ABOUT THIS BOOK
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.
REVIEWS
“Beldo has written a compelling, open-minded, and comprehensive account of a complex and controversial issue. His portrayal of the Makah and the activists who opposed their return to whaling is sympathetic and respectful of both their commitment and their arguments, and he persuasively demonstrates the way that official regulations ultimately shaped the strategies of all the parties to this conflict.”
— Harriet Ritvo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“A graceful, respectful and hugely enjoyable ride across the choppy waters of controversy, Contesting Leviathan navigates among Makah Indians, environmental activists, and US government bureaucrats with good humor and keen wit. This book deftly explores what whales mean to people with sharply divergent viewpoints, and how those people find unwitting common ground where they least expect it.”
— Don Kulick, Uppsala University, Sweden
“With his first book, Beldo has produced a thoroughly researched and well-written ethnographic study of the ongoing Makah whaling conflict. Timely and necessary, Contesting Leviathan combines his excellent independent research and discussions of relevant literatures using an accessible writing style that will engage anyone interested in this complex subject.”
— Mary Weismantel, Northwestern University
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226657547.003.0000
[Makah whaling;ethnography;ontology;state power]
This chapter introduces the Makah whaling by considering the overlapping cultural meanings attributed to the gray whale that approached the Makah whaling canoe in 1999. Centering animals in ethnographic analysis is among the worthiest of contemporary anthropological aspirations, but part of reaching for this goal involves recognizing that sometimes animals are marginalized figures in the stories that affect them the most. The figure ofthe whale—as an abstraction as well as in the form of concrete living beings—takes shape within systems of meaning-making and technocratic governance that are all too human.More than a political or moral or ontological struggle, the Makah whaling conflict is all of these things at once.The most important question this book addresses, then, is not “What is a whale?” or even “What does the whale become?” but “What does the whale approach?” To begin answering this question, this chapter considers the role of state power in the Makah whaling conflict, the “other leviathan.” This chapter includes discussions of the research setting, methodology, and subject position of the ethnographer. It concludes with an overview of the book.
One / It’s Who We Are
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226657547.003.0001
[Makah;whaling;identity;Native American;culture;treaty rights;sovereignty]
Previous accounts of the Makah whaling conflict have represented the revival of Makah whaling as an affirmation of identity and sovereignty. Such explanations fail to fully account for what is at issue and what is at stake in the conflict.This chapter situates the revival of the hunt in historical context, showing how contemporary Makah whaling is best viewed as part of a decades-long political struggle that is complex and, in several ways, contingent. Providing a brief history of Makah whaling from its role in precontact society through “the fish wars” of the 1960s, this chapter shows how the struggle forresource rights has become entwined with the emergence of Makah and Northwest Coast Native American identities in the twentieth century. When new battles over marine resources arise, those identities become part of the stakes, alongside older forms of social distinction predicated on the inherited social status. Thus, originally born of a growing sense oftribalresource sovereignty, whaling has become part of a narrative tribal unity andan assertion of treaty rights, while remaining a means for some actors to simultaneously reassert traditional hierarchies and privileges.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Two / We Eat Them
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226657547.003.0002
[morality;whaling;yum;animals;food;Makah;subsistence]
Whaling is a political project that depends upon the moral presupposition that whaling is acceptable. In Neah Bay, even opponents of whaling tend to view whales as things-to-be-eaten, reflecting the utilitarian assumptions toward animals that are widely shared in the community.This moral sentiment diverges from the majority view of whales in the United States. Reinforced by the circulation of images and motifs like “a whale on the beach,” the edibility of whales flattens idiosyncratic differences between the various enactments of gray whales within the Neah Bay community.This chapter begins by exploring the curious fact that the very articulation of self-consciously “Makah” attitudes toward whales can have a purposefully provocative effect on non-Native listeners, as it isintended to shock or provoke a perceived animal-loving public. The chapter concludes with an examination of what happened when the edibility of whales was challenged from the inside by a Makah elder, including the social pressures and normalizing mechanisms brought to bear in defending the consensus point of view.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Three / Everything Is Connected
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226657547.003.0003
[spirituality;whaling;Makah;grateful prey;nonhuman persons]
This chapter discusses spiritual preparation for whaling. Variability and secrecy are the rule rather than the exception.Not everyone in the community “gets into the spiritual stuff,” as one whaling captain put it, but many do. For most Makah whalers with whom I spoke, the main point of spiritual preparation was to safeguard against the inherent dangers of hunting a large and powerful animal from a relatively small and fragile canoe. Others, however, felt that spiritual preparation was necessary to make themselves worthy of the whale. They believe that if hunters prepare themselves properly, an animal’s spirit will “offer itself” to them and “come home” to feed the village with its flesh, a concept commonly known to anthropologists as “grateful prey.” This chapter recounts the spiritual views shared with me by individuals associated with contemporary Makah whaling and identifies a number of recurrent themes. One prominent and widely shared Makah spiritual discourse is reflected in the refrain, “everything is connected.”Spiritual practice can push back upon the present, providing the kind of “skills” that scholars have identified as integral to the environmental imagination of indigenous hunters. This chapter argues against the notion that Makah whalers view whales as “nonhuman persons.”
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Four / This Fishery Will Be Managed
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226657547.003.0004
[management;bureaucracy;morality;fisheries;traditional ecological knowledge (TEK);noble ecological indian;state power;National Marine Fisheries Service;technocracy]
This chapter explore an affinity that many Makah people recognize between local conceptions of the environment and the utilitarian, quantitative ontology of the state, reflected in avibrant local discourse that suggests Makah leaders were prepared by their traditional and spiritual teachings to contribute as fisheries managers.Complicating the anthropological view that modern resource management inevitably undermines the authority and legitimacy of traditional ecological knowledge (so-called), this chapter examines how and why many Makahs feel they are able to merge their knowledge and mastery of the federal management system with more traditional, spiritual discourses on whaling, effectively utilizing both registers in pursuit of their political aims.Because of the moral consonance between the two ways of seeing whales—each viewing whales, in the most abstract sense, as killable resources—Makah leaders have been able to pursue federal legitimacy in the form of resource co-management without disrupting or undermining the spiritual and ontological commitments of Makah whalers, while still mostly pushing back against the persistent misrecognition of the noble ecological Indian.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Five / You Just Don’t Kill Whales
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226657547.003.0005
[state power;antiwhaling;activism;environmentalism;animal rights;preservationism;US Coast Guard]
This chapter traces themotivations and early tactics of the antiwhaling activists who have opposed Makah whaling since the 1990s. I focus in particular on one ad hoc, local antiwhaling organization called Peninsula Citizens for the Protection of Whales (PCPW). The chapter begins by situating the group’s goal of “speaking for the whales,” within the broader history of antiwhaling sentiment in the United States, including the transformation of public opinion on whales and whaling amid social and technological changes taking place between the 1950s and 1970s (and culminating in the so-called Environmental Decade of US policy reform). This chapter follows the events that led to the failure of what I call interventionist activism in the Makah whaling conflict, or the attempts by animal rights activists to interfere directly in the 1999 and 2000 Makah hunts. Although the ultimate story of antiwhaling activism in the Makah whaling conflict is one of adaptation to the authorized discourse of the state, the story begins with the activists’ original defeat at the hands of a more conventional form of state power.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Six / The Science Has Ruled
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226657547.003.0006
[antiwhaling;activism;aesthetics;technocracy;bureaucracy;moral economy;fisheries management;National Marine Fisheries Service]
Antiwhaling activists in the Makah whaling conflict are driven by moral and aesthetic arguments against whaling as well as a stated desire to “speak for the whales.” How does one convince others not to harm something because they find it beautiful or magnificent? This would be difficult in any case, but it is nearly impossible within the moral economy of NMFS.Whales may have served as charismatic icons of the global environmental movement since its emergence, the imperative to “save them” a metonymic rallying cry for the Earth in its entirety, but the US federal government continues to manage whales as if they were large fish.For the National Marine Fisheries Service, the agency charged with overseeing Makah whaling, whales exist not as individual beings but as natural resources and fungible elements of statistical models—in short, as "stocks." Out of a sense of practical necessity, antiwhaling activists in the Makah whaling conflict have adapted their tactics to fit within the language and logics of federal fisheries management. This engagement with the state’s interpretive framework comes at a cost, however, as it tacitly affirms a moral economy of stock-based management that excludes the activists’ preservationist aims in the long run.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Seven / The Whale Approaches
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226657547.003.0007
[approach;whale;spirituality;ontology;state]
Gray whales arguably are not the most charismatic cetaceans; but there is one thing gray whales do consistently that resonates in human communities: they approach. The first Makah hunt was not successful until a gray whale approached the canoe. At the southernmost extent of the Eastern North Pacific gray whale’s range, female whales often approach boats of awed tourists and nudge their calves up out of the water as if to be touched and petted. The behavior has made the birthing lagoons of Baja California a whale-watching destination and earned these particular gray whales a nickname: the friendlies. This chapter examines how different parties to the Makah whaling conflict make sense of this most interpreted of gray whale behaviors: the spiritual explanations provided by Makah whalers, the curiosity and friendliness activists see in gray whales, and the state’s decision to consistently ignore or downplay the behavior. The chapter begins by exploring the details and consequences of the unauthorized 2007 hunt that ended with two Makah whalers in federal prison, an event known locally as the rogue hunt.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Conclusion
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226657547.003.0008
[politics;representation;recognition;whaling;antiwhaling;moral economy;technocracy]
The chapter revisits the book’s main claims and considers what the analysis of the Makah whaling conflict has to contribute to an anthropology that seeks to take itself beyond the human. Political representation for nonhumans is not only a question of having a voice and of who speaks for whom, but in what language, literally and figuratively, one is compelled to speak. This chapter includes an extended discussion of the politics of recognition, arguing that state recognition does not necessarily undermine indigenous interests as some scholars have asserted. The chapter concludes with a description of a recent public meeting of the National Marine Fisheries Service to discuss the draft environmental impact statement on Makah whaling, which shows the continued difficulty the parties to the Makah whaling conflict experience in translating their agendas into the language and logics of federal fisheries management.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
