nuu-chah-nulth member, and an Associate Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington and the author of Spirits of Our Whaling Ancestors, about the history of the whales in Indigenous culture and on the island.
Charlotte: (Speaking in Nuu-chah-nulth). So what I am sharing in my language and the Nuu-chah-nulth language is that I am from the nation of Tseshaht. We're part of the larger nation of the Nuu-chah-nulth on the west coast of Vancouver Island. And my Indigenous name is thlutismayulth, and it translates to "carrying thunder." It's connected to my whaling tradition and to my whaling identity. I come from a whaling lineage through my great great grandfather. So I just wanted to share that.
Emily: Thank you. And can you tell me about the cultural significance of grey whales and other whales in Nuu-chah-nulth culture?
Charlotte: So the whaling tradition is central to who we are as people and is significant to who we are as Nuu-chah-nulth as well as the Makah who are linguistically and culturally related to us as people on the west coast of Washington State. Our whaling tradition was entwined in a complex web of social interactions, with whaling serving important social subsistence and ritual functions. It was the unity and interactions of these various activities that formed a very elaborated, elaborate and interconnected network of economic, ceremonial and redistribution, rights and privileges. And our whaling tradition was immersed in spiritual rituals and religious practices. So it's more than just hunting whales, which many people see that I mean, through a very ethnocentric lens, that when we say that we're connected to the whales, they just see a connection through that hunting that takes place. Hunting is just one part of that larger tradition that is significant to who we are and connected to who we are as people. Whales in our culture are a part of our identity. Whales and the whaling practice of whaling is connected to who we are as Indigenous people.
Emily: Can you walk me through what the process of capturing a whale was?
Charlotte: Yeah, so let me start by just talking about the relationships that we have with animals. In my culture and Indigenous cultures, we have an understanding that we humans, that we exist in a world and have a symbiotic relationship with the other animals, the plants in this shared environment, where we all are considered equal, where we all recognize that and have mutual respect for each other. Indigenous cultures thrive in this world of reciprocity between us and our environment. So the relationship that we have with animals is based on respect and gratitude. There is a sense of sacredness attached to the spirit of an animal that gives its physical form to us for sustenance, for nutritional sustenance. And so the whaling tradition really exemplifies that whaler whalers, again, you're raised into that position. It's recognized as a hereditary right that when you're born, and you're raised to understand that that's going to be your vocation, you will be a whaler. And so it's not just a matter of that, that you're going to start whaling, you understand that to connect to that whale, you also have to be pure. As you're being raised and trained into that position, you also have to have the spiritual connections, the spiritual connections to that whale, or to the whaling spirit or to the spirits of whales in order to be able to become a good whaler. So in our culture, there is a belief in these, that we're connected to the spirit world. And so you observe that through prayer, through ceremony through this respect that you show to show for that world. And so, with whalers, they would sense that, from the time of when they were young, they would be working to connect to that spiritual world in a very sacred way. So that when they finally do become whalers, when they finally do get in the canoe and do harvest a whale, that they're doing it in this respectful way, through observances of, of spiritual ritual, through prayer through the ceremony. And so when that whale is caught, it's understood that the whale because of that spiritual connection, that you have to spirit, because of those, those ceremonies and rituals that were performed, that its spirit is actually giving itself to you, many people what they see the death of a whale through a Western cultural lens. They really ignore the spiritual and sacred elements that are attached to our tradition. And how important that is that when you do connect to an animal, or anything, a plant that gives itself to you, as it gives its life to you to feed you, that you're respectful to it in this mutual world of reciprocity. So that, in return, will continually provide itself to you, or those spirits of those animals or plants will continue to provide themselves to you as food.
Emily: I read in your article that your great great grandfather was a whaler, and I'm sure more of your ancestors were as well. But what did you know about his life?
Charlotte: Well, my great great grandfather, who I write about in my book, came from that generation of the last of what came from a whaling lineage. And I have whaling ancestors on both sides. But he was raised in that tradition, but he never hunted whales because he grew up in the 1850s, 60s and 70s. We'd already seen the impact of commercial whaling here in the northwest, here on the west coast of the north of the coastline. And that was because of unregulated commercial whaling. So when we started seeing the rise of commercial whaling in the 1840s, 50s, 60s, that an unregulated commercial whaling industry that by the time that he was of age to whale, we'd already seen the decimation of many of the whale species along the west coast. The grey whale, the humpback whale, that we have a special relationship to as well as they say, and the fin whales. When I was writing my book, I thought about what that must have felt like to our Whaling Chiefs. That's something that they were raised in, something that was part of their cultural identity, and they couldn't exercise that and couldn't take care of their communities and look after their communities and their villages. The way that they were raised to how that must have felt and how devastating that must have been.
Emily: The practice and the idea of whaling can cause quite a lot of division in non-Indigenous people. So what are your thoughts on that?
Charlotte: Yeah, it's when I was doing the research for my dissertation when I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the 1990s. I started my research and was focusing my research on salmon because salmon are also significant to who we are as Indigenous northwest coast. Indigenous peoples and the Makah were just starting conversations around reviving their whale hunt. And they were doing that because of three main factors, including that the grey whale had been taken off the endangered species list, and there was a major storm. On the traditional territory of the Makah, which uncovered thousands of whaling artifacts in an abandoned Makah village and that started to spark an interest in their community about revitalizing their whaling tradition. And as well, in the 1974 US v. Washington court case, also known as the Boldt Decision. The treaty rights of the northwest coast Indigenous peoples were affirmed in that decision, and one of the rights and the only treaty that contains this right is the right to hunt whales. In the Makah treaty, the Treaty of Neah Bay sparked an interest in reviving those hunts. And so one of my relatives who lives out in the bay and the Makah community of Neah Bay had contacted me when I was down in down in California in Berkeley and said, "Auntie, there's all of it is excitement about us reviving our whale hunts." And I thought maybe this is what I should write about. And I don't think I realized the controversy it was going to cause of the Makah and us also announcing that we would revitalize our whale hunts. The anti-whaling discourse that arose out of an ugly place that we've seen in, in the history here in the United States, and Canada's history. And that's out of a history of racism. A lot of the opposition was framed in a way that misunderstood what we were trying to do, why we wanted to revitalize our hunts, and what the significance of revitalizing those hunts meant to us. A lot of the opposition in this anti-whaling campaign that was developed after the Makah's announcement in 1994 was based on false stereotypes and misconceived ideas about who we are as Indigenous people. They did not understand those sacred relationships we have to animals and to the plants that give themselves to us as food. And so much of those debates that were going on and misunderstandings people were reporting misunderstood why we wanted to do this. I just felt it was really important that I needed to address that. And I needed to speak to that in this book, one of the main arguments against the Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth was centred in this food space discourse with members of the coalition arguing that we didn't need whale meat to survive. We had enough other foods. We had Western foods, which Indigenous peoples globally have struggled to control access to and the production of our foods, especially our traditional foods. As a result of colonization, we lost that connection. As a result of the loss of our homelands or the desecration of our homelands. We lost that—a lot of what was happening during those conversations in the 1990s into 2000. Even today, many people still frame their understanding of our whale hunts in this way. We have to look at it through a history of Western hegemonic control over foods and food production. And all we were saying was that we wanted to re-engage in the way that we did the way of our ancestors in revitalizing those whale hunts. As those anti-whaling campaigns continued, I felt a need to share our story and share our story as a way of hopefully letting people or explaining in a way that people could understand why we were doing what we're doing and wanted to revive our whale hunts.
Emily: Charlotte, thank you so much for taking the time to explain this complicated issue. I really appreciate it.
Charlotte: Yeah, well, thank you for inviting me to share this. It's been a while since I've talked about whaling heritage and our history. So I thank you for reaching out to me and allowing me to share this history with you.