EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of a two-part series on the thoughts of some Makah tribal members 10 years after a successful gray whale hunt in 1999.
NEAH BAY — Roxanne Venske, now 20, was among the Makah children who raced to the beach 10 years ago when tribal whalers pulled ashore a 32-ton gray whale, the first whale harpooned by the tribe in more than 70 years.
Venske and a friend sped onto the beach that skirts Bayview Avenue, Neah Bay’s main road.
“We got to touch the whale,” Venske recalled.
“Everyone was, like, so excited.”
But Venske, who attended Neah Bay schools on the Makah reservation, was taught little about the hunt in the years that followed that May 17, 1999 celebration, she said.
“It should be an issue for the tribe to make it available to the younger generation,” she said.
“It was a really important day for the tribe that is still not celebrated, and the younger generation is not going to remember it.”
In a series of Peninsula Daily News interviews last week, Makah community members and tribal leaders said the 10-year anniversary was going largely unnoticed among the reservation town’s 1,800 residents, and that they felt disappointed and frustrated that legal challenges have prevented their tribe from hunting gray whales for most of the last decade.
The tribe has been seeking permission from the federal government to legally hunt gray whales again under its 1855 treaty with the U.S.
After an illegal hunt in September 2007, some wildlife and animal-rights groups have demanded that the tribe be forever banned from whaling.
But federal officials continued their review of the tribe’s request for an exemption to the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
Event lost to young
Ben Johnson Jr., tribal chairman in 1999, is also worried the event — and its cultural significance — will be lost to the younger generation if whaling does not resume.
Johnson has lived in Neah Bay for all of his 70 years except for two, when he attended Peninsula College in Port Angeles.
“I should feel happy about that day, but I’m not, because we have people that are still against us,” Johnson said.
He decided not to run for re-election to the tribal council in part because of the toll the world’s reaction took on him when the Makah resumed whaling, he said.
Johnson said he feels stuck in time.
“There hasn’t been any advancement at all,” he said.
“We still have people who don’t support whaling and some who do support whaling.
“A lot of interest maybe was lost after we started jumping through all the hoops. It gets old. We don’t want to stir the pot again. People don’t like to hear the truth. We have to think about things like that. We are whalers.”
Over the last 10 years, “I got a little smarter,” Johnson added.
“Since then, rather than create something, I let it slide. A lot of things you want to do but you can’t because issues come up.”
Whalers
Andy Noel, now 30, and Donnie Swan, 33, were among the youngest whalers who participated in the hunt.
Swan, who was aboard a chase boat that accompanied the Hummingbird’s 13-man whaling crew, threw two of the three harpoons that struck the whale.
The hunt “changed my life, all aspects of my life,” Swan said.
“It seems like a dream that we did it, and we haven’t been able to go out in 10 years.”
Swan, whose father was a whaler, traveled to Russia about three years ago with Hummingbird and tribal whaling captain Wayne Johnson to whale, he said.
Swan’s 20-pound harpoon, which he carved from spruce and set with a stainless steel point, is hanging in his shop.
His 9-year-old son, Levi, is still “pretty ecstatic” about the hunt and wants to be a whaler, he said.
As the son of a whaler, “you have to carry yourself in a certain way,” Swan said, and the hunt “just made us hold our heads higher.”
For Noel, “The only frustration I have is there is not any difference between existing law and laws in the ’99 hunt,” he said.
“There is not any difference between now and then. There are just different interpretations.”
The lack of public signs of the hunt or celebration over the anniversary may be cultural, some suggested.
Tribal vice chairman Micah McCarty, a descendant of whalers, said there are “guarded differences” in the tribal community about what should and should not be public regarding the hunt.
“The whaling tradition among some is to be kept within tight circles,” McCarty said.
Secret, sacred society
Tribal Whaling Commission Chairman Keith Johnson hints at the same theme, calling whaling culture “a secret, sacred society.”
But in some important respects, the tribe has moved ahead in the last 10 years, McCarty said.
“We are farther ahead in advancing traditional whaling,” he said.
The hunt itself was of great value, he added.
“I think there are more people alive today who have a higher interest in culture that may not have had that experience as soon in their life if they weren’t a witness to what happened.”
School project
Since the hunt, Cape Flattery School District — which has a school in Neah Bay — is participating in a pilot project in “sovereignty curriculum development,” McCarty said.
“It’s beginning to gel as we speak,” McCarty said Tuesday.
“The ripple effect of Makah whaling has been a heightened sense of urgency among native leadership around the Puget Sound and Washington state that tribal sovereignty curriculum needs to be implemented in all school districts, especially school districts that have Native Americans with the school district boundaries,” McCarty said.
“This was conspicuously absent in school, what treaties really mean.”
McCarty fondly recalls his daughter, now 10, teething on whale blubber at 5 months.
As for the lack of a celebration, “our next whale will commemorate the first,” he said.
“People who rallied in support, and the kids who remember that as part of their childhood, will spontaneously commemorate the first one when they see the second one.”
Whale bones
That first whale’s reassembled bones and whiplike tail has been hanging from the ceiling of the Makah Cultural and Resource Center for about three years, said Janine Bowechop, the center’s director.
It took four years alone to clean it, through a complicated process that involved burying it for a time, she said.
For now, it lacks a written narrative in the museum that signifies its place in Makah history. Museum officials are considering the text.
But the whale bones are “a wonderful example and reminder of what our tribe successfully resumed,” Bowechop said.
“I’m very proud of the fact that the community came together and did what was required to successfully hunt a whale after decades of not being able to exercise that treaty right,” she said.
“But really, for us, the goal was to be able to continue whale hunting so we would have been able to bring in a whale or two — whatever our community needs, what we determined our tribe’s need was — up to a certain limit per year,” Bowechop said.
“Let’s just say two [whales] a year for the past 10 years. That would have been something worth celebrating. I feel it’s frustrating and disappointing that there’s not more support for Indian treaty rights.”
The last 10 years have tested the tribe’s patience, but Native Americans have faced tests like these before, Micah McCarty said.
“The cultural values of persistence and patience have taken us a long way,” he said. “The patience of our people can be tested and has been tested.”
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Staff writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
