Makah Whaling and Subsistence

By Kathryn Ritchie

Because this is a topic with which I am not yet very familiar, I am starting off with an overview of the Makah whaling controversy. I have been looking for arguments both for and against whaling by the Makah, and from what I have seen (from the Humane Society of the United States, article at http://www.hsus.org/marine_mammals/marine_mammals_news/federal_appeals_court_bars_makah_tribe_from_whaling.html ), the arguments against center around whale not being necessary for the subsistence of the Makah people. I’ll argue with this concept.
There’s an obvious clash in cultural ideology going on here. The HSUS are stating that the Makah don’t need to subsist on whale, because they hadn’t whaled for so long. What the HSUS is not taking into consideration is that the Makah voluntarily ceased whaling back in the 1920s, because the whale population had become critically low from commercial hunting (I found this from http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&File_Id=5301 ). In other words, the treaty right to whale was never taken away from the Makah people.
Another consideration not accounted for by the HSUS is the psychological importance of whaling to the Makah people. At http://www.makah.com, I found the statement, “Many Makah feel that our health problems result, in some degree, to the loss of our traditional diet of seafood and marine mammal meat.” Although I really don’t have the background or pertinent information on current Makah diets to say whether there is a physical truth to this statement, it implicitly becomes true because it is what the people believe. You can’t just go and superimpose your own beliefs on another culture!
Finally, it should be pointed out that when the Makah did harvest a whale in 1999, the meat was used for…you guessed it, subsistence. Yes, there is a ceremonial aspect of whaling for the Makah, but that, again, is due to the nature of the culture: it just isn’t possible to extricate the ceremony, because it isn’t a separate system of the culture.