By Wayne Johnson
EDITOR’S NOTE: The author of this column, Wayne Johnson, was the captain of the Makah tribe’s successful 1999 whale hunt.
He wrote this column for the Peninsula Daily News on the kill’s second anniversary on May 17, 2001, as legal challenges by furious opponents mounted against another whale hunt by the tribe.
TWO YEARS AGO today, I called the Makah tribal chairman from the waters off of Neah Bay to let him know “The Thunderbird has landed!” — our code for a successful whale hunt.
Like the first whale brought to our people by the Thunderbird, the whale my crew and I brought in nourished the bodies and sustained the spirits of our fellow Makahs.
People keep asking me, “When are you going to get another whale?”
It’s been two years since there’s been any whale meat in my refrigerator.
My family and our tribe want more.
Reporters like to ask about how the whale tasted.
It tasted like a dream come true, but along with the whale meat, I got a taste of the politics, and I can tell you, that part is no good.
We’ve had only a handful of days open for hunting since two years ago when Indians from around the country and indigenous people from as far as Fiji and Africa came to help us celebrate the return of the whale to our people.
Since then, we’ve been tied up with these rich animal-rights groups taking us to court and the U.S. dragging its feet on putting out a new environmental assessment and signing a new management agreement.
I’m tired of waiting.
I’m tired of commodity foods in the cabinet, and I’m tired of 75 percent unemployment on the reservation.
And mostly, I’m just tired of the politics of trying to carry out the rights our great-grandfathers kept for us in exchange for most of land of the North Olympic Peninsula.
My grandfather and other Makahs were arrested for fishing in the Hoko Bay in the 1940s.
They knew it was their treaty right and eventually they won in court.
We’re used to this kind of treatment.
Every protester who insults my family and my culture and every government official who finds some excuse to delay our rights just helps put me in the company of my ancestors who endured the same.
If it were up to me, I wouldn’t sign another agreement with the government.
I’d just go out on the water and do what my great-grandfather Arthur Johnson and my great-uncle Charlie Jones did: catch a whale and bring it home for the people to eat.
My family is ready.
But our whaling commission is made up of the heads of all Makah extended families.
They have chosen to work with the government, even though I think the United States has been stalling and lying.
I just don’t trust the government anymore, but I’ll go along with the tribal commission.
Since the commission says wait, I will wait. When the time is right, the Thunderbird will land again.
Today is a holiday for the Makah tribe to celebrate the anniversary of the return of the whale.
But the celebration is incomplete because there is no fresh whale to eat.
We waited 70 years until the gray whale population rebounded before hunting last time, and we can wait through this latest round of assaults on our rights and our culture.
We will get another whale. It’s only a matter of time.
________
Jennifer Sepez Aradanas, then a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Washington’s Environmental Anthropology program, helped Johnson write this column.
The skeleton of the 32-ton female gray whale killed in 1999 now hangs in Neah Bay at the Makah Museum/Cultural and Research Center.
Its nickname is “May.”
Johnson was one of five men who illegally harpooned and shot a gray whale off Neah Bay on Sept. 8, 2007.
He and the others were arrested. He served five months in federal prison.
The 32-foot hand-hewn Hummingbird cedar whaling canoe used in 1999 was retired in 2006 after it capsized, killing Joseph Andrew “Jerry” Jack, a hereditary chief of the Mowachaht/Muchalaht tribe of Vancouver Island, during an InterTribal Canoe Journey.
It is now stored on the Makah reservation.
On May 17, 2014, Johnson and most of the Makah whale hunters from the 1999 hunt did a ceremonial paddle in the Hummingbird across Neah Bay to mark the hunt’s 15th anniversary.
You can read the 2014 PDN article, “Makah whalers commemorate 15th anniversary of last legal whale kill (with photo gallery),” at https://www.peninsuladailynews.com/article/20140518/NEWS/305189969.
Scores of other stories about Makah whaling are in the PDN’s electronic news archives at www.peninsuladailynews.com.
