Contesting Leviathan

Activists, Hunters, and State Power in the Makah Whaling Conflict

Les Beldo

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780226657400, 9780226657370
• eBook ISBN: 9780226657547
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marine Biology
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1999, off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, the first gray whale in seven decades was killed by Makah whalers. The hunt marked the return of a centuries-old tradition and, predictably, set off a fierce political and environmental debate. Whalers from the Makah Indian Tribe and antiwhaling activists have clashed for over twenty years, with no end to this conflict in sight.
 
In Contesting Leviathan, anthropologist Les Beldo describes the complex judicial and political climate for whale conservation in the United States, and the limits of the current framework in which whales are treated as "large fish" managed by the National Marine Fisheries Service. Emphasizing the moral dimension of the conflict between the Makah, the US government, and antiwhaling activists, Beldo brings to light the lived ethics of human-animal interaction, as well as how different groups claim to speak for the whale—the only silent party in this conflict. A timely and sensitive study of a complicated issue, this book calls into question anthropological expectations regarding who benefits from the exercise of state power in environmental conflicts, especially where indigenous groups are involved. Vividly told and rigorously argued, Contesting Leviathan will appeal to anthropologists, scholars of indigenous culture, animal activists, and any reader interested in the place of animals in contemporary life.
 

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. The belief that prey animals will sacrifice themselves to human hunters has been widely documented among northern hunting peoples; see Brightman 1993; Tanner 1979; Nadasdy 2007; Ingold 1989; Willerslev 2007. Brightman (1993) refers to this set of beliefs as “grateful prey.”

2. See Escobar 1999; Descola 2013.

3. Ingold 2000, 41.

4. Latour (1987) writes, “Since the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Nature’s representation and not the consequence, we can never use the outcome—Nature—to explain how and why a controversy has been settled” (99; italics—all of them—in the original)

5. See, e.g., Escobar 1999, Butler 1990, and Mol 2002, respectively. I prefer Mol’s term, enactment, over the more popular term, construction, because it brings attention to the practices through which nature is formed and sustained while remaining agnostic about the actors involved and the materials that are used. “Construction metaphors,” as Mol points out, “suggest that the material is assembled, put together, and turned into an object that subsequently goes out into the world all by itself” (32).

6. I am aware that calling the whale by the name given to it by a Makah opponent of the hunt could make me appear partial, but it is not my intention to take sides. It is convenient to call this whale something, and Yabis seems appropriate. A contested name for a contested whale.

7. I borrow this last phrase from Jacques Derrida, who gives the example of a cat, his cat, the cat that stares at him one day as he exits the shower. A cat that “does not appear here to represent, like an ambassador, the immense symbolic responsibility with which our culture has always charged the feline race,” but is instead an “irreplaceable living being.” “Nothing,” he writes, “can ever rob me of the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized” (2008, 9). My point here is that we must observe the limits to the sense that nature even in its materiality is “always already social” (cf. Kosek 2006, 28).

8. See Kirksey and Helmreich (2010) on the concept of “becomings” in the emergent field of multispecies ethnography. As Celia Lowe writes, “The idea of becoming transforms ideas into events, objects into actions” (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010, 546).

9. Contemporary anthropological thinking tends to attribute the idea of multiple realities to the so-called ontological turn, but it is worth noting that Shweder (1991) introduced the idea of multiple objective worlds two decades earlier in a way that was in keeping with the culture theory of the time; this is another reason why I am tempted to agree with Candea (2010) that ontology is just another word for a return to a more robust concept of culture.

10. Sullivan 2000, 22.

11. Here, I borrow again from Derrida (2008), who presents his own animal ethics as a call to have the animal “heard in the singular” (2008, 47).

12. See Scott 1998, Fitzgerald 2003, and Telesca 2017 on forestry, agriculture, and fisheries, respectively.

13. Whales are perfectly good fish in many respects, of course, as the philosopher of science John Dupré (1999) has pointed out. Fish is more of a folk category than a scientific one, and both categories (fish and whale) are paraphyletic. Sperm whales and bottlenose dolphins share a closer common ancestor than either does with blue whales, but the category of whale customarily excludes the smaller toothed cetaceans. The category of fish must include mammals, ourselves included, if it is to capture everything we think of as fish and remain defined by a single common ancestor. However, the idea of a moral equivalence between whales and fish diverges from the current prevailing opinion in the United States; see, e.g., D’Amato and Chopra (1991) on whales’ “emerging right to life.” This is why I think this tacit classification should evoke some surprise.

14. See Cassaniti and Hickman 2014; Fassin 2012; Laidlaw 2001.

15. In his ethnography of Runa hunters, Eduardo Kohn (2013) refers to the “tricky business” of hunting within an “ecology of selves” without otherwise indicating that the animist hunters he worked with felt any sense of ambivalence at all over the act of hunting and killing (118). Phillipe Descola, also in a study of Amerindian (Achuar) hunters, unfavorably compares the “passing prick of conscience” experienced by Westerners to the deep metaphysical disturbance felt by animists (2013, 286). In so doing, both authors present moral sentiments as if they were the logical entailment of ontological classification.

16. See Bessire and Bond (2014) for a critique of this expectation of stability among the works within the so-called ontological turn.

17. Renker 2012.

18. The time depth of both the Makah occupation of Cape Flattery and the practice of whaling in the area is contested. The Makah language is part of the Wakashan language family, which is widely distributed across Canada’s Vancouver Island but found nowhere else in the United States. Contemporary language patterns suggest that the Makah language started to diverge from other Wakashan dialects about eight hundred years ago. Any attempt to assess the relative importance or purpose of whaling prior to the late precontact period is impractical due to the inherent limitations of the available archaeological evidence; for a discussion of those limitations, see McMillan (1999, 176) and Isaac (1988).

19. On the stratification of precontact indigenous societies on the Northwest Coast, especially of those belonging to the so-called Nootkan cultural type, see Sapir 1915; Drucker 1951; Isaac 1988. For the way that whaling reflected and reinforced this stratified social order, see McMillan 1999, 139; Drucker 1951; Coté 2002; Huelsbeck 1988; Reid 2015, 10–11; Swan 1870, 11.

20. On the decline of Makah whaling following the signing of the Treaty of Neah Bay, see Renker and Gunther 1990; Gibbs 1877; and Swan 1870. On the waning strength of tribal affiliations in the early 1900s, see Harmon 1998.

21. Petersen 1999.

22. 384 F. Supp. 312 (W.D. Wash. 1974).

23. On opinion polls, see Lavigne et al. (1999, 11) and Kim (2015, 244). On the ubiquity of whale watching and the diffuse affection for cetaceans in the Pacific Northwest, see Moore (2008).

24. See Russell 2001, 106–7.

25. The IWC’s concept of culture was not a historical accident. As Raibmon points out, discourses on cultural authenticity tend to cast Indians as having consensual rather than dialectical civic life, part of the dominant portrayal of Native Americans as people without history or politics (2005, 12).

26. Sullivan 2000.

27. Metcalf v. Daley, 214 F.3d 1135 (9th Cir. 2000).

28. Environmental impact statements are significantly longer and more rigorous than environmental assessments. The 1997 environmental assessment for Makah whaling was forty-eight pages, whereas the 2008 draft environmental impact statement was over seven hundred pages.

29. For an official report from the tribe’s marine mammal biologist that covers many of these details, see Scordino 2007.

30. Cf. Wynne 2010, as well as other theories for how the modern state legitimates itself through nonviolent means: e.g., as a source of order (Markell 2003, 30) or as a biopolitical exercise in human welfare (Kosek 2006, 96–102).

31. Briefly, the difference between these calculations for fisheries and cetacean management has to do with the target population level of the managed stock. PBR is set relative to the estimated “carrying capacity” of the environment, or the maximum population of a species the environment can support without adverse effects. NMFS calculates fisheries quotas based at or near “maximum sustainable yield,” which sets the “optimum sustainable population” at a fraction of the environment’s carrying capacity (usually the minimum, hence “maximum” yield; see Thornton and Hebert [2015] on how maximum sustainable yield models create damaging assumptions about fish harvests that portray “uncaught” fish as waste).

32. See the NMFS stock assessment for the Eastern North Pacific gray whale published in 2015 (NMFS 2015b).

33. Tribes are classified as domestic dependent nations according to US legal precedent (Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 US 5 Pet. 1, 1831) and are subject to a kind of legal guardianship that entails certain trust responsibilities on the part of the US federal government. On ethnic groups behaving like for-profit businesses, see Comaroff and Comaroff 2009.

34. See Swan 1870, 59.

35. The Seattle Times has continued to receive letters to the editor that use racial stereotypes to condemn Makah whaling (Westneat 2015), and some of the more diffuse opposition in the region might also be attributed to a general sense of resentment still smoldering from the Boldt decision, which som...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• contents
• introduction
• one / It’s Who We Are
• two / We Eat Them
• three / Everything Is Connected
• four / This Fishery Will Be Managed
• five / You Just Don’t Kill Whales
• six / The Science Has Ruled
• seven / The Whale Approaches
• conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index