Makah tribal member kills whale without permits or tribal sanction

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Last Updated: 17 years

AUTHORS: Lynda V. Mapes and Jonathan Martin

It was about 6:30 on a beautiful summer morning,
with gray whales all around, when Wayne Johnson decided he had waited long
enough: It was time to hunt whales again.

Within minutes Saturday, Johnson and four other Makah tribal members were
on the downtown dock at Neah Bay, boarding two motorized boats. By the end
of the day, the men were in handcuffs and a whale was dead.

Sunday, even as tribal council members strongly denounced the hunt, Johnson
said he had no regrets. “If anything, I wish I’d done it years earlier,” he
said.

The hunt started without a hitch: Less than a mile out, the men spotted a
gray whale. But Johnson, 54, and the rest of the crew decided they were too
close to shore to fire the .460-caliber rifle they’d brought.

Around 9:30, the crew saw another whale. This one, about 40 feet long,
surfaced and came to the two boats.

“The whale chose us,” Johnson said.

Into the animal’s flesh, crew members plunged at least five stainless-steel
whaling harpoons and four seal harpoons “so we wouldn’t lose it,” Johnson
said. They then shot the whale with a gun powerful enough to fire a slug
four miles.

The former captain of the whaling crew that in 1999 took the Makah tribe’s
first whale in 70 years, Johnson confirmed that the hunt that shocked his
own tribe and anti-whaling activists Saturday was carried out without the
permission of his Tribal Council or Whaling Commission.

And it was done without conforming to conditions of the federal permit that
controlled that 1999 hunt — permission from the tribe; prior notification
to a federal observer who had to be in place at the time of the kill;
restricting the hunt to the outer coast to protect “resident” whales in the
Strait of Juan de Fuca; approaching the whale in a traditional canoe; and
using first a harpoon and then a .50-caliber gun to dispatch the whale.

On Saturday, there was no permit, no observer, no canoe; no restricting the
hunt to the coast. Just five whalers, four from the 1999 hunt, casting
loose from the downtown dock.

“Why mess around with a canoe?” Johnson said. “It would have been more
people in jail, and we would have lost the canoe.”

The Coast Guard was on the scene within hours, and Johnson and the others
found themselves in handcuffs. The Coast Guard confiscated the gun and the
boats, and cut the whale loose — harpoons and all — to drift on the
current. By evening, it was dead.

After questioning the whalers, the Coast Guard turned them over to tribal
police. The men spent most of Saturday night at the tribal jail, then were
released on bond.

Makah Tribal statement:

Early Sunday afternoon, the Tribal Council issued a statement denouncing
the whalers’ actions and promising prosecution to the fullest extent of the
law.

The tribe said it would cooperate with any federal investigation of the
hunt and that the whalers will stand trial in tribal court.

“We hope the public does not permit the action of five irresponsible
persons to be used to harm the image of the entire Makah Tribe,” part of
the statement said.

The hunters could face federal charges if they are found to have violated
the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Emily Langlie, spokeswoman for the U.S.
Attorney’s Office in Seattle, said prosecutors need to review reports from
tribal police, the Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration before deciding if or how to charge the men.

Protests, lawsuit possible

If charges are not filed, said Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation
Society, which staked out the 1999 whale hunt for weeks, there will likely
be a noisy protest. He also said a lawsuit is possible against the federal
government for failing to enforce whale protections.

Early Sunday afternoon at the west edge of the Makah Reservation, tribal
police and a Clallam County sheriff’s deputy were stopping cars and asking
occupants their business on the reservation.

Yet for most of the day, there was a sole demonstrator, and he was outside
the reservation boundaries. Hans Barr, 24, a seasonal fisherman from
Bellingham, propped a sign in support of the Makahs’ right to hunt against
a battered black pickup.

The Makahs are entitled by their heritage to hunt whales, when and how they
wish, he said. “It’s not up to white people to say what native culture is
or is not.”

Environmentalists’ protests over the tribe’s whaling amount to racism, he
said.

Peter Cacace disagrees. He and his friends, fishing for salmon near the
reservation Saturday, saw Coast Guard boats protecting the injured whale.

The Makah need to follow the laws of the U.S., said Cacace, who lives near
Tacoma. “It’s been a long time since those treaties were signed.

“If they did it the way they used to do it, with the harpoon and canoe,
it’d probably be fine with me,” he said.

“I’m not ashamed,” the whale slayer said.

On Sunday, Johnson, sporting his trademark 50-caliber-shooting-club jacket,
said he had no regrets.

Tired of more than eight years of wrangling in the courts over permission
to once again hunt whales, he said: “The time just felt right. …

“I’m not ashamed. I’m feeling kind of proud. … There is only a few guys
in Neah Bay that can get a whale and bring everyone home safely. You think
one of the only whaling captains in 77 years could give it up? I should
have done it years ago. I come from a whaling family … It’s in the
blood.”

The tribe needs to whale to keep its culture alive, Johnson said. “The time
is now, when the people are still interested. And the whales are robust.”

Gray whales were taken off the endangered-species list in 1994, and
populations are healthy.

The animals make their way past Washington’s coast migrating to and from
their feeding grounds off Alaska and their calving lagoons off Baja
California.

This time of year has historically meant prime hunting for the Makah,
whalers for millennia.

“A black eye on us,” tribal leaders said of the rogue hunter

Saturday night, after the whalers were taken into custody, tribal officials
met with community members for more than two hours to talk about what had
happened. Some were concerned the rogue hunt would complicate and slow
their efforts to legally hunt whales again.

Ed Claplanhoo, 79, a Makah tribal elder and member of the tribal whaling
commission, said he and other tribal officials neither sanctioned nor agree
with the crew’s actions.

“We are a law-abiding people,” he said.

His Indian name, Bahduktooah, was passed down from his
great-great-grandfather, a whaler at Ozette, one of the tribe’s original
villages. And the women in his family have long made prized baskets
decorated with the tribe’s signature whale design.

But Claplanhoo disagreed strongly with Saturday’s hunt.

“This … puts kind of a black eye on us. I thought it was wrong. We pride
ourselves that we are a law-abiding tribe, and we go by the rules and
regulations.

“Even though we support our treaty 100 percent, we have to be within the
guidelines and the rules that we work with to protect the animals, and the
people themselves.”

The Makah tribe has work ahead.

“We will have to convince the powers that be that we are sincere in the
rules we set up, and that we know what we are doing, and we are not going
to sanction illegal activities by supporting this hunt. We are not that
kind of tribe.”

Should the matter come to tribal court, the tribe is equipped to handle it,
Claplanhoo said.

“We are ready to accept that responsibility.”

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Lynda V. Mapes and Jonathan Martin are Staff Reporters for the Seattle Times. Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company