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Holding Onto Heritage: Native Whale Hunts

& Diversity

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.

Copies of Chapter 1, Editorials, 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.
Copies of fact sheets on the gray whale from the American Cetacean

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Society.

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.

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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.

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