Holding Onto Heritage: Native Whale Hunts & Diversity

Objectives

• Students will review diverse commentary about the 1999 Makah whale hunt.
• Students will summarize and paraphrase written information.
• Students will make inferences and draw conclusions based on written information.
• Students will explain how people from diverse cultural backgrounds may perceive shared experiences differently.
• Students will write letters to the editor about the controversy's relationship to community support for diversity.

Materials

• Copies of Chapter 1, Editorials [1], from A Whale Hunt: How a Native-American Village Did What No One Thought It Could ($13) by Robert Sullivan (ISBN: 0684864347). Reprinted here with permission of the author.
• Copies of Makah whaling tradition background sheet [2]. Teachers also can use the The Makah Indian Tribe and Whaling: Questions and Answers [3] (PDF).
• Copies of fact sheets on the gray whale from the American Cetacean Society [4].

Suggested Procedures
Ask students to share what they know about Native Americans' relationship to animals and the environment. List words and images on the board. Ask students whether they'd be surprised to learn that, in 1999, the Makah tribe in Washington state engaged in a ritualistic killing of a gray whale. Why might the Makah have done this? How do students think the local non-Indian community responded?

As you distribute copies of the background material, share basic information with students.

• In 1999, hoping to restore "discipline and pride" in their youth through the revival of an ancient tradition, members of the Makah Indian tribe of Washington state resumed a practice they had abandoned 70 years before: the whale hunt.
• Some environmentalists and animal rights activists ardently opposed the hunt. The gray whale had been hunted to the edge of extinction in the 1850's and again in the early 1900's. In 1947, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) provided full protection to the gray whale. The eastern north Pacific population is the largest surviving population, having made a remarkable recovery and numbering close to its original size.
• Although most of the environmentalists and animal rights activists who opposed the hunt were respectful in their opposition, some were not. The Makahs were inundated with death threats, their schools evacuated due to bomb scares, and their reservation placed on "war-time" alert.
• Protesters paraded with signs proclaiming "Save a whale, harpoon a Makah," wrote to local newspapers inquiring about "where to apply for a license to kill an Indian," and even set up a Web page mocking the official Makah site. Tribe members were publicly labeled "drunkards," "savages" and "laggards."
• In fact, the Makahs were completely within their rights. An 1855 treaty, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, guarantees their right to hunt gray whales.

-- adapted from the Intelligence Report

Allow students time to read the provided materials. Break the class into small groups, and ask each group to construct a chart listing arguments for and against the whale hunt, noting who is making the arguments and whether the speaker(s) are Native American.

Re-create the chart as a whole class, working through any differences of opinion that may emerge between groups. As a class, discuss:

• What values underlie arguments for the whale hunt? Against it?
• What values do both sides share? Why might diverse groups perceive the same value differently?
• Who seems most likely to argue for the whale hunt? Against it? Why is this relevant?

As an in-class or homework assignment, students should write letters to the editor, responding to the following assertion from Ted Kerasote, author of Bloodties: Nature, Culture and the Hunt, in The Seattle Times.

[Non-Native reaction to the whale hunt] reveals a particular hypocrisy in American culture. Many Americans publicly espouse diversity and multiculturalism. ... But the moment a native community does something that doesn't fit into our preconceived notions of who we want aboriginals to be, we threaten our wrath -- the wrath of the majority.