Silencing Tribal Grandmothers -- Traditions, Old Values At Heart Of Makah's Clash Over Whaling

NATIVE AMERICAN writer Linda Hogan and Seattle writer Brenda Peterson journeyed to Neah Bay to interview Makah elders who are breaking the silence and speaking out against their tribe's return to whaling. Hogan's article is the first of two. Peterson's article will appear on next week's Issues page.

"When I was young the whales came up and they used to scrape the reef to get their barnacles off." - Alberta Thompson, Makah elder ----------------------------------------------------------------- DRIVING through the deforested world near Neah Bay, I say, "it must have been beautiful," because it still is, even logged. I think this of us, too, as people. We must have been beautiful.

As tribal people, the past is a country we look to. Those of us who are indigenous are wanting to find a way back to that past, to lay claim to the older world that sustained our ancestors with its richness. Our hearts still hurt for the injustice and corruption that took place at the time of treaty-making, at the smallness and greed of the Americans whose lifeways would destroy so much of our world.

No one else on this continent knows as we do the pain of our loss, the waters now thinned, the mines, the highways through our sacred grounds, the current plans to develop or to store nuclear waste that are sometimes even welcomed by native people who become falsely convinced that this will provide a solution to our economic difficulties.

In more recent times, we have become the ones others look toward. They seek us out as wisdom-keepers, as the first ecologists, as living examples of how to live in the world. And yet, many of us, too, are searching for a way back to traditions before those times of change. Some of us will find it. Some still have it. Some are too tied in with other systems of knowledge and values to return to the richness and strength that was the source of our cultures.

As an indigenous woman, the story of the Makah and their request to whale is a familiar story, one bearing still the dimensions of an American tragedy. It is a story with many sides. It contains the history of people who, by forced assimilation, have lost their values and tradition. It speaks of children who need to know who they are. It addresses treaty rights, men determined to exercise them, an American government that has not honored its own agreements.

It's a story of environmentalists trying to protect the future, while indigenous people are trying to protect the past and bring it into the present in order to renew ourselves. In our efforts, we sometimes reveal the effects of what history has done to us, of assimilation policies that were as deadly a disease for us as smallpox and measles several generations ago.

This is a story of several members of a tribe seeking economic development after other failed attempts, a fisheries company that left behind acres of killed, unused salmon and halibut, a story of whale meat wasted after a recent killing of a gray whale despite the claim of a tribe that their proposed whale hunt is for food-taking.

Evidence is surfacing that says it is a story of secret meetings with corporations and nations, of meetings held when those with other opinions were not notified, gatherings illegal according to tribal bylaws.

It is also the story of the Makah Forestry Enterprises that clear-cut their own land and of a chief executive officer fired during that time because "his weak point was his honesty and integrity."

The story of the Makah and the gray whales may turn out to be one more painful story of corruption, of inexperienced whalers in battle with environmentalists, of the oppressed who in turn oppress their own people, of a conflict between some traditionalists who speak for old values and business leaders who negotiate contracts and have the capacity to hire public-relations specialists to help promote their whaling interests with the media, nationally and internationally.

The Makah story goes further than this, into the territory of intimidation and harassment of the old women who, in earlier times, would have been the respected voice of their people.

Ordinary lives, extraordinary courage

As such within this territory, it has also become the story of women with ordinary lives rising to extraordinary courageous action, including women whose ancestors were signers of the 1855 treaty with the United States. And how two of these grandmothers in wheelchairs were called "dangerous" by the younger men of their tribe as they went to the International Whaling Commission to speak out against the proposed whale hunt of their own tribe.

"What has this old lady done to aggravate them? What am I onto that they would think I'm so dangerous?" This is the question asked by Makah elder Alberta Thompson and it's a strong one. Why would the old grandmothers frighten the business leaders of a tribal nation?

"I've taken a stand for the whales." Thompson says. "I've gone to Scotland and refuted their lies. I'm 72. None of us have even tasted a whale or know how to prepare it or cut it. They lied and said we were starving."

In the case of the Makah, despite how the hired public-relations experts have presented the problem, there is conflict within the tribe itself. While more traditional tribes are presently uniting to fight corporations and governments, the Makah council has decided to join forces with them. There are those who oppose this union.

Dotti Chamblin, who has asked for an ethics committee for the tribal council, is considered by some to be a cultural leader. She is from a whale-hunting family, the descendent of chiefs and treaty-signers, a woman who received a rare standing ovation for a talk she gave at the National Congress of American Indians.

She says, "There's something very wrong here. We created a stir just by seeking the truth and asking them to tell it. Because of this treatment, no one else will speak up for the rest of the people, and that's a sad state of affairs. They've ostracized us. They've victimized us. It's difficult to get health care. They treat me badly. It's not the Makah way. There is a young, educated faction that is in breach of tradition."

Yet, it is most often these days that this faction has a voice in the outside world and is in the position to negotiate contracts for the tribe. In the Makah case, the council has made a case for whaling, and they have tried to silence the grandmothers, even going so far as to make a token request for police backup at the International Whaling Commission meeting in Scotland, to protect the men from two grandmothers in wheelchairs who spoke powerfully enough to have the hunt delayed another year.

"They say they're traditional but they are not listening to or protecting the elders," says Chamblin, whose brother was on the tribal whaling committee when they had as many as 50 secret meetings without notifying him. "Shooting a whale with a machine gun is not a spiritual way." Chamblin has spoken of religious tradition and spiritual law that go deeper than politics, deeper than governments. "But no one in this village has a direct relationship with the whale any longer."

Latecomers to tradition

For those who want to whale hunt, the talk about spiritual traditions has been late in coming, only a recent afterthought to her words to the commission, although now it has become a dominant part of the discussion as the case is represented to the United States, the media, and to the International Whaling Commission.

There is a fine line between hunting as ceremony and the breaking of spiritual laws. For the Makah, whale hunting in the past was tied together with an elaborate and complex web of culture and belief. In older days, a whale hunt would have been a mighty event with much preparation, made out of deep need and hunger, love and respect for the whale.

Alberta Thompson says, "I would never have spoken this way in the 1800s because the whale was a staple, but this is no longer so. Also, in traditional times, the leftover whale meat would have been used at Makah days, a tradition-al time," she says, referring to the netting of a whale by Dan Greene, Makah fisheries director. Instead, during Makah days, 72-year-old Thompson was issued a resolution, hand-delivered to her by the acting chief of police, that she was not to speak about whaling or even "make a face," or she would be arrested. A ruling was also was made that only tribal council members and their hired PR people were allowed to speak with the press and media.

After Greene, council member Marcy Parker and fisheries assistant director Dave Sonnes called her a slave - slaves having no human rights in Makah tradition - and it appeared in the Vancouver Georgia Strait newspaper, Thompson said to Greene from the door of her mobile home, "Look at these four little walls here and you harass me. This is small in more ways than one."

"In my belief and training, we have the right to have our say. But we're treated with hostility and hatred," Chamblin says. Recently when one of the women tried to speak, a council member stood up and sang over her voice, trying to drown out her words. There is aggression toward the women. The pro-whaling tribal members even ignored their first petition. That the oldest women of the tribe have been threatened and silenced speaks volumes about the tribal council.

Because whaling is the right of the Makah people, some say this is merely an exercise of treaty rights. But the treaty also says that the tribe "finally agrees not to trade at Vancouver Island or elsewhere out of the dominions of the United States." To do so would make the Makah the breakers of their own treaty and would weaken and jeopardize their rights in the future, endangering their sovereignty. But Greene, the controversial head of tribal fisheries, has said they intend to commercialize.

The way in which the Makah request carefully states that only the edible portions of the whales will not be traded or sold, seems to be a way of sidestepping the law and misrepresenting their intent. The fat, oil and byproducts, which can be traded, are worth money. Norway stores three hundred tons of blubber from the minke whales and cannot trade it, according to international law. The Japanese wish to buy it for upward of $46 million. It is important to note that the governments of Norway and Japan are behind the Makah bid to whale. The Japanese, sources maintain, have already offered money to the Makah. Five is the requested yearly quota. But, as Thompson says, "We couldn't get one whale eaten. What will we do with five?"

The U.S. government says it is persuaded that the request to whale represents legitimate needs of the Makah and constitutes aboriginal subsistence whaling. They have cited nutritional needs. If eating the meat is the primary purpose, there are other considerations.

The Inuit comparison

With their request to whale, the Makah have been compared to the Inuit who, unlike the Makah, have an uninterrupted tradition as a whaling people. But the Inuit suffer from the highest concentrations of PCBs in breast milk of anyone in the world. In recent times, many young mothers have resorted to feeding infants non-dairy coffee creamer mixed with water, risking malnutrition rather than the poisoning their babies.

And while our treaties must still hold, in these days there are new considerations. At the time our treaties were created, we did not foresee the loss of species, large-scale toxicity, the thinning of waters, the deforestation of continents.

If, as some Makah council members and the whale delegation maintain, the whale hunt is about cultural revitalization, then we have to consider that in traditional cultures when the old women speak, the young people listen. That is how it's done in indigenous councils and communities throughout the world. So what is it that closes the ears of these council members to the voices of the Makah anti-whaling delegation, who risk harassment, intimidation and unduly harsh treatment by the other members of their own tribe?

Perhaps we can narrow it down to the question of who stands to gain by whale hunting. Not these grandmothers who have already lost so much by speaking out, who also spoke out against the Whiting fisheries that left behind so much devastation that it ruined the fishing businesses in the region. "Whiting said 50 families would benefit from their business," one of the women says. "But only five families did."

There is also the unremembered story of the whales who do not belong to human beings. While they may be part of a cultural complex, now they must stake their own claim to life. They do not understand our boundaries: they only pass through these places on their journeys of survival, and they pass through the waters of other people than just the Makah. The gray whale have been removed from the Endangered Species list too soon. Some maintain that the U.S. population counts are high. If there is even a thin line of doubt, it would be wise to protect that species, and in these times, to further endanger any species is no longer a human privilege. Nor would it be culturally appropriate for those whose lives have always centered around respect for the whale.

The spirit of the whale

"They haven't reckoned with the spirit of the whale," Thompson says. And this is true in more ways than one, in all the meanings of these words.

There are consequences of the hunt, not only the fight of the whale sometimes known to turn on its hunters, but in the fact that in the old days the relationship between the people and the whales was the significant factor to every whale kill. If a whale hunt was done incorrectly, just as we are learning from the science of ecology, balance was disturbed. The pro-whaling leaders seem no longer aware of the consequences of their actions even though the consequences are visible all around them.

The Makah stopped whaling voluntarily in 1915 because there were so few whales, their numbers diminished not by the Makah but by other, larger nations. But with such clearly different values than their ancestors held to, would they do it now?

As Indians, we have the necessity, the requirement, really, to speak out for both the old people and the old ways. What most tribes shared in common has been the respect for life. In the traditional and historic past, we recognized the sovereignty of other species, animal and plant. We held treaties with the animals, treaties shaped by mutual respect and knowledge of the complex workings of the world, and these were laws the legal system can't come close to. That is what gave us our the past. That is what the Europeans who arrived here did not have.

In this location, at the end of the continent, a people are trying to lay claim to an older world and its complex of ceremony, but which people? Here it may very well be the silenced older women.

"Lastly, I speak on behalf of the whale," says Chamblin. "We can't have done this in vain."

But no matter what the outcome in the next year, it won't have been in vain. The future generations will look back to these times, as we always do, and will see these women as courageous as our leaders were during the treaty-making times when they offered similar speeches to their tribe and to the outside world.

There is another possible outcome to this story. If the Makah are granted the right to whale by the International Whaling Commission, and they choose not to do it, it would truly make a statement about how strong a culture can be. It would be a statement that it will look to other means for the true and deep wellspring of a culture, of a people, one that holds to a reverence for life, a concern that the whale will continue into the future.

They will set an example for others by which part of the culture they decide to cultivate. And for the children at Makah, what better example than seeing their own people take the side of life, as part of the sacred. How much that would nurture respect for themselves. That might very well restore tradition until the whale and the people reestablish a relationship of offering and receiving from one another. The way it used to be. Linda Hogan is a member of the Chickasaw Nation. She was a delegate at last summner's International Institute on Cultural Restoration of Indigenous Opressed Peoples, which took place in Saskatoon. She is a novelist and essayist, and the organizer of a conference entitled "Endangered Species, Animals and Elders." Her books include "Solar Storms and Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World." ----------------------------------------------------------------- Tribal elections

Makah Tribal Council elections will be held tomorrow at the old Team Center by Olympic Fish in Neah Bay.