Colonialism and Animality

The fields of settler colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial studies, as well as Critical Animal Studies are growing rapidly, but how do the implications of these endeavours intersect? Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies explores some of the ways that the oppression of Indigenous persons and more-than-human animals are interconnected.

Composed of 12 chapters by an international team of specialists plus a Foreword by Dinesh Wadiwel, the book is divided into four themes:

Tensions and Alliances between Animal and Decolonial Activisms
Revisiting the Stereotypes of Indigenous Peoples’ Relationships with Animals
Cultural Perspectives
Colonialism, Animals, and the Law

This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, activists, as well as postdoctoral scholars, working in the areas of Critical Animal Studies, Native Studies, postcolonial and critical race studies, with particular chapters being of interest to scholars and students in other fields, such as Cultural Studies, Animal Law, Critical Prison Studies, and Critical Criminology.

Kelly Struthers Montford is Assistant Professor at the Department of History and Sociology at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.

Chloë Taylor is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

Routledge Advances in Critical Diversities

Series Editors: Yvette Taylor and Sally Hines

5 Exploring LGBT Spaces and Communities

Eleanor Formby

6 Marginal Bodies, Trans Utopias

Caterina Nirta

7 Sexualities Research

Critical Interjections, Diverse Methodologies, and Practical Applications

Edited by Andrew King, Ana Cristina Santos and Isabel Crowhurst

8 Queer Business

Queering Organization Sexualities

Nick Rumens

9 Queer in Africa

LGBTQI Identities, Citizenship, and Activism

Edited by Zethu Matebeni, Surya Monro and Vasu Reddy

10 Gender Verification and the Making of the Female Body in Sport

A History of the Present

Sonja Erikainen

11 Colonialism and Animality

Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies

Edited by Kelly Struthers Montford and Chloë Taylor

12 Disability and Animality

Crip Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies

Edited by Stephanie Jenkins, Kelly Struthers Montford, and Chloë Taylor

For more information go to https://www.routledge.com/sociology/series/RACD

Title Page

Colonialism and Animality

Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies

Edited by
Kelly Struthers Montford
and Chloë Taylor

Publisher Details

First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2020 selection and editorial matter, Kelly Struthers Montford and Chloë Taylor; individual chapters, the contributors

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Montford, Kelly Struthers, editor. | Taylor, Chloë, 1976– editor.
Title: Colonialism and animality : anti-colonial perspectives in critical animal studies / edited by Kelly Struthers Montford and Chloë Taylor.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. |
Series: Routledge advances in critical diversities | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019054020 (print) | LCCN 2019054021 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Animal rights. | Imperialism. | Speciesism. | Human-animal relationships.
Classification: LCC HV4708 .C655 2020 (print) | LCC HV4708 (ebook) | DDC 179/.3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054020
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054021

ISBN: 978-0-367-85612-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-01389-1 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra

Dedication

Dedicated to the memory of the animal residents of Farm Animal Rescue and Rehoming Movement (FARRM) who died in the Spring of 2019. The human and animal residents at FARRM were integral to the conference from which this volume emerges, generously opening their homes and allowing us the joy of their company.

Figures

Contributors

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a PhD candidate and 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar at the Department of English and Film Studies in the University of Alberta; his doctoral project is a creative-theoretical one called “The Conspiracy of NDN Joy.” He is also a Rhodes Scholar and holds an MSt in Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford. In the First Nations Youth category, Belcourt received a 2019 Indspire Award, which is the highest honour the Indigenous community bestows on its own leaders. Billy-Ray’s debut book of poems, This Wound Is a World (Frontenac House 2017), won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize (making him the youngest winner ever) and the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. It was also named the Most Significant Book of Poetry in English by an Emerging Indigenous Writer at the 2018 Indigenous Voices Awards. This Wound Is a World was a finalist for the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, the 2018 Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry, the 2018 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and the 2018 Raymond Souster Award, both of the latter via the Canadian League of Poets, and was named by CBC Books as the best “Canadian poetry” collection of 2017.

Darren Chang is an independent scholar who completed an MA in political philosophy and Critical Animal Studies at Queen’s University in 2017, under the supervision of Will Kymlicka. Darren’s MA research explored how farmed animal sanctuaries and animal rights/liberation activists could overcome the speciesist zoning bylaws segregating farmed animals and excluding them from urban spaces, while invisibilizing and confining them to rural agricultural zones. Darren has been participating in grassroots animal rights/liberation activism since 2011.

Lauren Corman teaches classes in the areas of Critical Animal Studies and contemporary social theory. Her intersectional research draws on feminist, anti-racist, posthumanist, post/anti-colonial, and environmental approaches to the “question of the animal.” Subsequent to her studies on slaughterhouse labour, Corman’s PhD focused on voice, politics, and the animal rights and liberation movements. Her current scholarship carries forward these threads to investigate ideas related to agency, resistance, and (interspecies) subjectivity. Her interdisciplinary work bridges the social and natural sciences through cognitive ethology, which explores non-human animal cultures and societies. Corman is interested in coalition building across social, environmental, and animal movements, and links her work to larger anti-capitalist struggles. She maintains her longstanding commitments to critical pedagogy, and also publishes in this area. She hosted and produced the animal advocacy radio show, Animal Voices, for about a decade. She is currently collaborating with filmmaker Karol Orzechowski (Maximum Tolerated Dose) on a documentary about non-human animals and intersectionality.

Maneesha Deckha is Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Her research interests include Critical Animal Studies, critical animal law, health law and policy, postcolonial theory, and feminist theory. Her interdisciplinary scholarship dedicated to an intersectional and Critical Animal Studies analysis of law and legality has appeared in American Quarterly, Hypatia, the Journal of Critical Animal Studies, and the McGill Law Journal, among other venues, and has been supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She has held the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Law and Society at New York University for her work on animals, culture, and legal subjectivity. She currently serves as Director of the Animals & Society Research Initiative at the University of Victoria as well as on the Editorial Boards of Politics and Animals and Hypatia.

Kathryn Gillespie is a writer, feminist geographer, and Critical Animal Studies scholar. Her research and teaching interests focus on feminist theory and methods, food and agriculture, political economy, Critical Animal Studies, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, incarceration/prison studies, gender and sexuality, and human-environment relations. She is the author of The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 (University of Chicago Press, 2018). She has also published in numerous scholarly journals and has co-edited three books: Vulnerable Witness: The Politics of Grief in the Field (University of California Press, 2018, co-edited with Patricia J. Lopez), Critical Animal Geographies: Politics, Intersections and Hierarchies in a Multispecies World (Routledge, 2015, co-edited with Rosemary-Claire Collard), and Economies of Death: Economic Logics of Killable Life and Grievable Death (Routledge, 2015, co-edited with Patricia J. Lopez). Gillespie was an Animal Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan University and has taught various courses at the University of Washington. She has volunteered with Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (a Puget Sound, Washington-based prison education organization), Books to Prisoners (a Seattle organization that receives and fills book requests from prisoners throughout the United States), Food Empowerment Project (a food justice organization in Cotati, CA), and Pigs Peace Sanctuary (a sanctuary for pigs in Stanwood, WA).

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond is Associate Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She has written extensively on the legacies of African enslavement and Critical Animal Studies, with publications including White Negritude: Race, Writing and Brazilian Cultural Identity (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008) and the edited collection The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005). Isfahani-Hammond’s current book project, “Home Sick,” blends theory with creative nonfiction to meditate on grief, end of life, the medical-industrial complex, Islamophobia, and the commodification of (human and non-human) animals. “Home Sick” is concerned with interconnected forms of caregiving, ministering to both the dying and living in attunement to the suffering of billions of animals each day, for intimate dealings with dying bodies reframe what it means to be an animal. In addition to her scholarly publications, Isfahani-Hammond has written for popular news media, with publications in The Advocate, CounterPunch, Ms. Magazine (blog), Persianesque: Iranian Magazine, and Truthout.

Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on comparative race studies and human-animal studies. She received her BA in Government from Harvard College and her PhD in Political Science from Yale University. Her first book, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (Yale University Press 2000), won two awards from the American Political Science Association: the Ralph Bunche Award for the Best Book on Ethnic and Cultural Pluralism and the Best Book Award from the Organized Section on Race and Ethnicity. Her second book, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge University Press 2015), received the Best Book Award from the APSA’s Organized Section on Race and Ethnicity as well. Dr Kim has also written numerous journal articles, book chapters, and essays. She was co-guest editor of a special issue of American Quarterly, “Species/Race/Sex” (September 2013), and co-organizer of the Race and Animals Institute at Wesleyan University in 2016. She is a past recipient of a grant from the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, and she has been a fellow at the University of California Humanities Research Institute and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. She is currently working on a book entitled Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World.

Fiona Probyn-Rapsey is a Professor of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Previously, Fiona was Associate Professor at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies in the University of Sydney from 2003 to 2016. Fiona’s research connects feminist critical race studies and animal studies (also known as human-animal studies), examining where, when, and how gender, race, and species intersect. Her first book, Made to Matter: White Fathers, Stolen Generations (2013), examines how the white fathers of Indigenous children (many now part of the Stolen Generations) reacted to and were positioned by Australian assimilation policies. This book highlights a research interest in the reproductive and biopolitical nature of settler colonial societies, a common thread that extends into more recent research in animal studies, including three co-edited books, Animal Death (2013), Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-Human Futures (2015), and Animaladies (2018). From 2011 to 2015, Fiona was convenor (and founder) of HARN: Human Animal Research Network at the University of Sydney. Fiona is currently working on a monograph on the cultural politics of eradication.

Margaret Robinson is a feminist scholar from Eskikewa’kik, Nova Scotia, and a member of the Lennox Island First Nation. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Departments of English and of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University, and an Affiliate Scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto.

Kelly Struthers Montford is Assistant Professor at the Department of History and Sociology in the University of British Columbia Okanagan. Previously, she was a postdoctoral research fellow in punishment, law, and social theory at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies in the University of Toronto. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Alberta in 2017. Her research bridges settler colonial studies, punishment and captivity, animal studies, and law, and has been published in Radical Philosophy Review, the New Criminal Law Review, PhiloSophia, the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, Societies, and PhaenEx: Journal of Existentialist and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, among other venues.

Chloë Taylor is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. She has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Philosophy in McGill University. Her research interests include 20th-century French philosophy, philosophy of gender and sexuality, Critical Animal Studies, food politics, and Anthropocene Studies. She is the author of Foucault, Guidebook to Foucault’s the History of Sexuality (Routledge 2016) and The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault (Routledge 2008), and the co-editor of Feminist Philosophies of Life (McGill-Queens University Press 2016) and Asian Perspectives on Animal Ethics (Routledge 2014). She has also published peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Hypatia, Feminist Studies, Philosophy Today, Ancient Philosophy, Postmodern Culture, Foucault Studies, Social Philosophy Today, and the Journal for Critical Animal Studies.

Dinesh Wadiwel is a senior lecturer in human rights and socio-legal studies, with a background in social and political theory. He has had over 15 years of experience working within civil society organizations, including in anti-poverty and disability rights roles. Dinesh’s current book project explores the relationship between animals and capitalism. This builds on his monograph, The War against Animals (Brill, 2015). Dinesh is also the co-editor of Foucault and Animals (Brill, 2016) and Animals in the Anthropocene (University of Sydney Press, 2015). He is also involved in a project exploring the application of the United Nations Convention against Torture to the treatment of people with disability.

Vanessa Watts is Mohawk and Anishinaabe Bear Clan from Six Nations of the Grand River. She is Academic Director of Indigenous Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Vanessa’s research focuses on Indigenous material knowledge production sites among the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe. She examines the roles of gender, sexuality, spirit, and other-than-humans in how material knowledge is produced and inherited within Indigenous communities amidst colonialism. Her research is framed within broader discussions of how epistemology and ontology are oriented to Indigenous cosmologies. Vanessa also holds an Arts Research Board grant entitled, “Working Colonial Sexualities: Indigenous Sex Workers and the Colonial Desire,” which will interrogate feminist approaches to agency in the sex trade industry in an effort to make space for the voices of Indigenous sex workers. This research will document how power and agency are particularly inaccessible to Indigenous women in the sex trade as well as contextualize discussions of prostitution, colonization, and Indigenous women in Canada’s efforts towards decriminalization of sex work, and the discourse of empowerment embedded within it.

Foreword: Thinking “critically” about animals after colonialism

Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel

In the colonial context the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man’s values. In the period of decolonization, the colonized masses mock at these very values, insult them, and vomit them up.[1]

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.

As this volume attests, the colonial project—encompassing diverse rationalities of elimination, exploitation, and assimilation[2]—cannot be easily disentangled from our prevailing relationships with animals. In part, this reflects the material reality that colonialism was also accompanied by the radical remaking of non-human animals and “nature.” For example, the relation between European expansion, invasion, settlement, and domination, and the development of large-scale industrial animal agriculture represents what David Nibert describes as an “entangled violence.”[3] Thus, Billy-Ray Belcourt notes (see this volume) that the context for understanding “speciesism” today includes:

the historic and ongoing elimination of Indigenous peoples and the theft of Indigenous lands for settler-colonial expansion, including animal agriculture. For that reason, we cannot address animal oppression and liberation without beginning from an understanding that settler colonialism and white supremacy are the bedrock of much of the structural violence that unfolds on occupied Indigenous territory.

Colonialism also participated in the conversion of almost all non-human life into objects for capitalist accumulation, transforming pre-existing human animal relations, and altering food production and consumption. Early forms of globalized capitalism, founded on developing supply lines of raw materials and labour between Europe and the colonies, established the beginnings of a global transformation in food production; as Eric Holt-Giménez notes this “colonial food regime was the first hegemonic regime…and had consolidated a powerful set of institutions and rules that influenced food production, processing and distribution on a world scale.”[4] Relevant to thinking about animals, this transformation of the world has intimately shaped the diets of populations globally, so that the “promotion of meat production and consumption accompanied Western political, economic, and cultural influences.”[5] Finally, the colonial project came armed with a strong set of epistemic effects which produced overt resonances between processes of racialization and the construction of the non-human animal: in this respect, it is not accidental that Achille Mbembe observes that “discourse on Africa is almost always deployed in the framework (or in the fringes) of a meta-text about the animal.”[6] The distinctive form of racialization that accompanied colonialism was one that placed humans and animals within the imaginary of the “chain of being”;[7] Syl Ko offers the succinct summary that “what condemns us to our inferior status, even before we speak or act, is not merely our racial category but that our racial category is marked the most by animality.”[8] Thus, it would appear that, and despite very different histories, the challenge of thinking “critically” about animals has to grapple with the very real material transformations, violences, and erasures of colonialism, all of which paved the way for what we “know” about animals today.

All of this beckons us to think about animals in truly “critical” ways, which requires a simultaneous project of disarming colonial logics. But this is not straightforward by any means. First, how did “Critical Animal Studies” arise as a tendency, and to what extent was it complicit in the colonial project? Various histories have understood CAS as an intervention into animal studies or human/animal studies,[9] or suggested that CAS was developed “some forty years ago as a specialization within analytic philosophy.”[10] This reading of CAS appears to locate its origins within pro-animal liberation movements in industrial societies, predominantly located in the Global North. But such a perspective relies on imagining that “critical” perspectives or studies of animals have their location within venerated institutions, discourses, and debates—e.g. animal ethics after Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, the emergence of a critique against mainstream human/animal studies in contemporary universities, the rise of vegan movements in the Global North, etc.—and forgets that diverse cultures and traditions have thought about animals in “critical” ways for a very long time; and that these ethics, practices, and ontologies continue to offer a profound critique of colonial ways of seeing, knowing, and relating to animals. The point here isn’t to pretend that CAS as an institutional formation did not have the historical location, or string of intellectual forebears that its proponents claim for it; rather, the aim is to push us to ask the more fundamental, and interesting, question: what does it mean to think critically about animals?

Secondly, in identifying these boundaries, we might then ask: which anti-colonial perspectives should be included within the boundaries of CAS? Which discourses are nominated to challenge colonial master narratives? And who initiates these projects of decolonization? For example, the conviction that veganism functions as a “moral baseline”[11] for CAS, while serving a function in aligning personal practices with scholarly commitments, also governs the borders of who we might imagine as being a committed CAS scholar. Certainly, it would appear odd that ethical vegetarians who belong to non-Judeo-Christian faith traditions such as Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, which are informed by hundreds if not thousands of years of careful ethical thought and practice relating to animals, should be regarded as have nothing to offer CAS because they do not obey an imperative towards veganism. What are the rules of inclusion in CAS, and who gets to decide?

Thirdly, we might ask epistemically, to what extent does CAS participate in seeing and knowing animals in ways that reflect settler rationalities? Is it even possible to think about animals “critically” outside of the tools we have inherited from colonialism? After all, we are reminded again and again that the colonial project did not just seek to materially remake the world through social, economic, and political violence, but simultaneously wrought an epistemic violence that shaped how we saw the world; and impressed upon us values that shaped how we saw ourselves. As Edward Said pointed out, the colonial enterprise required the establishment of the object of imperialist knowledge as a site of both domination and truth: “to have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it.”[12] This makes it difficult to even think about decolonization without simultaneously evoking the language of the colonists—since their perspective continues, almost everywhere, to dominate with apparent universality as the only world that appears rational and comprehensible. As discussed above, animals too were framed as part of this remaking of the world. We thus face an extraordinary challenge to think “critically” about animals, while simultaneously holding in check and resisting colonial logics. For example, as Claire Jean Kim describes in an analysis of contention over Makah whale hunting (see this volume), some animal advocates openly reproduce settler logics which trivializing “concerns about tribal or racial justice.” Resistance to colonial violence here depends upon being able to produce an alternative set of realities without simply, by default, reinscribing the master’s discourse.

Finally, in reproducing alternative knowledges about animals, how do we avoid simply cataloguing diverse and irreconcilable perspectives which do not in themselves lead to change? How do we engage in decolonization work that actually leads to the transformation of societies, and heads towards a break in the cycle of colonial violence and the elimination of violence towards animals? As Fayaz Chagani notes: “The normative horizon for postcolonial thinking—its reason for critiquing humanism in the first place—has been a world in which non-coercive relationships between cultures and societies are possible.”[13] What does this project look like? And who gets to decide?

The above challenges might be read as invitation to inaction. However, inaction is not a possibility. This is because of the political urgency of the colonial violence we are responding to; this violence is not insignificant, at least to those who experience it. We need to respond; the question is how. In other words, the problem before us is strategic in nature. If we must act, how do we act? What approach do we take? What are the effects we are seeking to induce?

Reflecting on the project of teaching towards transformation, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak offers I think a useful way to explore our strategy with respect to the recognition and production of anti-colonial perspectives. In this context, Spivak is particularly concerned about a tendency of teaching spaces to resist change by peddling a kind of “pluralism” which responds to the colonial narrative by simply offering alternative discourses, without necessarily engaging in change: Spivak remarks that “Most of us are not interested in changing our social relations, and pluralism is the best we can do.”[14] Against this tendency, Spivak suggests a strategy of building a collective process of change, starting with an acknowledgment of the limits of one’s own capacities and understanding:

Once we have established the story of the straight, white, Judeo-Christian, heterosexual man of property as the ethical universal, we must not replicate the same trajectory. We have limits; we cannot even learn many languages. This idea of a global fun-fair is a lousy teaching idea. One of the first things to do is to think through the limits of one’s power. One must ruthlessly undermine the story of the ethical universal, the hero. But the alternative is not constantly to evoke multiplicity; the alternative is to know and to teach the student the awareness that this is a limited sample because of one’s own inclinations and capacities to learn enough to take a larger sample. And this kind of work should be a collective enterprise. Other people will do some other work. This is how I think one should proceed, rather than make each student into a ground of multiplicity. That leads to pluralism. I ask the U.S. student: “What do you think is the inscription that allows you to think the world without any preparation? What sort of coding has produced this subject?” I think it’s hard for students to know this, but we have a responsibility to make this lesson palliative rather than destructive.[15]

I believe Spivak offers us here some useful cautions for the work of decolonization. We must “ruthlessly” take away the universalizing foundation that apparently structures what we see and take for granted. But we simultaneously must know the limits of our own knowledge and invite others to be part of the collective enterprise of making sense of a world outside of “the straight, white, Judeo-Christian, heterosexual man of property as the ethical universal.” Importantly, Spivak always reminds us of the importance of knowledge as strategy:[16] the classroom aims to use knowledge strategically to disrupt the students’ own self-certainty. Knowledge here does not proclaim to be universal; instead, it only reminds the student that the master’s discourse cannot make a claim to universality in the way that was previously taken for granted.

The present volume arose out of a very successful conference held in June of 2016, “Decolonizing Critical Animal Studies, Cripping Critical Animal Studies.” The conference in itself was an overdue offering within the circuit of animal studies conferences that had been occurring over the last decade, many of which had scarcely or not adequately addressed issues relating to race and legacies of colonialism. The 2016 conference provided some highly powerful provocations to the field, some of which I suspect challenged the self-certainty of many involved, including myself. As such this volume is timely. However, this volume was never intended as a complete or final statement on anti-colonial perspectives in CAS, nor should it be regarded as such. Instead, in line with Spivak’s commentary above, this volume might be understood as offering a strategic intervention that might provoke us to think critically about Critical Animal Studies; perhaps, as such, to actually think “critically” about animals. First, the volume provides us some insight into the functioning of the “straight, white, Judeo-Christian, heterosexual man of property as the ethical universal” within the field of animal studies, whether this is in the form of resistive ontologies, such as those discussed by Vanessa Watts, or legal analysis that challenges the presumed authority of the Global North in driving improvements in animal welfare and rights (see Maneesha Deckha). Secondly, the volume shows us the way that colonial violence towards humans interconnects with violence towards animals through colonial logics, shaping policies of annihilation (see Fiona Probyn Rapsey) and incarceration (see Kelly Struthers Montford). Finally, and importantly, this volume provides an opening to a continuing conversation on strategies of decolonization and their relationship to social movements that organize around animals. In part, these openings are relevant for the material alliances that will be required to effect decolonialization: “this kind of work should be a collective enterprise.” This will require a careful assessment of how the political terrain of existing contestation is constructed, and care in thinking about strategy and alliances (see for example Darren Chang).

By necessity such a politics requires an evolving commitment to self-determination in guiding futures and actions. The opposite of coercion—that wrought by material or symbolic violence—is the freedom to collectively determine one’s own pathway and conditions of flourishing. It is on the latter point that Margret Robinson (this volume) offers a remarkable vision for a future of flourishing, tying Indigenous sovereignty with plant-based diets and ethics:

At stake in the creation of an Indigenous veganism is the authority of Aboriginal people, especially women, to determine cultural authenticity for ourselves. Dominant white discourse portrays our cultures as embedded in the pre-colonial past. This perspective must be replaced with the recognition that Aboriginal cultures are living traditions, responsive to changing social and environmental circumstances.

This sort of vision helps me make sense of Spivak’s desire for the decolonial lesson to be “palliative rather than destructive.” Robinson here announces the demise of settler project, while simultaneously declaring a different vision for flourishing, one which might connect together Indigenous self-determination and animal flourishing. The place of veganism here is important in so far as Robinson explicitly does not embrace imperatives to plant-based diets driven by white vegan cultures, but instead unsettles the master narrative by asking how veganism might reaffirm self-determination, and with this offer a vision for non-human flourishing. Here, decolonization is necessarily a collective enterprise—one driven and articulated by those who experience the violence of colonialism. With reference to Māori communities and the development of plant-based ethics and lifestyles, Kirsty Dunn has recently observed:

It is vital, though, in this context, that any kōrero regarding veganism, plantbased kai or ‘kaimangatanga’ and any challenges or conflicts that arise with regards to customary and contemporary practices involving nonhuman animals, must be conducted by and within Māori communities. Otherwise, the imposition of a vegan ethics without the knowledge, understanding, or respect Māori experiences, narratives, concepts, and knowledges, can only repeat the role of yet another colonial project.[17]

I don’t at all intend to privilege veganism as a practice or strategy in this discussion: the strategies deployed by communities resisting legacies of, and continuing realities of, colonialism must be determined by those communities themselves within the context of a real political terrain. However, I want to highlight the way that any number of pro-animal strategies, created by those who resist colonial power, might disorient the master narratives of settler logics and provide a mechanism “by which collective power and community may be built.”[18] In this sense, many who resist colonialism are also actively resisting industrial animal agriculture;[19] the lesson for animal studies, including by necessity those who want to build a “critical” voice, is to pay attention: to know the limits of our power; understand the specifics of our history and its relation with others; avoid believing we are the movement or can control who comprises the collective project; and remain alive to those outside of our experience can teach us about the non-universality of “the story of the straight, white, Judeo-Christian, heterosexual man of property.”

This collection overall has prompted me to think again about what it means to affect a “critical” perspective on animals. What does it mean to actually be critical in our viewpoint; that is to look at the world in ways that do not simply reproduce the logics of domination that we have been forced upon us? And what does this mean for “critical” animal studies? I hope this volume helps to move these considerations forward.

I would add that there are Indigenous veganisms too, and that kaimangatanga is but one iteration of these, with its own variations or branches. Some might even choose to refrain from using the ‘vegan’ label entirely: this is my reason for refraining from presenting ‘veganism’ and ‘kaimangatanga’ as simple equivalents. Whilst some may see the word, ‘kaimangatanga’, for example, as a translation of the word ‘veganism’ or ‘vegetarianism’, others, including myself, assert that kaimangatanga stands on its own as a decolonial food ethic. Whilst there will indeed be similarities between veganism and kaimangatanga, it is my view that the latter term can accommodate a more nuanced approach towards kai-related practices and the creation and preservation of taonga, and one that can adapt and change where needed. That some of us may choose to name this way of being and relating to the world in our own language makes it, for me, a powerfully decolonial act: an act of tino rangatiratanga. This also helps us to kōrero with others in our own whānau, hapū, iwi, and in our own homes, communities, and wharekai, and to continue forging our own responses to the exploitation of animals and the environment, and the ramifications of intensive animal agriculture in Aotearoa and beyond.

(56–7)

To adopt a form of veganism – a plant-based lifestyle and ethics – that acknowledges, is based upon, and celebrates Te Ao Māori, is a break from the dominant and from the status quo and but also an act of decolonialism. It is a way to reclaim sovereignty and exercise individual choice. And finally, it is a means by which collective power and community may be built; this is evident in the existence of online forums and comment threads on Māori-based vegan and plant-based social media accounts.

The resurgence of Indigenous movements is predicated not only on the recognition of Indigenous self-determination. At a more fundamental level, it calls for the restoration of the relationship between human beings and the lifeworld, for a profound recognition of our deep interconnectedness across all species and for the recognition of the sacred in all things. Resilience, on this account, is the stand by Indigenous peoples who put their bodies on the line to protect the rights of nature. Resilience is the re-enacting of deep sacred connection. Looking towards an uncertain and increasingly problematic future, it is perhaps our best hope for survival.

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Acknowledgements

This volume emerged from a conference that the co-editors organized in June of 2016, “Decolonizing Critical Animal Studies, Cripping Critical Animal Studies.” A pendant volume in Critical Animal Studies, including some of the proceedings from the conference with crip theory and critical disability studies themes, will be published separately. We would like to thank all of the participants, student helpers, and audience members who made this conference such an overwhelming success. We would also like to express our gratitude to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta, the Kule Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Alberta, and the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta, whose financial support made the conference possible. Billy-Ray Belcourt’s contribution to this volume is an expanded and revised version of an article that was originally published in Societies. Margaret Robinson’s chapter was originally published in the Canadian Journal of Native Studies. Fiona Probyn-Rapsey’s chapter was first published in the Animal Studies Journal. Kathryn Gillespie’s chapter is reprinted from Antipode. We thank each of these journals for permission to reproduce these articles.

We would also like to thank Dr Eloy LaBrada for their careful reading and feedback on the entirety of this text. Tessa Wotherspoon also provided research support for which we are grateful.

Colonialism and animality: An introduction

Kelly Struthers Montford and Chloë Taylor

In 2015 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada delivered its final reports and 94 Calls to Action. The TRC was meant to document, pay witness to, and create an official record of Canada’s use of residential schools which operated for more than 100 years and targeted multiple generations of Indigenous persons with the expressed purpose of cultural assimilation. With the goal of “civilizing” Indigenous children, residents were prohibited from speaking their native languages, were malnourished, used as experimental bodies, and experienced normalized emotional, physical, and sexual violence.[20] Many residents did not survive these schools. The TRC, amongst others, has referred to residential schooling as “cultural genocide”:

Cultural genocide is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group. States that engage in cultural genocide set out to destroy the political and social institutions of the targeted group. Land is seized, and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated and destroyed. And, most significantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next.[21]

Residential schools are but one manifestation of settler colonialism’s genocidal drive that has targeted both humans and non-human others.

Other mechanisms include the Indian Act, the 60s scoop, the disproportionate and racialized apprehension of Indigenous children by child welfare agencies, lack of clean drinking water and sanitary housing conditions on reserves, the mass imprisonment of Indigenous persons, the fur trade upon which imperial wealth was amassed and consolidated, and animal agriculture that contributed to the institution of settler lifeways and the privatization of land—all of which support the Canadian state’s singularity of rule and control of territory through the suppression of Indigenous persons and self-governance.[22] The report of the National Inquiry in Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, released in 2019,[23] also included a supplementary report devoted to a legal analysis of the concept of “genocide” wherein the Inquiry concluded that the evidence and testimony collected through its process “provide[s] serious reasons to believe that Canada’s past and current policies, omissions, and actions towards First Nations Peoples, Inuit and Métis amount to genocide, in breach of Canada’s international obligations, triggering its responsibility under international law.”[24]

Paradoxically, Canada, a state charged with genocide, is also officially in a time of reconciliation, where the federal government has committed to implementing the TRC’s Calls to Action, to providing funding to support the rebuilding of First Nations, and implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.[25] Until 2016 Canada was one of four original objectors to the declaration, along with Australia, the United States, and New Zealand—each of which have reversed their position. The TRC imagines reconciliation as the abandonment of “the paternalistic and racist foundations” that have structured settler colonialism in order to go forward with nation-to-nation relationship premised on “mutual respect.” Ultimately, the TRC positions responsibility squarely upon the Canadian state and its citizens that will require a wholesale shift in relations: “Reconciliation is not an Aboriginal problem; it is a Canadian one. Virtually all aspects of Canadian society may need to be reconsidered.”[26] Although the current volume is not restricted to the Canadian context or even to settler colonialism in North America, it is in taking seriously this responsibility to reconsider the societies in which we live that this volume is premised. Reconciliation requires accounting for the past, coming to terms with the causes of and acknowledging the harm that has occurred, and a commitment to change future behaviours and relations.[27]

In fact, Maneesha Deckha has recently argued that reconciliation cannot be accomplished through a singular focus on humans, because colonialism has attempted to remake not only intra-human relationships but targeted relationships that are intertwined and play out across territory, animals, and humans.[28] By examining Indigenous Legal Orders—which position animals as persons in the sense that they are subjects, have consciousness, have their own social and familial communities, and exist for themselves rather than as property, objects, and resources—Deckha shows that reconciliation itself will have to be an inter-species process to advance decolonial efforts. Because many Indigenous worldviews often share a focus on the interconnectedness of humans, animals, and the environment, and do not draw sharp distinctions between humans, animals, and territory, the property status of animals under our current laws will impede reconciliatory initiatives in multiple registers. As Deckha writes, “If Indigenous peoples’ subjectivities are enmeshed with animal identities, bodies, and beings, then a legal order that draws a sharp and diametrically different distinction as Canadian state laws do, arguably eclipse the personhood of Indigenous peoples themselves.”[29] Given how colonialism and other projects of white supremacy have relied on the denigrated status of the animal to justify the subjugation of non-white humans and non-humans, an inter-species and more-than-human approach to decolonization is all the more urgent.

This volume is meant as a beginning, rooted in a commitment to taking seriously human-animal relations in contexts of colonialism. The insights from the TRC are not constrained to the Canadian context, but are instructive for thinking through past and ongoing projects of empire, imperialism, and colonialism that structure how we conceptualize humanity, animality, and territory. As Billy-Ray Belcourt argues, reconciliation and decolonization are not mutually exclusive. Rather, we need to be vigilant as to how claims of engaging in reconciliation can be used to support ongoing settler projects that attach themselves to, and structure our institutions and dominant practices.[30] Importantly, tension exists between how reconciliation is viewed, with the Canadian state seemingly believing that it requires Indigenous peoples to accept the singularity of colonial rule, whereas Indigenous persons understand it as “an opportunity to affirm their sovereignty and return to the ‘partnership’ ambitions they held after Confederation.”[31] This volume supports and aims to contribute to the latter understanding of reconciliation as decolonial, in that it interrogates the taken-for-grantedness of colonial states and offers alternative ways of relating at the intersections of animality and colonialism—relations that national inquiries such as the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996) and the TRC have shown to be profoundly altered as a driver and consequence of colonialism.[32]

The use of animals and the institution of speciesism have been integral to colonization, with humans continuing to deploy animals to achieve colonial ends. Historians have examined how settlers in North America and Australia used animals imported from Europe in their projects of conquest.[33] Some settlers could not build enclosures fast enough to contain their farmed animals, and roaming farm animals often determined the settlers’ next town. Under English law farmed animals grazing on territory provided the legal grounds for colonists to lay property rights as this constituted “productive use.”[34]

The claim that Indigenous persons were closer to animals than to white European men also functioned to cast them without culture and as inferior persons requiring civilization, justifying colonial projects. Indigenous people in North America were, for example, compared to wolves because they purportedly lived in forests and their relations were unmediated by legal property statues. Other categories of animals, such as the domesticated dog, were used to subdue those likened to wolves. Political theorist Claire Jean Kim’s research shows that influential religious leaders advised governors to use dogs to pursue Native Americans as “they act like wolves and are to be dealt with as wolves.”[35] The use of non-consenting animals and the trope of animality in projects of white supremacy have been ubiquitous. Slave owners weaponized dogs to instil terror and to “hunt” escaped slaves, and military and police regimes continue to rely on horses and dogs to suppress crowds, protests, and individuals—often Indigenous and persons of colour who threaten colonial state order.

State service animals are used as racialized weapons and are themselves exploited and killed in the “line of duty.” Yet this is duty in the service of white supremacy to which they cannot consent. Police dogs and military animals are said to have “sacrificed” their lives to the country and may be bestowed the honorary status of police officers and military heroes. In Canada, the killing of Quanto, a police dog stabbed to death by a man fleeing arrest, not only led to the incarceration in solitary confinement of an Indigenous man, Paul Joseph Vukmanich, but catalysed the Justice for Animals in Service Act, which became law on June 23, 2015.[36] The stated purpose of this Act is to “to ensure that offenders who harm those animals or assault peace officers are held fully accountable.”[37] Under this Act, those found guilty of killing law enforcement, military, or service animals carry a mandatory minimum sentence of six months. As such the killing of animals mobilized by institutions of colonialism/Indigenous suppression is an offense under the Criminal Code of Canada, even while police officers routinely kill and sexually assault persons of colour without legal or professional repercussion, animals continued to be farmed and killed for food, animals are cut open and tortured in military medical training exercises, and animals are routinely poisoned and destroyed in medical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetics testing facilities with no consequences.

While some theorists have turned to non-Western and Indigenous cultures for examples of less or non-speciesist worldviews, the relationship between anti-colonial politics and animal activism has been fraught.[38] Single-issue animal activist campaigns have often functioned to justify racism, xenophobia, and exclusion, with, to adapt Gayatri Spivak’s phrase, white humans saving animals from brown humans. For instance, the racialized practices of eating shark fins and dog meat have been marked as cruel and backward, in contrast with dominant constructions of (equally animal-based or even more carnist) Western diets as sophisticated and humane. Indigenous rights activists and animal rights activists have clashed over the issue of hunting charismatic animals such as whales and seals, often eclipsing more widespread forms of animal, colonial, and racial oppression in Western, settler societies. Ecofeminist approaches to animal ethics have been riven over the issue of Indigenous hunting; some ecofeminists have expressed dismissive views of the spiritual significance of hunting for Indigenous people[39] or have charged Indigenous people with cultural imperialism towards the animals they hunt,[40] while others, such as Val Plumwood, Deanne Curtin, and Karen Warren, have argued for contextual rather than universalizing forms of ethical vegetarianism.[41]

While these debates over hunting have focused on cultural practices of meat-eating, ecofeminist Greta Gaard and Critical Animal Studies scholar Vasile Stǎnescu have recently offered complex studies of dairy production, dairy promotion, and milk consumption at the intersections of feminism, postcolonial theory, and posthumanism.[42] In “Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies,” Gaard shows that milk—beginning with breastmilk—is a feminist issue, and, given the ways that environmental toxins are biomagnified in human and other animals’ breastmilk, milk is an ecofeminist issue in particular. Because female non-human animals are “milked”—which, as Gaard notes, in vernacular English means “to take for everything you can get”[43]—for human consumption, milk is also a Critical Animal Studies issue, and a feminist Critical Animal Studies issue specifically. Milk is moreover a postcolonial issue because its consumption as a “pure,” “white” beverage has long been taken as a cause of European racial superiority, with people of colour purportedly being weaker and less virile because many are lactose-intolerant. Milk is also a postcolonial issue because Indigenous people have been robbed of their lands so that white settlers could graze dairy cows; because environmental pollutants from this dairy industry have harmed Indigenous people and people of colour in exacerbated, environmentally racist ways; and because food colonialism and the exportation of Western dietary norms have resulted in exponential and ecologically disastrous increases in dairy consumption in countries such as China and India.[44] For reasons such as these, Gaard demonstrates that milk must be considered at the intersections of posthumanism, feminism, and postcolonial studies, and her article begins to explore this intersectional field.

For his part, in “‘White Power Milk’: Milk, Dietary Racism, and the ‘Alt Right’,”[45] Stǎnescu examines some of the ways that milk, like Ivory soap, has been taken as a symbol of racial purity. In particular, Stǎnescu describes recent ways in which male white supremacist members of the extreme right have taken up milk consumption and lactose-tolerance as an indicator of racial superiority and white masculinity in their social media posts. In so doing, he tracks how this phenomenon perpetuates intersecting 19th- and 20th-century histories of colonialism, xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiments, sexism and animal oppression. Perhaps most troublingly, Stǎnescu shows that this ongoing history of gender-inflected dietary racism is not only prevalent in the social media of the extreme right, but has had uptake in mainstream media and academic scholarship through the 20th century until today.

Other decolonial and postcolonial scholars have also demonstrated the interconnections between animal oppression, imperialism, and settler colonialism, and have argued for the need to centre race in Critical Animal Studies. Legal scholar Maneesha Deckha, for instance, has highlighted the ways that imperialism is justified through animalizations of racial others and condemnations of the ways colonized others treat animals, even while imperial identities are constituted through the consumption of animal bodies.[46] Jacqueline Dalziell and Dinesh Wadiwel’s article, “Live Exports, Animal Advocacy, Race and ‘Animal Nationalism’,”[47] interrogates the success of animal advocacy in cases where such advocacy taps into pre-existing perceptions of white superiority, taking the controversy over and legislative responses to live animal transport from Australia to Indonesia as their case study. Political theorist Claire Jean Kim has provided detailed examinations of the intersection of race and species in disputes over how immigrants of colour, racialized minorities, and Native people use animals in their cultural traditions, focusing on the live animal markets in San Francisco’s Chinatown, whale hunting by Indigenous peoples, and anti-Black racism in animal advocacy campaigns against dog fighting.[48]

The chapters in Section I, “Tensions and Alliances between Animal and Decolonial Activisms,” forefront these conversations. Together, Chapters 1–3 show the need for further dialogue and solidarity between decolonial and Critical Animal Studies scholars and activists. In Chapter 1, “An Indigenous Critique of Critical Animal Studies,” Cree scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt revisits his influential article, “Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects,” arguing that speciesism and animal oppression are made possible in settler colonial contexts through the prior and ongoing dispossession and erasure of Indigenous people from the lands on which animals are now domesticated and exploited. Belcourt critiques the ways that Critical Animal Studies typically assume and operate within the “givenness” of a settler colonial state, and suggests that Critical Animal Studies should centre an analysis of Indigeneity and call for the repatriation of Indigenous lands. In Chapter 2, “Tensions in Contemporary Indigenous and Animal Advocacy Struggles: The Commercial Seal Hunt as a Case Study,” Darren Chang argues that despite conflict between multiple groups about the Canadian commercial seal hunt, foundational attention to colonial and racial capitalist relations, themselves embedded in animal exploitation, must be meaningfully thought together and addressed if we are to have any hope of addressing systems destroying wildlife. In Chapter 3, we reproduce Claire Jean Kim’s “Makah Whaling and the (Non) Ecological Indian,” first published in her important monograph, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age.[49] In this chapter, Kim analyses disputes about the Makah’s decision to resume whaling after a multi-decade hiatus. Whereas animal advocates seeking to prevent the hunt relied on ecological and ethical arguments, some members of the Makah Indian nation claimed that the hunt was fundamental to their culture, and that they were once again the target of cultural imperialism. Providing a case study on single-issue versus multi-issue advocacy, Kim argues that a politics of truly considering the validity of another group’s claims would provide the conditions to recognize and attend to each other’s needs, be that of tribal justice, non-Western ontologies of life, environmental preservation, or animal protection.

Indigenous people are both idealized as living in harmony with nature and other animals and simultaneously constructed as having static cultures entirely dependent on the killing of animals. The first view romanticizes what Claire Jean Kim calls “the ecological Indian,” failing to recognize differences between diverse Indigenous cultures, and the ways that interactions with settler colonialism have transformed these manifold cultures. The second view is encapsulated by Indigenous historian Rita Laws (Choctaw Nation), who writes ironically of “How well we know the stereotype of the rugged Plains Indian: killer of buffalo, dressed in quill-decorated buckskin, elaborately feathered headdress, and leather moccasins, living in an animal-skin teepee, master of the dog and horse, and stranger to vegetables.”[50] Like the first view, the stereotype of the Indigenous hunter also fails to recognize the diversity of Indigenous cultures and transformations in these cultures over time. For instance, as Laws demonstrates, the “buffalo-as-lifestyle phenomenon” was “a direct result of European influence,” and was “limited almost exclusively to the Apaches, flourish[ing] no more than a couple hundred years.”[51] As Native Studies scholar Nathalie Kermoal has moreover argued, the focus on the Indigenous hunter privileges men’s contributions to traditional Indigenous foodways, whereas women’s gathering activities in fact provided the mainstay of many Indigenous peoples’ diets and ensured their survival through the winter months.[52] Indeed, many Indigenous cultures were characterized primarily by plant-based diets and complexly critical attitudes towards meat-eating prior to contact with Europeans.[53] For these reasons, some Indigenous activists urge a return to a plant-based diet as a form of decolonization.[54] Significantly, similar arguments have recently been advanced by Black feminist vegans and other vegans of colour,[55] indicating a growing movement challenging the paradoxical stereotype of veganism as elite and white.

Regardless of whether Indigenous people come from traditional hunter-gatherer societies or from societies with traditionally plant-based diets, it should go without saying that is entirely possible for Indigenous people to be critical of contemporary meat-production, industrialized animal agriculture, and the killing of animals in times and contexts where such violence and death are unnecessary and environmentally unsustainable. In a series of articles, Mi’kmaq scholar Margaret Robinson has argued that although the traditional diet of the Mi’kmaq was heavily based on animal foods, given the view of human-animal relations as one of siblinghood that is evident in Mi’kmaq legends, veganism is more consistent with Mi’kmaq values than meat-eating in most contemporary contexts.[56] In Mi’kmaq legends, animals sacrificed their lives to humans who treated them respectfully, and humans took those lives due exclusively to necessity. Today, when many Indigenous people live in locations where plant-based foods are available year-round, and where animal deaths do not occur in the respectful and limited manner that characterized traditional Mi’kmaq hunting, Robinson argues that meat-eating violates core Mi’kmaq values.[57] According to Robinson, veganism is in fact a way to reject the speciesism of settler colonialism which is alien to Mi’kmaq values, and is hence a way to reclaim Indigeneity, to redefine Indigenous tradition and authenticity against settler stereotypes, and to live in greater harmony with nature. For her part, Ojibway nation (Catfish clan) author and artist Linda Fisher also challenges the view of Indigenous cultures as static, and adds that Indigenous peoples are not entirely “defined” by their heritages. In “Freeing Feathered Spirits,” Fisher provides an internal critique of the ongoing use of leather, fur, quills, and feathers in Indigenous ceremonies.[58]

The chapters in Section II, “Revisiting the Stereotypes of Indigenous Peoples’ Relationships with Animals,” contribute to these conversations and challenges. Chapter 4, “Veganism and Mi’kmaq Legends,” is a reproduction of one of Margaret Robinson articles on Indigeneity and contemporary food politics. In this chapter, Robinson provides an ecofeminist argument for an Indigenous veganism. Against the perception of veganism as white and colonial, Robinson looks to Mi’kmaq legends in which humans and animals possess a shared personhood in order to account for a veganism that is “ethically, spiritually and culturally compatible with our indigeneity.” Indeed, in the contemporary colonial context of what is called Canada, Robinson argues that “Meat, as a symbol of patriarchy shared with colonizing forces, arguably binds us with white colonial culture to a greater degree than practices such as veganism, which… is far from hegemonic.” In Chapter 5, “Growling Ontologies: Indigeneity, Becoming-Souls and Settler Colonial Inaccessibility,” Mohawk (Bear Clan, Six Nations) and Anishinaabe scholar Vanessa Watts juxtapose and interrogate Indigenous and Western post-structuralist ontologies of humans and animals. Taking up the fluid, and impossible to fix-in-time nature of Indigenous cosmologies, Watts asks what it means to be always becoming bear, human, animal, and broadly souls. Rather than being constrained within the violence of the Western human/animal dualism, Watts suggests a decolonial ethos rooted in and obligated to cosmologies of animality. Finally, Chapter 6 is a co-authored chapter by the editors of this volume, titled “Beyond Edibility: Towards a Nonspeciesist, Decolonized Food Ontology.” In this chapter, we challenge ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood’s influential argument that “ontological vegetarianism” is necessarily “racist” towards Indigenous peoples.[59] On the contrary, we show that ontology and contextualism need not be mutually exclusive concepts. Instead, ontology, including ontologies of life and food, is inherently political and thus contextual. By drawing on archival documents we show that in Canada and the United States, our prevailing ontologies of animals and food are deliberate colonial imports that have been integral to settler land acquisition. With this in mind, we argue for a contextual vegan food ontology that resists property relations and the cogent desubjectification of animality inherent in practices of animal agriculture.

Human exceptionalism has been integral to Western settler colonial projects. Cogent with a racialized, gendered, and speciesist hierarchy of life has been the belief that culture is unique to (typically) white men. Dualisms such as nature/culture, body/mind, female/male, and animal/human have been used to mark those labelled as closer to nature, such as racialized persons, women, and animals, as less human and therefore a-cultural non-agentic non-subjects. The cultural position of animals has also been used as a marker of civility. Reverence, respect, and spiritual communion with animals and nature were used by colonists as evidence of the savagery of Indigenous peoples—a position used to justify the settler project.[60] While the role of animals and animal symbolism to human culture has received sustained academic attention,[61] a context such as ours dominated by “violent hierarchies”[62] of life has meant that little attention has been paid to non-human life worlds and cultures.

Contributing to these conversations, Section III, “Cultural Perspectives,” provides three original chapters by feminist Critical Animal Studies scholars exploring the intersection of animals and culture. In Chapter 7, “He(a)rd: Animal Cultures and Postcolonial Politics,” Lauren Corman argues that despite the forceful criticism levied by postcolonial scholars against imperial ways of knowing, being, and relating, most approaches remain humanist and thus colonial. In a move to resist colonial humanism, Corman urges us not only to account for the impact of colonialism on Indigenous human cultures, but to ask after its effects on animal cultures. By drawing on multi-disciplinary scholarship on animal cultures and societies, Corman demonstrates the interplay between colonialism and humanity’s supposed monopoly on culture. In so doing, Corman urges us to consider our responsibilities to the more-than-human when undertaking postcolonial work. In Chapter 8, “Dingoes and Dog Whistling: A Cultural Politics of Race and Species in Australia,” Fiona Probyn-Rapsey interrogates the supposed purity of the taxonomic categorization of Australian dingoes by situating this in broader discourses of racial purity that have characterized colonial genocide and white supremacy. Coming to the fore after decades of panic is a mounting concern over the extinction of the dingo—extinction that is not framed as their elimination, but rather their “mixing” with domestic dogs. These “queer” relationships between dogs and dingoes, as Probyn-Rapsey terms them, not only point to the rich social and cultural lives of canines, but resist the assumed fixity of colonial taxonomization. Rather than dog-dingo hybridity remaining a symptomatic, but also material, locus of (human) colonial genocide, racist anxiety, and projection, Probyn-Rapsey asks us to consider the potential of thinking race and species together in a manner than resists colonial divisions of life. Finally, in Chapter 9, “Haunting Pigs, Swimming Jaguars: Mourning, Animals and Ayahuasca,” Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond moves through personal and political grief as experienced subconsciously, consciously, and in altered states of consciousness. Demonstrating the inextricably of colonial, nation-state, and globalization politics, Isfahani-Hammond presents us with visceral experiences of racialized social death, animal death, and ethical harm. While the trauma and grief of harm against animals is socially and politically marginalized, Isfahani-Hammond contends that we cannot truly escape the animal transport truck nor the slaughterhouse. Instead, we remain personally and politically haunted by the animals upon whom our worlds are premised.

Animal subjugation in colonial contexts is rendered possible and normative through imported imperial legal structures. Law (and the absence of its rule, such as in protection for farmed animals and laboratory animals) shapes and regulates animal life in domestic, agricultural, research, and entertainment contexts. It also interacts with ontology and subjectivity, with human superiority and animals as property assumed as natural accounts of beingness. As such, law infiltrates our extralegal realms to shape how and whom we eat, who shares our homes with us, who is categorized as enough like humans to have pharmaceuticals and cosmetics tested on, but who yet remain legally killable, and who can remain incarcerated for entertainment or other purposes. While Western legal structures privatize animals, territory, and relationships, many see legal change as an avenue to improve the lives of animals whose exploitation is bound up in colonial ontologies.

The chapters in Section IV, “Colonialism, Animals, and the Law,” contribute to the examinations of these themes. In Chapter 10, “Constitutional Protections for Animals: A Comparative Animal-Centred and Postcolonial Reading,” postcolonial feminist theorist and animal law scholar Maneesha Deckha examines constitutional protections in Sweden, Germany, Brazil, and India which provide a contrast to the property status of animals in Canadian and US law. While these legal challenges have culminated, to varying degrees, in findings that animals are different from objects and have personhood and dignity, these findings have largely been interpreted in anthropocentric manners and have affected little practical change for animals. By considering Western and non-Western legal contexts, Deckha resists the imperialism of Eurocentric animal advocacy which often demonizes non-Western human-animal relations as uncivilized and barbaric. Deckha then asks us to consider how “progress” in animal law can be bound up in civilizing logics, while at the same time suggesting legal strategies that do not seek to uphold colonial versions of humanity, and which might achieve more practical success in resisting their status of property. In Chapter 11, “Placing Angola: Racialization, Anthropocentrism, and Settler Colonialism at the Louisiana State Penitentiary’s Angola Rodeo,” Kathryn Gillespie mobilizes empirical research on the Angola penitentiary rodeo to consider the overlapping nexus of racial capitalism, chattel slavery, settler colonialism, mass incarceration, and speciesism. Inasmuch as Angola penitentiary now exists on a former site of plantation slavery, Gillespie demonstrates the enduring legacies of colonial and racial power that not only come together in racialized mass incarceration, but through the multiple modes of subjugation and domination inherent in the spectacle of the Angola rodeo. Ultimately Gillespie shows that the analytic of dehumanization is insufficient for addressing forms of racialized and specied injustice. Instead, a decolonial and thus de-anthropocentric approach to justice is required. Finally, in Chapter 12, “Towards a Theory of Multi-Species Carcerality,” Kelly Struthers Montford uses the case of prison-based animal agriculture in the colonial context of Canada to propose four symptoms of multi-species carcerality: enclosure, de-animalization, exploited labour, and ontological and ecological toxicity. By tracing the explicitly colonial logics structuring the institutions of the prison and the animal farm in Canada at the turn of the 20th century, Struthers Montford shows that colonial tactics of territorialization, property relationships to life, and the desubjectification of animality continue to be presented as a benevolent initiative to turn prisoners into proper citizens. The toxicity of prison-based agriculture is then not contained behind prison walls but transposes geographic boundaries to sustain settler colonial aims.

Acknowledgements

Margaret Robinson’s chapter was originally published in the Canadian Journal of Native Studies. Fiona Probyn-Rapsey’s chapter was first published in the Animal Studies Journal. Kathryn Gillespie’s chapter is reprinted from Antipode. We thank each of these journals for permission to reproduce these articles.

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Lawrence, Bonita. “Gender, Race, and the Regulation of Native Identity in Canada and the United States: An Overview.” Hypatia 18, no. 2 (2003): 3–31.

Laws, Rita. “History of Vegetarianism – Native Americans and Vegetarianism.” Vegetarian Journal, 1994. https://ivu.org/history/native_americans.html.

Mosby, Ian. “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952.” Histoire Sociale/Social History 46, no. 1 (2013): 145–172.

National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. “A Legal Analysis of Genocide,” 2019. www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Supplementary-Report_Genocide.pdf.

———. “Reclaiming Power and Place: Executive Summary of the Final Report,” 2019. http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/201/301/weekly_acquisitions_list-ef/2019/19-23/publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2019/bcp-pco/CP32-163-2-3-2019-eng.pdf.

Nichols, Robert. “The Colonialism of Incarceration.” Radical Philosophy Review 17, no. 2 (2014): 435–455.

Peña-Guzmán, David M. “Anti-Colonial Food Politics: A Case Study in Action from Mexico – Faunalytics.” Faunalytics (blog), October 24, 2018. https://faunalytics.org/anti-colonial-food-politics-a-case-study-in-action-from-mexico/.

Plumwood, Val. “Integrating Ethical Frameworks for Animals, Humans, and Nature: A Critical Feminist Eco-Socialist Analysis.” Ethics & the Environment 5, no. 2 (2000): 285–322.

Robinson, Margaret. “Veganism and Mi’kmaq Legends.” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 33, no. 1 (2013): 189–196.

———. “Animal Personhood in Mi’kmaq Perspective.” Societies 4, no. 4 (December 3, 2014): 672–688. doi:10.3390/soc4040672.

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Shukin, Nicole. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Stănescu, Vasile. “‘White Power Milk’: Milk, Dietary Racism, and the ‘Alt-Right’.” Animal Studies Journal 7, no. 2 (2018): 102–128.

Struthers Montford, Kelly. “Land, Agriculture, and the Carceral: The Territorializing Function of Penitentiary Farms.” Radical Philosophy Review, no. online first (2019). doi:10.5840/radphilrev20192494.

Struthers Montford, Kelly, and Dawn Moore. “The Prison as Reserve: Governmentality, Phenomenology, and Indigenizing the Prison (Studies).” New Criminal Law Review: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal 21, no. 4 (November 1, 2018): 640–663. doi:10.1525/nclr.2018.21.4.640.

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Section I. Tensions and alliances between animal and decolonial activisms

1 An Indigenous critique of Critical Animal Studies

Billy-Ray Belcourt

Preface (2018)

I am writing on the occasion of the republication of my 2015 essay “Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects: (Re)Locating Animality in Decolonial Thought.”[63] This is something of a preface to a slightly altered version of the essay, edited for clarity of thought, word choice, and syntax. By far my most debated piece of academic writing, “Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects,” was a part of a chorus of meta-critiques of the still-nascent field of Critical Animal Studies (CAS) that had at its core a hermeneutics of suspicion. This is to say that racialized scholars in particular, notably Che Gossett in a Verso Books’ essay,[64] saw and see still the uneven circuits of affective investment that moved through the field and out into the world. This had and has to do minimally with (1) the disappearing of race as a key analytic used to understand the machinations of speciesism and anthropocentrism, (2) a non-engagement with strains of thought in Native and Black studies concerned with earthly flourishing and non-human ontologies; and (3) a trend of making recourse to settler-colonial political institutions to dream up new modalities of animal life as though they were sites of ethical purity. The essay was met predominately with two responses: (1) gratitude for my diagnosis of the above-mentioned lacunas at the time of writing; and (2) doubt that I could make such a generalized argument about a field teeming with a host of scholars from various countries that sees itself as invested in radical activist projects. I, of course, agree still with the provocations I offered up in 2015, but I will say that it was not my intention to hand down a final verdict about CAS that all should subscribe to, but instead to agitate and pressurize those who write in the direction of animal freedom. It was and is a call to tend to the incommensurabilities and interconnectedness of Black, brown, and animal life. Because of the metaphysical closeness of race and animality, the ongoing plundering of Indigenous land in settler states around the globe, and the attendant destruction of the earth (among other issues), there is a social stake to doing the work of CAS. My essay then and now was and is a reminder of what is at stake.

Introduction

It is my contention that Critical Animal Studies (CAS) and mainstream animal activists have generally failed to center an analysis of settler colonialism and therefore operate within “the givenness of the white-supremacist, settler state.”[65] This is a theoretical absence with respect to the coloniality of the present insofar as indigeneity is made invisible in the articulation of an anti-speciesist mode of thinking about ethics and earthly life. Our disappearance from this discipline matters because it emblazons a conceptual terrain that mimics the logics of settler colonialism.

Perhaps in an effort to repair this analytic blind spot, a number of CAS scholars have made use of a framework of “total liberation,” framing decolonization, for example, as a “responsibility for all who fight for social justice”; this is done, however, in a way that neither attends to the large body of writing in Indigenous studies about other-than-human life nor calls for both the abolition of the settler state and a repatriation of land to Indigenous communities.[66] A theory of decolonization that is not accountable to Indigenous politics erases the referent—Indigenous peoples—that vitalizes the concept to begin with. To do this is to whitewash decolonization and thus to place settlers at the core of a social justice project that is against the position of the settler as the a priori subject of the world. What is negated then is that settler-colonial life-ways are already Indigenous death-ways.

For instance, in Defining Critical Animal Studies, Anthony J. Nocella II et al. argue that CAS must advance “a holistic understanding of the commonality of oppressions… in favor of decentralizing and democratizing society at all levels and on a global basis.”[67] This rendering of “oppressions” as commensurable, however, obfuscates the singularity of settler colonialism insofar as its irreducible elements are the elimination of Indigenous peoples, the theft of land, and the normalization of settler ways of being. “Decolonization wants something different than [other] forms of justice” and is far too often subsumed into “other civil and human-rights based social justice projects.”[68] What is posited in this formulation of decolonization is a future in which the settler state can be more democratic or less oppressive, which is untenable. Decolonization is not about the “self-transformation” of the settler;[69] it is not a politics of allyship, nor is it “a generic term for struggles against oppressive conditions.”[70]

In their critique of the ways in which academics misapply decolonization, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang argue that internal colonialism requires “the biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora, and fauna within the ‘domestic’ borders of the imperial nation.”[71] Notably, Tuck and Yang do not take up the question of anthropocentrism, which is what I do here. I argue that neither the abolition of speciesism nor the production of more ethical human-animal relationalities can occur in at least the North American context without the end of settler colonialism. To additionally understand animal life as a vehicle for settler-colonial continuity, I introduce anthropocentrism as one of the key logics of white supremacy. I then think with the politics of animal recognition proposed by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka in Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights to scrutinize the use of settler-colonial political institutions to advance animal freedom. A presupposition here is that Zoopolis is representative of a neoliberal trend in CAS in which animality is conceivable only through settler epistemologies. I conclude with a brief consideration of how Indigenous cosmologies might give glimpses to a more radical alternative to normative ways of thinking about the politics of animals.

Speciesism in this country follows from the historic and ongoing elimination of Indigenous peoples and the theft of Indigenous lands for settler-colonial expansion, including animal agriculture. For that reason, we cannot address animal oppression and liberation without beginning from an understanding that settler colonialism and white supremacy are the bedrock of much of the structural violence that unfolds on occupied Indigenous territory. It is clear that we need to think spatially to get at the ways in which animals are emplaced in a constrained set of zones of living and dying. Animals exist, then, in the settler imaginary as geographic subjects, enervated and trapped. Part of the work of decolonization is thus to unmoor animality from place narrowly comprehended as inherently cruel.

The logics of white supremacy: anthropocentrism

In “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy,” Andrea Smith argues that the “three primary logics of white supremacy” are slaveability/anti-Black racism, genocide, and orientalism, which anchor capitalism, colonialism, and war, respectively.[72] Smith later suggests that “the consequence of not developing a critical apparatus for intersecting all the logics of white supremacy… is that it prevents us from imagining an alternative” to the settler-colonial and racial state.[73] What I want to do now is add anthropocentrism to this set of logics. According to Donaldson and Kymlicka, anthropocentrism is a “moral theory that takes humanity as its standard”—that is, it is a making of “humanness” so as to circumscribe the “essence” of “‘being human’ or of ‘humanity’,” often with fatal ramifications.[74] Humanity delivers a kind of livability to those inside its ontological confine, and suffering to those banned from it.

In my mind, anthropocentrism is the anchor of speciesism, capitalism, and settler colonialism. Just as Smith’s original logics are woven together vis-à-vis settler sovereignty and racism, it is my contention that speciesism intersects with the logic of genocide to secure a capitalist project of animal agriculture that requires the disappearance of Indigenous peoples from the land.[75] If settler colonialism is to remain both “territorially acquisitive in perpetuity” and about the production of an unhuman suffering, then animals are colonial subjects par excellence, at once the means to genocidal ends (clearing of the plains of Indigenous peoples) and made to take on an impoverished non-existence that results in premature death. Included in the calculus of anthropocentrism, then, is a politics of territoriality that renders land a thing to be owned, to be made into property. Animal agriculture, which uses approximately 30 percent of the Earth’s land mass and accounts for “nearly half of all water used in the United States,”[76] should thus be a key object of inquiry and protest in decolonial thought as much as it is in CAS. However, CAS is beholden also to fixing ethical attention on the originary trauma of dispossession that undergirds all agriculture in North America.

What’s more, the logic of anthropocentrism begets a racial hierarchy that rips indigeneity and blackness from the terrain of the human and then consigns us into the position of the killable. That is, Black and Indigenous peoples are dehumanized and repeatedly inscribed with an animal status—which is always a speciesist rendering of animality as injurious. There is a dual function to this: (1) Black and Indigenous peoples are refused the sovereignty that humanness motors and thus made to weather the terror of a life lived in the status of non-being; and (2) animality is made into a loose signifier, a fungible concept, that invites violence of all sorts.[77] Maria Lugones was attuned to this in a terminal essay in which she argues that the “modern colonial/gender system” uses animality to put an ontological wedge between white womanhood and women of color.[78] In white supremacist societies, then, animality is a Trojan horse. It is an explosive concept, used against the marginalized in the war of ideas that determine for whom the world exists.

The colonial politics of animal recognition

In Zoopolis, Donaldson and Kymlicka rethink animality with the language of “political and cultural membership” to propose a non-speciesist and deontological human-animal relationality that models contemporary applications of neoliberal citizenship.[79] Donaldson and Kymlicka suggest that Animal Rights Theory has failed to think beyond negative rights (i.e., the right not to be killed or confined), and therefore argue that “animals, like humans, should be seen as possessing certain inviolable rights” as determined by doctrines of human rights.[80] They sort animals into three categories: domesticated animals are citizens, feral animals are denizens, and wild animals are members of sovereign nations.[81] Of importance here is the model of recognition that Donaldson and Kymlicka use for domesticated animals that prop up settler-colonial infrastructures of subjecthood. The problem with citizenship as a model for animality is that it makes animals into sites of settler promise.[82] In other words, animals siphon “certain sanctioned fantasies… [that] are insidiously elevated as the parameters of realness.”[83] The animal’s entrance into discourses of settler citizenship therefore reifies the settler state as the sole arbiter of being in the world. In this way, animals are ushered into “forms of life that make settler colonialism’s constitutive hierarchies seems natural.”[84]

I therefore do not hold out hope for the model of animal recognition proposed by Donaldson and Kymlicka insofar as it operates within and consequently upholds infrastructures of settler recognition. I use Coulthard’s “politics of recognition” here to suggest that Donaldson and Kymlicka “reproduce the very configurations of colonial power” that require the disappearance and/or assimilation of Indigenous peoples in their move to save animals from problems of settlers’ making.[85] Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that domesticated animals should be conferred citizenship because they “are members of our society” with the “capacity to have and express a subjective good, to participate, and to cooperate.”[86] The shift then is not one toward a more capacious freedom for all but a grammatical one: animals metamorphose from objects of violence to subjects of neoliberalism. When Donaldson and Kymlicka frame “citizenship [as] a cooperative social project… in which all are recognized as equals” and “all benefit from the goods of social life,”[87] an image of the country is posited that is vacated of the realities of social and political inequalities. It is fantastical to believe that the state governs in a way that is about “the goods of social life” and not the maintenance of a racial order and territorial regime that wires Indigenous suffering into everyday life. Donaldson and Kymlicka’s citizenship model forecloses Indigenous responses to state violence that contest the genocidal model in which “everything within a settle colonial society strains to destroy or assimilate the Native in order to disappear them from the land.”[88] Precisely because decolonization “sets out to change the order of the world” as “an agenda for total disorder,”[89] Donaldson and Kymlicka’s animal citizenship model is antithetical to Indigenous freedom.

Donaldson and Kymlicka’s theory of animal citizenship is in actuality a politics of “strategic domestication” in which animals are circumscribed by “the terms of recognition in such a way that the foundation of” settler society is “relatively undisturbed.”[90] I contend that this reimagining of animal ontologies and human-animal relations within the language of settler citizenship cannot disrupt those power mechanisms (i.e., capitalism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy) that require the subjugation of both Indigenous peoples and animals. The turn toward “social and political integration” advanced in Zoopolis locates animals within the symbolic and material spaces of a world caught up in a coloniality of the present.[91] For instance, Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that the criminal justice system should be expanded to better “protect” animals as citizens.[92] Painting an image of the criminal justice system through analytics such as deterrence, “deserved retribution,” and “protection of basic rights,”[93] Donaldson and Kymlicka adopt a carceral logic in which animals are to be afforded a safety that minoritized populations are not, populations who are instead subject to police violence and incarceration at alarming rates. Donaldson and Kymlicka resultantly substitute forms of economic and/or speciesist violence for the racialized violence of the prison, which throws into relief a hierarchy of ethical concern in which animals supersede people of color. For that reason, our theories of animality must instead be embedded in a politics of decolonization that recognizes the ways in which Indigenous peoples and Indigenous epistemologies are at stake.

Indigenous cosmologies and animality

Indigenous nations from coast to coast to coast have cosmologies that can better instruct those in CAS about what an anti-colonial notion of animality might look like. In “Veganism and Mi’kmaq Legends,” for example, Margaret Robinson suggests Mi’kmaq cosmologies are shaped through “a model of creation in which animals are portrayed as our siblings” and thus share a symbiotic form of personhood with humans.[94] In the story of “Muin, The Bear’s Child,” one of her key case studies, a young boy is raised by bears after being abandoned by his stepfather in a forest,[95] which envisages animals not just as active agents but also as beings who are capable of creating kinship relations with humans. Although Robinson examines these legends to propose an Indigenous veganism that finds legitimacy in traditional Indigenous oral cultures, I want to nod to this sort of non-speciesist human-animal relationality as a key node for CAS. We must also be careful, however, to negate the “purposeful and ignorant misrepresentations of Indigenous cosmologies” by those outside of our communities and nations.[96]

I additionally want to briefly present an alternative to the abolitionist/citizenship debate in CAS to get at the coloniality of animals in the anthropocentric imaginary.[97] Animal Rights Theory has traditionally operated through two binarized ideas of the animal. First, scholars such as Gary Francione argue that domesticated animals inhabit hybrid and/or “unnatural” subjectivities that allow them to be used to human ends. As a result of this unethical relationship, Francione proposes an eradication of the domesticated animal all together because the “intent of domestication” is and was intrinsically immoral.[98] Conversely, Donaldson and Kymlicka contend that this argument is itself speciesist and alternatively believe that a citizenship model can create human and domesticated animal interactions that are reciprocal and non-exploitative.[99] It is important to note that settler colonialism constructs death differently for Indigenous peoples and animals. Settler colonialism requires the elimination of Indigenous peoples through genocide or neoliberal processes of assimilation in which the colonized subject symbolically abandons indigeneity for settler ways of living. The corporeal and/or discursive refusal of indigeneity by the settler state legitimates settler claims to territory and futurity. However, settler colonialism produces animals as commodities embedded in a necropolitical global economy. Said differently, animals are always already consigned to death, to be consumed as meat, clothing, scientific data, and so forth.[100] In short, animals must live to die; Indigenous peoples must die for the settler to live. The alternative to the above debate then is a decolonial politics that conceptualizes animals as kin who co-produce a way of life that engenders care rather than and contra to suffering. So, the settler state “has been characterized by the coercive confinement, manipulation, and exploitation of animals.”[101] Animals thus must first be excised from their colonized subjectivities to be subsequently welcomed into a decolonial subjecthood animated by Indigenous cosmologies. Similar to the ways in which Indigenous peoples can be rid of colonial mentalities, animals can likewise undergo a “process of desubjectification.”[102] In that sense, recalling the representation of animals in Indigenous cosmologies/oral traditions and unsettling speciesism as a “colonial mentality” must be prioritized in decolonial thought. It is important to note finally that the animal and the Indigenous are not commensurable colonial subjects insofar as their experiences of colonization are different—we must therefore continue to account for these differences rather than obfuscate them with a one-size-fits-all solution to a problem—speciesism—looped through and coanimated by colonial violence of all sorts.

Conclusion

Indigenous Studies and Settler Colonial Studies continue to attend to the “specializations” of settler colonialism, including the ways in which “settler sovereignty imposes sexuality, legality, raciality, language, religion, and property” onto Indigenous communities as an assimilationist tactic.[103] At times, animals fall into the margins of our radical imaginaries, so we ought to think hard about the ways settler-colonial understandings of animality infiltrate our nations. Lines of inquiry one might want to pursue include the distinction between hunting for recreation and hunting for livelihood; how the Inuit in the North require provincialized ways of thinking about ethics and killing (see my contribution to the anthology Messy Eating, for example); how nations differ in their understandings of animals, inter alia.

In order for Critical Animal Studies to perform the radical work it seeks to, it must be grounded in an understanding of the coloniality of the world. In North America, animality is rung through a metaphysics of colonialism. Animals are mired in the miseries of colonial power much like Indigenous peoples and according to entangled logics (though not commensurably). It makes a world of difference whether or not one’s ethical standpoint flowers from a desire to undo the trauma of colonization and imagine more flourishing futures with Indigenous peoples. This essay, if nothing else, is a note of caution: in the contested terrain of North America, Indigenous flourishing hangs in the balance as an effect of a centuries-long besiegement on behalf of a settler population, and, because of this, indigeneity ought to be at the core of any theory of ethical living.

References

Belcourt, Billy-Ray. “Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects: (Re)Locating Animality in Decolonial Thought.” Societies 5 (December 2014): 1–11, doi:10.3390/soc5010001

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex. London: Routledge, 2011.

Colling, Sarat, Sean Parson, and Alessandro Arrigoni. “Until All Are Free: Total Liberation through Revolutionary Decolonization, Groundless Solidarity, and a Relationship Framework.” Counterpoints 448 (2014): 51–73. www.jstor.org/stable/42982377.

Coulthard, Glen Sean. “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada.” Contemporary Political Theory 6, no. 4 (November 2007): 437–460.

———. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Donaldson, Sue and Will Kymlicka. Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

“Facts on Animal Farming and the Environment.” Accessed December 13, 2014, www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/facts-on-animal-farming-and-the-environment/]]

Lugones, Maria. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 186–209.

Nocella, Anthony J., John Sorenson, Kim Socha, and Atsuko Matsuoka. “Introduction: The Emergence of Critical Animal Studies: The Rise of Intersectional Animal Liberation.” Counterpoints 448 (2014): Xix–xxvi. www.jstor.org/stable/42982374.

Powell, Dylan. ‘Veganism in the Occupied Territories: Animal Liberation and Anti- Colonialism.” Accessed October 24, 2014. http://dylanxpowell.com/2014/03/01/veganism-in-the-occupied-territories-anticolonialism-and-animal-liberation/

Robinson, Margaret. “Veganism and Mi’kmaq Legends.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 33, no. 1 (2013): 184–196.

Smith. Andrea. “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy.” Global Dialogue 12, no. 2 (Summer/Autumn: 2010): 1–13.

Stanescu, James. “Beyond Biopolitics: Animal Studies, Factory Farms, and the Advent of Deading Life.” PhaenEX: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture 8, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2013): 135–160.

Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

Vaid-Menon, Alok. “My Little Homonationalist Pony: A Critique of Zoophilia.” Accessed October 24, 2014. http://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/fs953jp5133.

Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012.

Watts, Vanessa. “Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European World Tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 20–34.

2 Tensions in Contemporary Indigenous and Animal Advocacy Struggles: The Commercial Seal Hunt as a Case Study

Darren Chang

Introduction

Commercial seal hunting remains a contentious issue. In this chapter, I consider the conflicts between various groups engaged in the struggles for or against the commercial seal hunt in Canada that have been unfolding over the past few decades. Together, the tensions that Indigenous peoples experience when confronting neoliberal global capitalism, settler colonialism, Eurocentric white supremacy, and reciprocal relationships with the land make up the main object of my analysis. Given that the focus of my analysis is on the Inuit relation to the sealing industry, I want to acknowledge that while many Indigenous peoples do share similar overarching experiences from the genocidal and assimilative practices and policies carried out by settler-colonial states, differences in diverse cultural and historical backgrounds means that we should always be cautious when generalizing across contexts.

I will first identify my main interlocutors in the seal hunt struggles, as well as their positions and main arguments. These interlocutors include Inuk filmmaker and activist Alethea Arnaquq-Baril and Inuk activist and lawyer Aaju Peter, who advocate for the seal hunt; Sheryl Fink (Director of Wildlife Campaigns with International Fund for Animal Welfare) and Paul Watson (founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society), who represent Western animal and environmental advocacy nongovernmental organizations; as well as Dylan Powell, a white settler anti-colonial activist who has centred his long-time work around animal liberation and Indigenous solidarity. To provide an overview of these perspectives, I will rely on interviews, public statements, and blog posts. Following that, I will summarize some theoretical work from Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Glen Coulthard on Indigenous modernity, reciprocal relationships with the land, and the politics of recognition and reconciliation within the liberal-multicultural settler-colonial state of Canada.

Applying Coulthard’s and Cusicanqui’s theoretical analyses to consider the range of positions on the seal hunt, I propose two main arguments. First, I argue that all efforts going towards defending wild animals and the ecological environment they depend on will likely be rendered ineffective if settler-colonial capitalist processes of dispossessions and destructions go unchallenged. To challenge these processes would require Indigenous communities and settler solidarity to fight for Indigenous self-determination and sustainable economies, while the failure to do so involves legitimizing state powers and relying on state legitimacy to either sustain or collapse capitalist industries. Secondly, I argue that while Eurocentrism, white supremacy, and racism certainly played a significant role in bringing the commercial seal hunt to its knees, the role that nonhuman animals (i.e. the seals themselves) played in their own resistance, and the struggles against capitalist industrial massacres should not be erased or downplayed. Furthermore, the recognition of animal agency and resistance creates opportunities to build solidarities with animals, and to include them as part of various coalitions fighting back against colonial capitalism and other oppressive ideologies and structures.

Positions and perspectives on the seal hunt

Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s documentary Angry Inuk (2016) showcases an impassioned defence of the seal hunt, pointing out the cultural and economic importance of the sealing industry to the Inuit communities. One of the main issues articulated in the film has to do with both the European Economic Community’s banning of the importation of harp seal pup skins in 1983 and the European Union’s most recent complete ban of seal products from the commercial seal hunt in 2010. Arnaquq-Baril argues that these bans have had devastating impacts on the livelihood of Inuit communities.[104] Although the EU ban included an exemption for Inuit seal products, this exemption is meaningless because the price of Inuit seal skin is heavily dependent on the commercial industry, which effectively makes the Inuit sealers part of the commercial hunt. Aaju Peter, who was featured as a main subject in Angry Inuk, has stated in an interview that the exemption in the EU ban is “a form of cultural colonisation,” in that the Europeans and Western animal advocates want the Inuit “to be like little stick Eskimos who are stuck on the land and go out in [their] little Eskimo clothes with a harpoon,” while disallowing them to hunt with modern technologies or sell their products as part of a commercial industry.[105] In other words, the Inuit exemption in the context of it being granted by colonial powers is both paternalistic and racist in the ways they stereotype the Inuit as culturally and economically backwards. In terms of real outcomes, the Europeans essentially dictate that the Inuit could only hunt for traditional, cultural, and subsistence trading and consumption purposes.

Echoing Peter’s views, in my own reflections on the film I proposed that the EU ban and the Inuit exemption should be understood through the “Western civilizational binary logic that defines accepted Western practices as ‘civilized’ and non-Western practices as ‘savage’ or ‘barbaric’.”[106] Understanding how this civilizational logic operates allows us to interpret the EU ban and the Inuit exemption as a way for members of the European Parliament and their constituents to fantasize and aggrandize their moral superiority and exceptionalism. By distancing themselves from animal exploitation and killing practices associated with Indigenous peoples, Europeans reproduce the association of Indigeneity with immorality and savagery, versus civility and enlightenment with whiteness.

Jacqueline Dalziell and Dinesh Wadiwel expound a similar analysis in their critical analysis of the Australian animal advocacy campaigns to ban the shipment of live animals from Australia to Indonesia and other non-Western nations.[107] After the investigation footage of animal slaughter in Indonesia was released to the general public, Australian media, public, and animal advocates discursively produced “Middle Eastern and Asian export nations as savage and regressive,” while reaffirming the façade of humaneness and civility of Australians’ relations with and treatment of farmed animals at home.[108] This is despite the fact that the conditions of animal confinement, exploitation, and killing occurring in farms and slaughterhouses in Australia and other Western or Global North nations have been shown through countless investigations to be as violent and cruel as anywhere else in the world.[109] Therefore, one of the main commonalities between the live export ban and the seal product ban is how both campaigns portray racialized Others and reproduce them as perpetually barbaric and savage, in opposition to civilized white peoples and states that enjoy unquestionable entitlement to exploit and kill animals.[110]

Interestingly, a major distinction between the live export ban and the seal ban lies in how the politicians (and in the case of Australia, also livestock industry lobbyists) representing respective regions chose to engage with the racialized subjects they have produced. In the case of live export, Australian politicians and members of the livestock industry opposed the ban, arguing that ending the shipment of animals from Australia to other destinations would impede Australia’s ability to intervene and improve the conditions of animal farming and slaughter in nations deemed to have inferior animal welfare regulations and standards.[111] Dalziell and Wadiwel point out how this argument for Australian government and industries using their supply chain to further regulate animal treatment in receiving destinations resembles the civilizing missions that colonial powers have used to justify their domination and dispossession of non-Western peoples. It thus perversely follows that better welfare for animals could only be achieved if Australia were to continue to export animals for slaughter overseas.[112] The seal ban, however, shows how Europeans chose to distance themselves from a collapsing commercial sealing industry as opposed to advocating for better welfare regulations through increased proximity and trade. This distinction demonstrates how governments and industries in the Global North rely on colonial civilizational discourse and logics depending on and according to their financial or economic interests.

Governments and industries, however, are not the only ones using the civilizational discursive framing of animal slaughter to their benefit. The civilizational binary logic also helps to explain why Western NGOs have a tendency to disproportionately target non-Western or culturally specific animal practices and industries with far more aggression and persistence when compared to the practices of their own countries. Western NGOs have shown relative moderation and civility when confronting industries of animal exploitation with European or Western origins (e.g. industrial animal farming and slaughter). This is in part because the modern NGOs have taken on corporate models situated within a nonprofit industrial complex, where priorities centre on the growth of their organizational capacities through appealing to the moral sentiments of their funders (i.e. the settler-colonial population, Europeans, and the state).

In Angry Inuk, Arnaquq-Baril also accused the NGOs of employing unethical campaigning strategies for fundraising. According to Arnaquq-Baril, NGOs such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), Greenpeace, Humane Society International (HSI), and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) ran campaigns that erased Inuit activists from the commercial seal hunt and denied the Inuit their voice in this conflict. Through Arnaquq-Baril’s research, she found that animal advocates opposing the seal hunt have never consulted with Inuit communities directly and seemingly refuse to talk to the Inuit, have misled the public with “graphic imagery and creative marketing techniques to make the seal hunt one of the most reviled activities on the planet,” and primarily used the seal hunt as an easy way to raise money.[113] One segment of Angry Inuk presented a 1978 CBC interview with Paul Watson, where Watson openly admitted that using images of seals crying (a natural tearing function that protects seals’ eyes from salt and freezing, with no known connection to their cognitions and emotions) was one of the easiest fundraising techniques for NGOs such as Greenpeace.[114] Although Watson seemingly denounced these practices in that interview, he and the SSCS would go on to adopt the exact same strategy of targeting the seal hunt, which continues to this day.

Countering the claims and arguments narrated in Angry Inuk, the animal advocacy NGOs typically maintain sharp distinctions between Canada’s East Coast seal hunt and the Inuit hunt, and assert that they have never campaigned against the latter. Sheryl Fink of IFAW outlines some observable differences between the two hunts. In terms of killing methods and animal use, media depictions typically show Inuit hunts to involve an overall respect for the animals by using every part of the body and require patience and skill in hunting techniques.[115] Meanwhile, mass industrial slaughter involves the use of boats to smash through ice to reach a high concentration of pups, helicopters to lift stacks of seal skin to the boats, and hakapiks[116] to efficiently crush seal skulls in mass numbers, and an estimated 92 percent of seal meat goes to waste due to a lack of demand.[117] There are also different regulations: the Department of Fisheries and Oceans manages the commercial seal hunt by determining an annual total allowable catch of 400,000 harp seals and 60,000 grey seals, which licensed sealers are not allowed to exceed; however, Indigenous sealers and “residents of Labrador north of 53oN latitude” are not required to have licences, do not have to abide by the regulations, and hunt an average of 1,500–2,000 seals annually.[118]

Lastly, with regard to market impacts, Fink suggests that the major differences between the hunts indicate that it is likely that the effect of the ban on Inuit livelihood is overestimated.[119] Citing a 2010 article from Nunatsiaq News based in Iqaluit, Nunavut, as well as a 2013 CBC article, Fink argues that the Inuit exemption in the EU ban, combined with the low production of sealskins in the North and the low market demand in the EU, are actually the main factors why the Inuit are experiencing difficulties selling their sealskins.[120] First, according to the Nunatsiaq editorial, “sealing is not an industry and never has been an industry” in Nunavut; it has contributed “virtually nothing to Nunavut’s economy”; and it is primarily “an important cultural expression.”[121] Secondly, the CBC article points out that although “local demand for sealskins is at an all-time high,” and the Nunavut government continues to pay seal hunters the same prices per sealskin pelt as they obtained prior to the EU ban, sealskin production in Nunavut has decreased by more than half since the EU ban.[122] Devin Imrie, acting director of fisheries and sealing in Nunavut, suspects that multiple factors contributed to the decline; these include that lower sealskin prices could serve to discourage hunting, or that there is a possible decline in the seal population.[123]

In her conclusion, Fink denounces what she sees as deliberate attempts to blur the differences between the two hunts, and attributes much of the blame to the Federal Government of Canada. Fink mentions an internal government memo from 2001 that explicitly states the Canadian government’s strategy of “playing the Nunavut Inuit card as leverage… [to gain access to markets for seal products] and have the east coast sealers follow,” although this evidence was not referenced in her article.[124] Nonetheless, the combined narrative and strategy of maintaining the distinctions between the two hunts while assigning blame to the Canadian government is commonly repeated among almost all anti-sealing animal advocates.

In a recent public statement, Paul Watson criticized Greenpeace for endorsing the commercial seal hunt and issuing an apology to the Inuit over past anti-sealing campaigns carried out by Greenpeace. In his statement, Watson claimed that the Canadian government had devised a strategy in 1985 to revive commercial sealing following the 1983 European ban on whitecoat seal pups. Watson states that the strategy “was to promote seal fur with a deliberate tactic of associating the commercial East Coast seal slaughter with Indigenous Northern Native cultures,” and that the Inuit had agreed to this manipulative government ploy to their own disadvantage “in exchange for subsidies.”[125] This disadvantage was evident in the corporate exploitation of Inuit sealers when they receive “less than 5% of the final retail price” of the sealskin products.[126] Moreover, Watson argues that despite the Inuit exemption, “the Inuit voluntarily included themselves in the ban on all seal products” when Inuit leadership willingly entered into political alliance with white commercial sealers for purely political reasons.[127]

Similarly, although from a much more humble and critical anti-colonial perspective, activist Dylan Powell puts forward his belief that the Canadian government has been using the seal hunt to manufacture a “wedge between Inuit communities and Animal Rights activists” to serve their own destructive interests in resource extraction and assimilation.[128] Powell observes how the Canadian government has “done nothing substantive to transition or ensure alternative economic options” for East Coast sealers or Inuit communities, despite having known for years that the demand for seal products has completely eroded.[129] By offering subsidies to the sealing industry and using it to “extract political capital,” the Canadian government would have achieved “a major political victory” if they could “collapse the economy, pit traditional communities against environmentalists and animal rights activists, and walk away looking like the good guy.”[130]

However, unlike Watson who appears to frame the Inuit as mostly victims in this conflict (both victims to state manipulation and their own bad decisions), Powell acknowledges Inuit voices and agency in their decision making and believes that “Inuit folks are making decisions based upon what they believe to be the best interests for their community and for the land.”[131] Powell believes that Inuit communities recognize they are positioned at the bottom of the global commercial trade and understand that a collapse on the top would also crush them; they realize how the collapse of the sealing industry would “only heighten food insecurity, decrease autonomy and make way for more aggressive resources extraction,” which would also bring about more negative impacts on wild animals of the North.[132]

Powell’s speculations are affirmed by Arnaquq-Baril when she declares that animal and environmental NGOs’ anti-sealing efforts have actually pushed the Inuit “toward massive destructive resource extraction industries” faster than they want to approach them, and that the animal advocacy community actually shares common objectives with the Inuit when it comes to defending wild animals and the environment.[133] In fact, Watson also claimed that Greenpeace was only apologizing to the Inuit for the purpose of building an alliance against increased corporate and state interests in Arctic drilling and other resource extraction development.[134] I will later discuss the politics surrounding the possible coalitions between the Inuit communities and the animal/environmental NGOs suggested by Powell and Arnaquq-Baril. For now, I conclude this section by highlighting the ongoing tension between the need to defend the land against more destructive resource extraction industries and the threat of a collapsing commercial sealing industry.

Grounded normativity, Indigenous modernity, and the colonial politics of recognition

One of Glen Coulthard’s main arguments in Red Skin, White Masks is that “a recognition-based approach to reconciling Indigenous peoples’ assertions of nationhood with settler-state sovereignty” only serves to maintain colonial domination “insofar as it remains structurally committed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of [their] lands and self-determining authority.”[135] According to Coulthard, these attempts at dispossession through the “politics of recognition” and reconciliation are usually performed in the offer to accommodate “Indigenous identity-related claims through the negotiation of settlements over issues such as land, economic development, and self-government.”[136] For example, the state has no concerns when it comes to recognizing Indigenous rights to self-governance over their cultures, identities, traditions, languages, and institutions so long as these recognitions are “grounded in the assumption that Aboriginal rights are subordinately positioned within the ultimate sovereign authority” of the state, most importantly the state sovereignty over Indigenous land and territories.[137]

Given that land is so central to Indigenous self-determination and decolonization, Coulthard offers an ethical and epistemological framework he calls “grounded normativity” as a foundational theory to inform decolonizing practices. Grounded normativity is defined as a form of Indigenous relationship with the land that is based on reciprocity, in which the land informs Indigenous ways of life by teaching Indigenous peoples how to “live in relation to one another and [their] surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative way.”[138] This means that Indigenous struggles against settler colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism informed by grounded normativity are more than simply struggles for the land; it would also involve and require Indigenous peoples to live on the land with each other and their living environment in reciprocal ways, informed by place-based knowledge and practices.[139] Because recognition politics allows states to reinforce and reproduce structures of colonial domination without overt violence, and relies instead on their “ability to entice Indigenous peoples to identify, either implicitly or explicitly, with the profoundly asymmetrical and nonreciprocal forms of recognition either imposed on or granted to them by settler state and society,” decolonization would require resisting and turning away from this state enticement.[140] Grounded normativity effectively becomes the antithesis to the politics of recognition as it offers an alternative to the enticement of state recognition by re-focusing Indigenous relationships with the land as the most central aspect of anti-colonial struggles.

However, there are at least two related major obstacles to practising grounded normativity. The first concerns the notion of modernity and how Indigenous peoples’ identities would be discursively produced as belonging in the past if they are to live by grounded normativity. The second issue relates to whether to sustainably practise the nondominating and nonexploitative relational ethics and values of grounded normativity is actually realistic and practicable in a world that is in the grip of neoliberal global capitalism.

In her work, Aymaran activist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui confronts the first problem within the context of Indigenous struggles in Bolivia, where Indigenous peoples make up the majority of the population. Like Coulthard, Cusicanqui rejects the politics of recognition from a liberal multicultural state. Cusicanqui argues that liberal multiculturalism contains a hidden agenda that seeks to discursively fix Indigenous peoples “to a past that is imagined to be still, static, and archaic.”[141] Furthermore, multicultural discourse “denies the contemporaneity” of Indigenous peoples, “excludes them from the battles of modernity,” stereotypes them as the noble savage and guardian of nature, and effectively converts them into minorities by granting them a residual status.[142] Cusicanqui’s view also echoes what was expressed by Aaju Peter with regard to how the Inuit are represented and treated as outside of contemporaneity by the Inuit exemption in the EU ban, that they are denied their presence and voices in the modern commercial seal hunt. Given this analysis, the ethical values associated with grounded normativity could serve to reinforce what Cusicanqui called the “Aboriginal discourse,” which represents Indigeneity as a “museum ethnicity,” belonging “in a cage like endangered species.”[143]

One of the ways Cusicanqui overcomes this first problem is by flipping the discourse to emphasize the contemporary features of Indigeneity, as opposed to the archaic, politically backward features of the elite. Looking at Bolivian history, Cusicanqui notes that in many instances, the 19th-century liberal elites were in fact quite archaic, and even pre-capitalist: after formally recognizing Indigenous peoples as equals, the liberal elites aggressively recolonized Indigenous territories “by means of the expropriation of communal lands.”[144] By focusing exclusively on the usurpation of Indigenous lands and distancing themselves from commercial and industrial activities, those elites effectively positioned themselves as “a feudal rentist class that was more recalcitrantly colonial” than even their Spanish predecessors from the 16th century.[145] While the elites were busy reproducing and renewing “the colonial condition of the entire society” with their “political backwardness and conservatism,” the Indigenous and mestiza populations controlled “fully modern rural-urban networks fully linked to the broader reproduction of capital” that facilitated the circulation of trade.[146] Jumping to the contemporary moment, Cusicanqui points out how Indigenous peoples continue to be on the forefront of modernity, breaking national folklores about their identity through art and music, breaking down borders and creating transnational Indigenous communities through illegal trading of counterfeit items, engaging in experimental, micropolitical ways of living in “countercultural collectives,” and ceaselessly reinventing themselves.[147]

Although Cusicanqui’s discursive characterization of the Indigenous as modern appears to be an empowering response to the liberal multicultural discourse, the practices she outlines do not appear to resolve the tensions between grounded normativity and Indigenous modernity. If anything, it appears that Cuiscanqui actually embraces, to an extent, processes of capitalist production in order to claim Indigenous modernity. Such an approach seems consistent with Aaju Peter’s vision of the Inuit as part of the commercial seal hunt.

This leads into the second problem related to whether grounded normativity could be compatible with modern industrial processes. In Coulthard’s view, grounded normativity will always be “antithetical to capitalist accumulation,” but it could be compatible with “contemporary economic ventures” as long as grounded normativity informs Indigenous governance of “non-traditional economic activities.”[148] In more concrete terms, Indigenous political-economic alternatives to capitalist exploitation and accumulation could take the form of a “mix of subsistence-based activities with more contemporary economic ventures,” where traditional manufacturing and harvesting of renewable resources through activities such as hunting, fishing, and trapping are combined with other potentially non-renewable economic activities on communally held land.[149] Taking proposed economic strategies for his homeland of Denendeh, Coulthard suggests that a “contemporary economy committed to the traditional practices” and renewables would be prioritized, but “the exploration and development of Denendeh’s non-renewable resource base might be permitted to continue” only if they guarantee the long-term well-being of the land and people of Denendeh, with revenues directed towards a type of collective heritage fund rather than going to profit-driven developers.[150] One way or another, relations of private property and capitalist extractive accumulation must end in order for Indigenous sovereignty and autonomy to exist.

With all that said, Coulthard recognizes that these visions of Indigenous self-determination would not be possible unless “all of the colonial, racist, and patriarchal legal and political obstacles” blocking Indigenous access to their land are first dismantled.[151] However, unlike the situation of an Indigenous majority in Bolivia, Coulthard recognizes that settler colonialism has rendered Indigenous populations “too small to affect this magnitude of change.” As a result, Indigenous peoples are required to establish “relations of solidarity and networks of mutual aid with national and transnational communities and organizations that are also struggling against the imposed effects of globalized capital.”[152] These communities and organizations range include urban Indigenous peoples and organizations, other Indigenous nations and national confederacies, as well as racial and ethnic communities subjected to particular forms of socioeconomic and cultural marginalization, such as labour, women’s, GBLTQ2S (gay, bisexual, lesbian, trans, queer, and two-spirit), and environmental movements.[153]

Beyond shallow coalitions: what might a decolonizing solidarity look like?

Examining seal hunt conflicts using Cusicanqui’s and Coulthard’s decolonizing theories and practices allows me to expand my first argument: that all efforts to defend wild animals and the ecological environment they depend on will most likely fail if settler-colonial capitalist processes of dispossessions and destructions are not dismantled. On this point I am inclined to agree with the animal advocates and animal liberationists who recognize the Canadian government’s role in manipulatively using the seal hunt for political gains and as a mechanism to prepare for future resource development expansions into the North. However, given that the animal advocacy NGOs clearly recognize that the mass industrial violence against seals is sponsored by the state through endless subsidies, it seems strategically pointless for them to keep begging for the state to end the hunt to no avail. Instead, their efforts ought to support radical Indigenous endeavours to delegitimize the Canadian state.

The first step to dismantling state-sponsored capitalist violence against seals and the land would require all groups involved in the struggles over the seal hunt to reject the colonial politics of recognition, particularly those groups that truly care about defending wild animal populations and their homes from further threats and destructions in the long run. This would require a radical turning away from the state and ceasing engagement with state institutions, in order to stop legitimizing their violent colonial powers. Currently, all involved groups are trying to convince the EU and/or Canadian government to either end or resuscitate a sealing industry that has practically collapsed. Even though neither the EU nor Canada has shown that they actually care about the well-being of the people who would suffer from the seal hunt collapse or the seals, all groups continue in their attempt to persuade government bodies to recognize either the cultural and economic importance of seal hunts, or the immorality of the mass slaughter of seals.

With a capitalist sealing industry at a downfall from which they are unlikely to recover, it seems that possible future directions and political outcomes are wide open. Given my own positioning as a settler on colonized and occupied land and as an outsider to the Inuit community who has not consulted with the Inuit in any capacity, I will share Powell’s assumption that the Inuit communities are strategizing in their best interests against settler-colonial attempts at further assimilation and destruction, and thereby refrain from making strategic suggestions for the Inuit communities. Nonetheless, if we take for granted Coulthard’s arguments that Indigenous sovereignty and autonomy would be impossible, or at least extremely unlikely without grounded normativity and the death of capitalism, then the consistent conclusion would be for Indigenous peoples to abandon all colonial-capitalist industries, including the commercial seal hunt. In any case, without elaborating more on future options for Inuit communities, I want to instead assume a path towards decolonization, and explore what settler obligations towards the Inuit communities might look like, particularly in the creation of alternative futures to the bigger threats looming on the horizon (i.e. the transition towards non-renewable resource extraction that would further devastate the land, threaten all animals, and undermine Indigenous sovereignty following a seal hunt collapse).

In the concluding section of Powell’s article on the seal hunt, he proposes a coalition politic precisely to confront the looming disasters that a transition from the seal hunt to resource extraction would create. With a sense of urgency, Powell argues that at both the global and grassroots levels of the animal advocacy movement, animal advocates need to “understand treaty rights, settler colonialism, and how whiteness and privilege surround issues of animal use.”[154] In addition, animal and environmental NGOs and their activists need to be directly consulting and communicating with Inuit communities, instead of always referring back to the Inuit exemption or differences between the hunts.[155] Given that there now exists a low level of trust from the Inuit communities due to the amount of overt racism or unresponsiveness from the animal advocacy movement, Powell suggests there is a desperate need to build trust and meaningful relationships between various groups, in order to prevent the Canadian government from driving further wedges between the groups through the seal hunt.[156]

While I agree with Powell that building relationships is crucial, and that there needs to be much more learning and humility on the part of privileged animal and environmental advocates, I believe that a substantive decolonial or anti-colonial solidarity would demand much more in concrete material terms. Combining Peter’s and Cusicanqui’s defiant pursuit of Indigenous modernity against racist colonial stereotypes, as well as Coulthard’s anti-capitalist demands of grounded normativity, I propose that animal and environmental NGOs that are sincerely responsive to colonial injustices should participate in a reparation process to assist Indigenous communities in achieving the combination of both decolonizing practices. It is well known that many international NGOs have accumulated tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars through decades of fundraising, with much of the money contributed by settlers and Europeans who continue to benefit from a history of global imperialism and settler colonization. Since Western NGOs have accumulated their wealth through settler colonialism and imperialism, and arguably even direct cultural exploitations in cases where they have used racist civilizational rhetoric appealing to Western moral exceptionalism to target Indigenous practices, I argue that financial reparations would be a necessary process in building real decolonizing solidarity, beyond lip service and opportunistic coalitions.

The suggestion that NGOs should play a role in reparations to Indigenous communities has in fact already been proposed. In Watson’s critique of Greenpeace, he stated that if Greenpeace truly believes they have created harm and hardships for the Inuit communities through their past anti-sealing campaigns, and if Greenpeace was sincerely sympathetic to the Inuit struggles, then “they should do more than apologize with mere hollow words” and should “turn over the tens of millions of dollars and euros” they have raised to oppose sealing to the Inuit communities.[157] Almost a year later in a CBC article, Peter states the same proposal that Greenpeace should compensate the Inuit for the damages they have done, and Greenpeace Canada’s executive director Joanna Kerr replies in the same article that compensation is something they would consider.[158]

As Coulthard acknowledges, due to the legacies of settler-colonial genocide and assimilation suffered by many Indigenous groups, rebuilding their nations through decolonization would require solidarity from other movements. The wealthy NGOs that claim to support Indigenous struggles and the defence of animals and the ecology have an opportunity to contribute significantly to self-determining and self-sustaining Indigenous futures as outlined by Coulthard. Reparations could help to tackle issues around food security and transition towards sustainable economies. For example, researchers at the University of British Columbia have been developing greenhouse lighting technologies that would allow food production in Northern climates and begin addressing a food insecurity situation where “a head of cabbage can cost upwards of $28.”[159] While the UBC researchers admit that food insecurity is entrenched in a range of social, cultural, economic, and political factors, technological innovation could nonetheless provide one piece of the puzzle to confront this problem.[160] In fact, the organization Green Iglu has already begun partnering with Northern Indigenous communities to build dome greenhouses, aimed at “fighting food insecurity in the Arctic by using Growing Dome technology to grow fresh produce in northern communities all year round.”[161] Such projects have tremendous potential to empower remote Northern communities to become food sovereign.

Moreover, plant-based food economies may continue to see exponential growth in both local mainstream settler societies and across the globe in response to changing consumer demands, as more studies continue to prove that plant-based food production and consumption are far more efficient and require significantly lower ecological damage than animal-based foods.[162] A well-established plant-based food production system in the North could effectively prepare Northern Indigenous communities to take advantage of this shift, and better secure sovereignty with respect to both food and economic security. Taking on this transition would also be consistent with Kendra Coulter’s proposed vision of creating more “humane jobs.” For Coulter, employment is humane when it is to the benefit of, and respects the well-being of both humans and animals.[163] Ultimately, however, it should be up to the Indigenous communities receiving reparations to decide for themselves what to do with the money and resources, and all projects must receive their free, prior, and informed consent without covenants partially dictated by the NGOs.

This is the type of area where NGOs could work directly with Indigenous communities and collectively disengage from the colonial state. Assisting Indigenous communities to regain autonomy is critical for future land and ecological defence. Arnaquq-Baril stresses that NGOs should recognize the common objectives they share with the Inuit, because Inuit hunters who live and work on the land are the ones directly battling the most destructive resource extraction industries, fighting seismic testing sponsored by the Canadian government, defending caribou and narwhal calving grounds from mining and shipping operations, and lobbying for whale sanctuaries.[164] Indigenous peoples doing this work should be empowered and supported through reparations rather than undermined through short-sighted campaigns that bring them extra burden.

Animal resistance against capitalist domination

To conclude, I will expand my second argument by turning to one of the key missing voices thus far in this entire discussion: the seals themselves. The recognition that animals possess and exercise agency is now gaining wider acceptance in mainstream society as a result of decades of scientific work that has gone into studying and proving the complexities of animal cognitions, emotions, and sociality.[165] Many people now recognize animal subjectivities and cultures, acknowledging that animals have their own interests and that they are intentional beings.[166] Ethological and historical observations of the complex lives of animals across species have also documented instances of how animals resist human attempts to dominate them by fighting back, escaping, or interfering with the exploitation of their bodies and labour in various ways.[167]

In the growing field of critical animal studies, scholars who ground their work in postcolonial or anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and anti-oppression intersectional theories have expanded on the types of work above to further politicize animal agency and resistance. For instance, citing ethological and historical works, Lauren Corman opposes the idea that animals are merely and always passive, voiceless victims who play no part in their own liberation; while recognizing that they often lack a political voice and thus need human advocates, she challenges the notion that humans alone must speak on their behalf, arguing instead that animals’ own resistance and voices should be recognized alongside the humans’ who fight on their behalf.[168] Similarly, Sarat Colling productively merges wide-ranging works across ethology, history, and animal geography to develop an “animals without borders” approach to interpret the experiences and representations of animals who challenge human-constructed borders.[169] As a form of animal resistance, animals without borders refer to not only how animals are routinely challenging and dismantling the geographical, physical, and material divisions separating humans and animals, such as walls, fences, private properties, and legal or political borders, but also how animals disrupt the ideological divides that conceptualize humans as superior and animals as inferior.[170]

Dinesh Wadiwel presents an alternative approach to animal resistance by directing our attention to the technologies and apparatuses “designed precisely to counter resistance” when animals fight back against human efforts to exploit and kill them.[171] Influenced by the autonomous and operaist Marxist conceptualization of labour’s resistance to systems of production, Wadiwel argues that if animals “were not sentient, autonomous and evaded capture and utilisation in the first place,” then there would be no need for humans to design technologies and weapons aimed at putting down resistance.[172] Examples of these technologies adopted to pacify animal resistance include curved corrals in slaughterhouses designed by renowned animal welfare scientist, Temple Grandin, in order to smooth the process of sending cows to slaughter, as well as the use of dimmed lighting to weaken chickens’ vision and reduce their inclination to struggle against handling by humans or machines.[173] Both Colling’s animals without borders and Wadiwel’s autonomist approaches to animal resistance open up ways for us to imagine how solidarities could be built across species between humans and animals to collectively challenge oppressive ideologies, structures, and institutions dominating all life on Earth.

Although these works are ground-breaking within the academy, many Indigenous cultures have always recognized animal agency as part of their worldviews. For example, Coulthard discusses how within his own Dene community’s language, the word for “land” is “translated in relational terms” to encompass not only the physical land itself, “but also people and animals, rocks and trees, lakes and rivers, and so on.”[174] The Dene worldview understands their people to be “as much a part of the land as any other element,” and that “within this system of relations human beings are not the only constituent believed to embody spirit or agency.”[175] This understanding of humans as merely a part of a complex web of relations as opposed to the master of other elements on the land is an integral part of grounded normativity. As Coulthard explains, the ethical implication of this worldview means that humans have “certain obligations to the land, animals, plants, and lakes in much the same way” that they are obligated to other humans, and that if these obligations were fulfilled, these relations “would reciprocate and meet their obligations to humans” to ensure the mutual survival and flourishing of everyone and everything over time.[176] If we took grounded normativity, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial theorizing around animal resistance, as well as the reimagining of relations with other animals by Indigenous scholars and activists such as Margaret Robinson[177] and Billy-Ray Belcourt[178] into concurrent considerations, their combination would suggest that animal liberation and decolonization are movements that could be reoriented towards what Claire Jean Kim calls “an ethics of mutual avowal, or open and active acknowledgement of connection with other struggles.”[179] With this in mind, I question whether there is room for nonhuman animals to be included as political agents and allies among the broad range of marginalized and struggling groups and communities with whom Coulthard suggests Indigenous peoples build coalitions. In particular, can seals be reframed as political agents and allies in the conflicts discussed above, rather than merely existing as resources for Indigenous or non-Indigenous economies? After all, animals are also victims/survivors/resisters of colonial-capitalist violence who are struggling to survive.

Finally, although the collapse of the seal hunt could be attributed to animal advocacy NGOs reproducing Eurocentric, white supremacist power dynamics to appeal to (racist and hypocritical) settler and European populations, recognizing animal agency means we should not downplay the power in the visibility of the seals’ resistance in their own fight. In videos of the commercial seal hunt recorded by animal advocates, individual seals could be seen attempting to escape or shouting and fighting back against the sealers attacking them. Seals attempting to crawl away into the water for a chance to escape the violence were also observed. The sheer scale of the capitalist industrial slaughter magnifies and multiplies these moments of violence and resistance. When transmitted through mass media, the seals’ fight for their lives becomes a powerful expression of animal agency that obligates ethical responses from human viewers. The economic impact on the commercial seal hunt due to media exposure, in part, also demonstrates why industrial slaughter in Western capitalist animal agriculture is commonly hidden from the sight of consumers and the general public. Any exposure of their mass systematic violence threatens these exploitative industries.

Timothy Pachirat argues that this active concealment of industrial animal slaughter is implemented in part because emotional responses to seeing animal slaughter, such as pity, horror, disgust, and shock, could motivate social and political transformations.[180] Pachirat also discusses how animal agriculture industries persistently exert their powers to lobby for legislations (now commonly known as ag-gag laws) that criminalize all “unauthorized physical access to industrialized slaughterhouses, unauthorized visual, audio, and print documentation of what takes place in slaughterhouses, and the possession and distribution of those unauthorized records regardless of who originally produced them.”[181] The long-standing Marine Mammal Regulations (MMR) in Canada include sections specific to the seal industry that serve similar purposes to prevent observation and disruption of the hunts. In February 2015, when the Conservative Party of Canada held a majority in parliament, a bill was passed to amend the MMR to further conceal the sealing industry. Formally known as An Act respecting the Marine Mammal Regulations (seal fishery observation licence), Bill C-555 made substantial amendments to the MMR. Prior to the amendment, individuals who do not possess a seal fishery observation licence issued by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans must maintain a half nautical mile (0.926 km) distance of anyone hunting seals. Bill C-555 increased that distance to one nautical mile (1.85 km) and specify that the Minister issuing the observation licence shall consider whether the applicant aims to disrupt the sealing industry, which effectively bans all animal protection documentations.[182] Pachirat’s analysis of these legislations that serve to conceal animal slaughter and exploitation contradicts and contests Arnaquq-Baril’s assumptions that she shared in a recent interview.

In an episode of VICE Media’s Politics of Food series covering the seal hunt, Arnaquq-Baril shared her view on how the seal hunt could serve as a good influence on other animal exploitation industries:

I would love if other industries that use animals as a resource follow the model of seal hunting, that is done sustainably, that is done ethically, that is done out in the open. I hope that people will see that someday and use it as a model to improve our practices with other animals.

(VICE/Munchies, 2017)

I argue that Arnaquq-Baril has mistakenly assumed that killing openly and transparently would be an answer to sustain the seal hunt—that it would bring about broader acceptance of violence against animals in any form, especially at a commercial or industrial level. Pachirat’s theorizing of how those who profit from killing animals actively distance and conceal their daily work would suggest the contrary, and the damages that the commercial sealing industry has taken from animal advocacy exposés would be consistent with this perspective. Systematic mass killing and exploitation of animals is hidden precisely because the animal exploitation industries need to suppress the presence, agency, and resistance of animals. One important critique of Angry Inuk relates to how the film participates in this suppression of animal subjectivities through the erasure of the seals themselves. In the film, there were no discussions about who the seals are, and no representation of their social, cultural, and emotional lives. In the scenes where they were shown, the seals have been mostly represented as already killed objects of food or commodities, and there was little to no footage or images depicting the realities of the arguably ruthless commercial seal hunt. This is likely in large part because to recognize and acknowledge the subjectivities of seals would be disruptive to a project that seeks to continue exploiting them as mere resources.

I must stress that these critiques and difficult conversations should not impede, but rather assist the urgent need for settler and Indigenous activists to begin building solidarity and establishing mutual understanding and respect. In many ways, the seals have been fortunate in the short run to have those who are privileged enough to take advantage of settler-colonial powers as their main allies in a fight to shut down a brutal industry causing them immediate harm. However, we must keep in mind that existing scientific evidence makes it “incontrovertible that recent extinction rates are unprecedented in human history and highly unusual in Earth’s history,” and “our global society has started to destroy species of other organisms at an accelerating rate, initiating a mass extinction episode unparalleled for 65 million years.”[183] As the entire planet plummets towards worsening climate crises, it is all the more crucial for the animal advocacy movement as a whole to reorient our strategies towards solidarity with Indigenous decolonization efforts and to challenge the most destructive state-sponsored industries, whether resource extraction or animal exploitation.

References

Balcombe, Jonathan. Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good. New York: Macmillan, 2007.

Balcombe, Jonathan. What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins. New York: Scientific American and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

Bekoff, Marc. “Cognitive Ethology and the Explanation of Nonhuman Animal Behavior.” In Comparative Approaches to Cognitive Science, edited by J. A. Meyer and H. L. Roitblat, 119–150. Cambridge and London: MIT, 1995.

———. The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy – And Why They Matter. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007.

Belcourt, Billy-Ray. “Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects: (Re)Locating Animality in Decolonial Thought.” Societies 5, no. 1 (2015): 1–11.

CBC News. “As Local Fur Demand Rises, Mysterious Drop in Nunavut Seal Harvest.” Accessed April 12, 2017. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/as-local-fur-demand-rises-mysterious-drop-in-nunavut-seal-harvest-1.2468737.

Ceballos, Gerardo, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anthony D. Barnosky, Andrés García, Robert M. Pringle, and Todd M. Palmer. “Accelerated Modern Human-Induced Species Losses: Entering the Sixth Mass Extinction.” Science Advances, 1, no. 5 (2015): 1–5.

Chang, Darren. “Reflections on Angry Inuk: White Animal Saviour (Industrial) Complex* and the Perpetuation of Colonial Domination.” March 18, 2017. https://ecology.iww.org/node/2151

Colling, Sarat. “Animals without Borders: Farmed Animal Resistance in New York.” MA Thesis, Brock University, 2013.

Corman, Lauren. “The Ventriloquist’s Burden: Animal Advocacy and the Problem of Speaking for Others.” In Animal Subjects 2.0, edited by Jodey Castricano and Lauren Corman, 473–512. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016.

Coulter, Kendra. “Humane Jobs: A Political Economic Vision for Interspecies Solidarity and Human-Animal Wellbeing.” Politics and Animals 3, no. 1(2017): 31–41.

Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera. Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on Decolonizing Practices and Discourses. Translated by Joan Donaghey. Edited by Richard Day. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2010.

Dalziell, Jacqueline and Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel. “Live Exports, Animal Advocacy, Race and ‘Animal Nationalism.’” In Meat Culture, edited by Annie Potts, 73–89. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2016.

Fink, Sheryl. “Differences between Inuit, Canada’s East Coast seal hunts.” March 27, 2017. www.ifaw.org/canada/news/differences-between-inuit-canada%E2%80%99s-east-coast-seal-hunts.

———. “WATCH: Canada’s Commercial Seal Hunt: Separating Myth from Fact.” April 10, 2017. www.ifaw.org/canada/news/watch-canada%E2%80%99s-commercial-seal-hunt-separating-myth-fact.

Green Iglu. “Home.” Accessed March 11, 2019. www.greeniglu.com/

Hribal, Jason. “‘Animals Are Part of the Working Class: A Challenge to Labor History.” Labor History 44, no. 4, (2003): 443–444

Hribal, Jason. “Animals, Agency, and Class: Writing the History of Animals from Below.” Human Ecology Review 14, no. 1 (2007): 101–113.

Hribal, Jason. Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance. Petrolia and Oakland, CA: CounterPunch and AK Press, 2010.

Kim, Claire Jean. Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age. New York: Cambridge, 2015.

Nunatsiaq News (Editorial). “Less Symbolism, More Realism Please.” Accessed April 12, 2017. www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/stories/article/9768_less_symbolism_more_realism_please/.

Oudshoorn, Kieran. “Greenpeace Should Compensate Inuit for Effects of Anti-sealing Campaign, Says Activist.” CBC News. December 1, 2016. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/greenpeace-should-compensate-over-anti-sealing-campaign-says-activist-1.3875701.

Pachirat, Timothy. Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2011.

Parliament of Canada. “Bill C-555: An Act Respecting the Marine Mammal Regulations (Seal Fishery Observation Licence).” June 18, 2015. www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/41-2/bill/C-555/royal-assent.

Poore, Joeseph and Thomas Nemecek. “Reducing Food’s Environmental Impacts through Producers and Consumers.” Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science). 360, no. 6392, (2018): 987–992.

Powell, Dylan. “An Animal Liberationist Perspective on #sealfie and the Inuit Seal Hunt.” April 2, 2014. https://dylanxpowell.wordpress.com/2014/04/02/an-animal-liberationist-perspective-on-sealfie-and-the-inuit-seal-hunt/.

Robinson, Margaret. “Indigenous Veganism: Feminist Natives Do Eat Tofu.” The Scavenger. November 14, 2010. Accessed May 30, 2018. www.thescavenger.net/social-justice-sp-24912/animals/504-indigenous-veganism-feminist-natives-do-eat-tofu-237794.html.

———. “Veganism and Mi’kmaq Legends.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 33, no. 1 (2013): 189–196.

———. “Animal Personhood in Mi’kmaq Perspective.” Societies 4, no. 4 (2014): 672–688.

———. “Is the Moose Still My Brother If We Don’t Eat Him?” In Critical Perspectives on Veganism, edited by Jodey Castricano and Rasmus R. Simonsen, 261–284. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2016.

Shepon, Alon, Gidon Eshel, Elad Noor, and Ron Milo. “The Opportunity Cost of Animal Based Diets Exceeds All Food Losses.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 115, no. 15, (2018), doi:10.1073/pnas.1713820115.

Smuts, Barbara. “Between Species: Science and Subjectivity.” Configurations 14, no. 1–2 (2006): 115–126.

UBC. “A Light in Winter.” Catalyst for Innovation. January 2017, University of British Columbia. Accessed April 12, 2017. http://stories.innovation.ubc.ca/catalyst-for-innovation/a-light-in-winter/#sm.00002brxr7o02cqgzc01zdbxckpiu

VICE/Munchies. “Canada’s Controversial Seal Hunt.” Politics of Food. Season 1 Episode 8. June 28, 2017. https://video.vice.com/en_ca/video/politics-of-food-canadas-controversial-seal-hunt/57d2de3ef82e2002a8072de2

Wadiwel, Dinesh Joseph. The War against Animals. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill and Rodopi, 2015.

Watson, Paul. “I Do Not Apologize for Opposing the Slaughter of Seals.” January 28, 2016. www.pamelaandersonfoundation.org/news/2016/1/27/i-do-not-apologize-for-opposing-the-slaughter-of-seals-by-captain-paul-watson

Wolfe, Judy. “Why Are the Inuit So Angry?” Point of View Magazine. July 6, 2016. http://povmagazine.com/articles/view/why-are-the-inuit-so-angry

3 Makah whaling and the (non)ecological Indian

Claire Jean Kim

Early in the morning of May 17, 1999, in the Pacific waters off of the northwest tip of Washington State, a three-year-old female gray whale swam up alongside a canoe of Makah hunters, expressing the curiosity that many gray whales show toward humans. Theron Parker, the harpooner, stood up, and launched the first of three harpoons into her back. The hunt was being filmed, and television viewers across the globe watched “as the wounded whale struggled, twisting and zig-zagging, pulling the Makah hunters a short distance, three harpoons lodged in her 30-foot body.” As “bloodied waters swelled outward from the dying whale in crimson waves,”[184] the Makah hunters then shot her three times with a powerful rifle. The last bullet penetrated the gray whale’s brain and killed her. The broadcasting of the hunt prompted both exultation on the part of many Makah and intense expressions of sorrow and outrage on the part of other Makah and non-Makah.[185] Alberta Thompson, a Makah elder who opposed the hunt, named the whale who had been killed “Yabis,” which means “beloved” in the Makah language.[186]

It was the first time that the Makah had successfully hunted a whale in over 70 years. Once legendary whale hunters of the Pacific Northwest Coast, the Makah ceased whaling in the 1920s due, in part, to the depletion of whale populations brought about by European and American commercial whaling. Since that time, international and domestic practice and opinion had largely turned against whaling, so the tribe’s announcement in the mid-1990s that it wished to resume whaling set off a global firestorm that raged from the Makah reservation in Neah Bay to the National Marine Fisheries Service in Washington, DC to International Whaling Commission (IWC) meetings in Europe over what constitutes a subsistence hunting tradition, who owns the seas and living marine resources, the biological and moral status of the gray whale, the cultural rights of Indigenous peoples, and the imperatives of environmental protection. The Makah whale hunt has been the site of intense political, legal, moral, spiritual, and physical struggle from the moment it was proposed in the mid-1990s until today, when, deterred from whaling by legal and bureaucratic obstacles, the Makah wait to hunt again.

In this conflict, race, species, nature, and culture are passionately contested in a discursive-political space defined in part by multiculturalist norms and the values and practices of neoliberal capitalism. Indianness continues to be constituted here in relation to species and nature; claims of tribal identity and culture are both accorded presumptive weight and seen as special pleading against the universalist claims of environmental and animal protection; environmental and animal protection claims, in turn, are cast as racist and imperialist; and the neoliberal instrumentalization of nature as a “resource” proceeds in the face of unspoken collective anxiety about the rightness of this course. But the Makah whaling story also contains many distinctive elements—from the imagining of the “ecological Indian” in U.S. culture; to the special status of the whale as an intelligent mammal and environmental icon; to the vexing tangle of treaty rights, federal law, and international conservation law that contours this dispute; to the highly charged global politics of whaling; to the utterly unique political and legal status of Indigenous peoples as nations rather than minorities within the U.S.

A racial trope of considerable vintage took center stage in the discourse about the conflict. As far back as the 1600s, whites imagined the North American Indian as a constituent part of nature and apart from civilization— and this idea proved remarkably tenacious over the centuries. In the 1970s, in the context of the modern environmental movement, the idea reemerged in the trope of the “ecological Indian,” the Indian who is a natural conservationist, lives simply and virtuously, maintains a spiritual balance with nature, and thus serves as the perfect foil for the Western capitalist, whose greed and rapaciousness leave him severely out of joint with (not to mention a serious threat to) the natural world.[187] In this trope, the culture/nature divide is maintained and the Indian is still identified with nature, but now it is nature not culture that is valorized. The 1971 anti-pollution television commercial featuring Iron Eyes Cody as an Indian weeping over whites’ despoliation of nature exemplified this trope. In the whaling conflict, this trope was evoked by members of the public (and occasionally by environmental and animal protectionists) to castigate the Makah for acting non-ecologically, or betraying their Indianness. That is, the “ecological Indian” trope functioned as a disciplinary tool, essentializing Native Americans (in the guise of lauding them) and erecting a behavioral ideal that was both restrictive and unattainable.

In many ways, the debate over the relationship between Indians and nature was at the heart of the Makah whaling conflict. Native American leaders and scholars regularly assert that “indigenous standpoints” (Tallbear 2011) have something distinctive and important to say about human relations with nonhuman animals and nature, and they argue that Native peoples were practicing “sustainability” long before this ethos surfaced as an 11th hour response to the excesses of neoliberal capitalism (Coté 2010). But they did not therefore embrace the “ecological Indian” trope, the dualistic premises of which are alien to Native American ontologies, which rest on different foundational understandings about humans, animals, and nature than do Western ones (Deloria 2001; Tallbear 2011).

A few environmental and animal protectionists deployed the “ecological Indian” trope against the Makah, but most argued instead for moving beyond the dualisms of culture/nature and human/animal and rejecting the positioning of animals and nature as objects beneath us. For them, recognizing the whale’s subjectivity, understanding human-whale continuities, and respecting the whale logically entailed a prohibition on hunting the whale. But Native American ontologies, which have always viewed humans, animals, and other beings in nature as all animate and all related (non-dualistically), simultaneously recognize the animal’s kinship with the human and the rightness of killing animals for food (Nadasdy 2007). For Native Americans like the Makah, recognizing the whale’s subjectivity, understanding human-whale continuities, and respecting the whale logically allowed for hunting the whale.[188] Makah leaders presented an alternative ontology that sees animals as respect-worthy and important but still edible. Environmental and animal protectionists did not acknowledge or grapple with this different moral and spiritual understanding of human-whale relations, but simply dismissed it. This attempt to erect a Western framework of understanding upon the elision of a Native one elicited the charge of colonial domination from the Makah.

I begin with a historical account of the Makah tribe, gray whales, and the IWC and then tell the story of what happened when the Makah sought to resume whaling in the mid-1990s. Next, I examine the optics of ecological and ethical harm articulated by environmental and animal protectionists, as well as the optic of ecocolonialism articulated by the Makah in response. I then show how animal and environmental activists and Makah activists disavowed each other’s claims and perspectives in the course of political struggle. Here I pause to reflect, first, on the historical relationship of Makah whaling to slavery and sex inequalities within the tribe, and, second, on what it means to consider that gray whales might have their own perspective on the whaling issue. I conclude with a brief discussion of what an ethics of mutual avowal might entail in this case.

Histories: the Makah, gray whales, the International Whaling Commission

The Makah are a Native people who have lived on the tip of the Olympic Peninsula for thousands of years (see Figure 3.1). Based upon the neighboring Clallam tribe’s description, whites gave them the name “Makah,” meaning “generous with food.” Their name for themselves is kwih-dich-chuh-ahtX, meaning “people who live on the cape near the rocks and seagulls.”[189] The Makah are culturally and linguistically related to the Nuu-Chah-Nulth tribes on western Vancouver Island (just across the Strait of Juan de Fuca), who are First Nations in Canada. As a coastal people whose lands are largely inhospitable to agriculture, the Makah have traditionally lived off of the sea, developing deep local knowledge of the ocean’s shelves and currents and skills in fishing and sea mammal hunting.[190]

Figure 3.1

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Makah Reservation, Neah Bay, Washington.

Archaeological research at the Ozette site, discovered in the 1970s, indicates that for more than 1,500 years, whaling was an integral aspect of Makah life. Whales occupy a central status in Makah religious and spiritual practices, cultural ceremonies, and artwork. The practice of whaling reflected and in turn reinforced social organization and stratification within the tribe. Whaling was the preserve of chiefs or titleholders who owned not only the whaling equipment (canoes, buoys, harpoons) but also the songs and ceremonial rituals that accompanied the hunt. The practice enabled chiefs to amass the resources (including whale meat and whale oil) to hold potlatches—lavish ceremonial feasts where chiefs encouraged the consumption of goods and distributed goods in order to demonstrate and thereby shore up their power and authority. The Makah put almost every part of the whale’s body to use in some way, and evidence from the Ozette site suggests that whale products made up more than 80 percent of the tribe’s diet at one point.[191]

Whaling was also the key to the Makah’s commercial success during the mid-1800s. Although the first contact with Europeans occurred in the late 1700s, it was not until the 1840s that American and European whalers became a significant presence in the waters of the Pacific Northwest. The Makah, who had already established a thriving commerce in whale oil and dogfish oil with neighboring tribes, commenced trading with the Hudsons’ Bay Company as well, trading up to 30,000 gallons of whale oil a year and becoming one of the wealthiest tribes in the region.[192]

The arrival of whites brought short-term enrichment but long-term immiseration. By the mid-1800s, the colonization process which had begun centuries earlier on the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. had reached the Pacific. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 had forced Native American tribes from the southeastern U.S. to move west of the Mississippi River, and the U.S. government was setting up a system of reservations upon which to relocate them. In this context, Governor Isaac Stevens of the Washington Territory sat down with Makah elders to negotiate the Treaty of Neah Bay in 1855. In this treaty, the Makah ceded most of their lands, accepted the establishment of a reservation at Neah Bay of approximately 27,000 acres, received sums of money, and agreed to various regulations banning slavery, the sale of alcohol, and other practices on the reservation.[193] Historical accounts make it clear that the Makah were intent upon preserving their fishing, whaling, and sealing rights and that they received assurances from Governor Stevens’ aides that the U.S. would support these.[194] Makah Chief Stecowilth stated memorably, “I want the sea. That is my country.”[195] Article IV of the Treaty of Neah Bay states: “The right of taking fish and of whaling or sealing at usual and accustomed grounds and stations is further secured to said Indians in common with all citizens of the United States.” The Treaty of Neah Bay is the only Native American treaty with the U.S. government that explicitly secures the right to whale.

Despite its assurances, the U.S. government set out to radically restructure Makah society. The story is tragically reiterative of the histories of other Native American tribes. The plan was to forcibly assimilate the Makah into American society, which first required the strategic eradication of all markers of difference—that is, of Makah language, religion, and culture. Colson (1953) writes: “The policy was one of wholesale transformation, or the substitution of one entire way of life for an alien one.”[196] To this end, U.S. government representatives set up a boarding school for Makah children in 1874. Attendance was compulsory, and parents were jailed if they resisted sending their children. At the school, children were forbidden to wear traditional dress or speak the Makah language. For ten months of the year, they were relentlessly indoctrinated into believing that all things Makah were backward and pagan, and that Christianity and English were the keys to salvation.[197]

U.S. government agents took other steps to dismantle Makah society and rebuild it in their own image. They instituted a system of elected tribal government. They encouraged the destruction of the wooden longhouses where Makah kin groups lived and the construction of single-family homes in their place. They tried to stamp out potlatches, which they viewed as heathen rituals hampering assimilation. Instead of providing fishing and hunting equipment as promised, they distributed agricultural equipment. Hunters and fishermen had to be turned into farmers because agriculture was the foundation of civilization (even if the topography of the area did not support agriculture). The barbaric savage would be made Christian and civilized whether he wished this or not.[198] By and large, he did not wish this. The Makah continued to speak to their children in the Makah language and to teach them about their history and culture. They engaged in potlatches under the creative cover of Christian rituals like Christmas or in physical sites (e.g., Tatoosh Island) free of government supervision.[199] They accepted the agricultural equipment and transformed it into whaling equipment.[200]

Despite these forms of resistance, Makah society experienced significant political, social, and cultural disruption. The imposition of elected government and policies of cultural suppression (including the suppression of the potlatch) weakened the authority of titleholders:

[T]he Indian agents’ attempts to displace the authority, and consequently diminish the acquisition of wealth that accompanied chiefly positions, including that of the titled men who once carried out the whale hunt, took its toll on the community’s recognition of traditional leadership.[201]

Diseases introduced by whites—including smallpox, influenza, and tuberculosis—devastated the Makah population during the mid- to late-1800s, accelerating social change and disrupting the passing on of cultural knowledge and “proprietary rights regarding ownership of dances, songs, and other ceremonial and economic privileges.”[202] By 1890, such diseases had reduced the Makah population by 75 percent.[203]

With lines of traditional authority and cultural transmission interrupted, whaling became more difficult, and many Makah turned to sealing. The rise of commercial pelagic sealing in the 1860s enabled many Makah to thrive selling furs, working as laborers on sealing vessels, and occasionally purchasing and operating such vessels themselves. By 1875, sealing was the tribe’s principal source of income.[204] In sealing, commoners could make a living on their own, no longer dependent upon a chief who controlled access to resources.[205] The changing Makah social structure, that is, made whaling more difficult and sealing more plausible. In the 1890s, the combination of faltering seal populations and new government regulations on sealing prompted the Makah to return to whaling and other forms of fishing, but the alteration in the social structure that whaling had depended upon and reinforced, as well as the steady depletion of whale populations due to European and American commercial hunting, led the Makah to gradually cease whaling by the 1920s.

In 2010, the population of the Neah Bay reservation was 1414, 75 percent of whom were Makah tribal members. Another 1512 Makah tribal members lived off of the reservation.[206] The Makah Tribal Council is the governing body and consists of five members who are elected for staggered three-year terms.[207] Commercial fishing and timber are current mainstays of the tribe’s economy, as well as tourism and sport fishing.[208] As a result of extensive litigation in the 1970s, the tribe co-manages various fisheries with the state and other entities and gets a direct allocation of various kinds of fish (including halibut and black cod/sablefish) every year.[209] The decline of the Pacific Northwest timber industry and salmon fisheries in the past few decades has impacted the tribe’s economic welfare, however, and poverty, unemployment, drug abuse, and alcoholism are all notable problems on the reservation. Per capita income on the reservation in 2007 was $11,030, compared with $21,587 for all Americans, and the unemployment rate was 51 percent (this figure climbs even higher in the winter season). Almost 40 percent of reservation households are below the federal poverty line.[210] Makah Tribal Council members say they are a people in crisis and claim that whaling will restore tribal unity and pride, promote social cohesion, and reinvigorate their culture.

Gray whales pass through the Makah usual and accustomed hunting grounds twice a year on their famed migrations along the Pacific coast between their birthing lagoons in Baja Mexico and their summer feeding grounds in the Bering and Chukchi Seas off of Alaska (see Figure 3.2). They are uniquely vulnerable to human activity because they inhabit and migrate through shallow coastal waters. Human-related threats to their survival include ship strikes, fishing nets, pollution, global warming and its impact upon their prey, oil and gas exploration, military activities, and hunting. One-third of calves do not survive their first year and the momentous migration northward.[211] Our ability to narrate the history of gray whales—and “scientifically manage” their populations—is compromised by the fact that scientific knowledge about them is provisional, incomplete, and vigorously contested.

Figure 3.2

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Gray Whale Migration Route, Mexico to Alaska.

Eschrichtius robustus is a species of baleen whale whose members grow to between 36 and 50 feet long, weigh between 16 and 45 tons, and may live as long as 80 years.[212] They feed in shallow coastal waters by scraping the mud bottom and using their baleen to filter out their prey, which consists of benthic and epibenthic invertebrates such as amphipods, decapods, mollusks, sponges, and shrimp. They also consume pelagic prey such as crab larvae and herring eggs and larvae.[213] Like other whales, grays evolved from land mammals who returned to the sea about 50 million years ago.[214]

Recent studies of closely related species, as well as behavioral studies of grays themselves, suggest that gray whales are intelligent mammals with cognitive abilities, emotional lives, and social relations. A 2006 study of other baleen whales (the humpback and finback) and toothed whales, conducted at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, reported that these whales had, on a parallel track, evolved brain structures similar to our own, with specialized neurons called spindle cells which are linked to self-awareness, linguistic expression, compassion, and other traits. The study argued that these whales “exhibited complex social patterns that include intricate communication skills, coalition formation, cooperation, cultural transmission and tool usage.”[215] Many scientists argue that cetaceans’ large brains indeed “evolved to support complex cognitive abilities.”[216] Odontocetes (toothed whales), in particular, have large brains relative to body size because they hunt for food in groups, which requires highly developed social and communication skills. Although the evidence of cognitive abilities and social relations is stronger for odontocetes (toothed whales) than for mysticetes (baleen whales), Simmonds (2006) notes that the latter are understudied and that recent studies on minke whales suggest that “the behavior of baleen whales may be more complex than previously thought.”[217] Swartz (1986) points out that gray whales give care to unrelated calves and help injured companions, behaviors which suggest significant cognitive, emotional, and social abilities:

[O]n the Arctic feeding grounds, it was common for a second whale to remain with a harpooned one. In one instance, a harpooned pregnant female was supported at the surface by a second pregnant female that put her head and tail under the animal.[218]

Gray whales used to live in the Atlantic Ocean as well as the Pacific, but they were hunted to extinction in the Atlantic by the end of the 1600s.[219] They were very nearly driven to worldwide extinction by commercial whalers in the 1800s. Captain Charles Scammon’s discovery in 1858 that gray whales return every year to birthing lagoons in Mexico led to the intensive slaughtering of whales there and sent the population numbers of gray whales plummeting. Scammon went after calves, knowing that gray whale mothers would come in close to try to protect their young. By the late 1930s, gray whale numbers were estimated at 1,500 worldwide, down from tens of thousands prior to the advent of commercial whaling.[220] In 1937, in recognition of the gray whale’s dire situation, an international agreement on the regulation of whaling banned the commercial hunting of gray (and right) whales, with an exception for aboriginal hunting. Both the ban and the aboriginal exception were continued under the 1946 International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW), the agreement which established the IWC. In the 1970s, the U.S. extended the species additional protections by passing the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, which prohibits the “taking” of marine mammals (with various exceptions), and listing the gray whale as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Enacted in 1986, the IWC’s moratorium on commercial whaling, again with an aboriginal exception, also protects gray whales.

Today, there are two surviving populations of gray whales: the Western North Pacific gray whale and the Eastern North Pacific gray whale (ENP). The Western gray lives along the coasts of Russia, Japan, Korea, and China, whereas the Eastern gray lives along the coasts of Mexico, the U.S., and Canada (see Figure 3.3). The official stance of the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is that these are two genetically distinct populations with separate migratory routes and feeding and breeding grounds. When the NMFS advised the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to delist the gray whale in 1994—the governmental move that opened the door to the resumption of Makah whaling—it stated that the Eastern North Pacific gray whale had rebounded to a healthy population size of more than 20,000, whereas the Western gray whale remained critically endangered at a population size of 100–200, and recommended delisting only the former. However, scientists have recently discovered that “at least some individuals from summer feeding grounds utilized by the endangered western stock migrate across the Pacific and into areas used by ENP gray whales,” suggesting that the two populations may not be as distinct as previously thought.[221] The possible implications of these studies for the scientific management of gray whales are significant enough that the NMFS cited them in May 2012 as one reason they had decided to discard the 2008 Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) on the proposed Makah whale hunt and start the environmental impact assessment process over again. (It is ongoing at the time of this writing.)

Figure 3.3

k-s-kelly-struthers-montford-and-chloe-taylor-colo-2.jpg

Ranges for Western North Pacific and Eastern North Pacific Gray Whales.

Another reason given by the NMFS for discarding the DEIS also had to do with emergent data and scientific uncertainty. ENP gray whales engage in the longest bi-annual migration of any mammal, traveling up to 12,000 miles round trip from Baja Mexico to the Bering and Chukchi Seas in the spring, and back again in the fall. Each year, a small group of gray whales (approximately 200 individuals) does not travel all the way north to Alaska in the spring but instead chooses to spend the summer feeding in waters from Northern California to Northern British Columbia (an area that includes the Makah usual and accustomed fishing and hunting grounds). Scientists cannot explain why this subgroup of whales makes this decision, whether and to what extent these whales are distinguishable genetically or otherwise from whales who migrate all the way north to Alaska, or why the composition of this group varies to some degree but not wholly from year to year. What is certain is that the project of characterizing and understanding these whales has high political stakes. NMFS scientists call these whales the Pacific Coast Feeding Aggregation or Group (PCFA or PCFG) and emphasize that their composition varies somewhat annually, while whale advocates call them “resident” whales, speak of their “site fidelity,” note that some have returned every year for 25 years, and emphasize their individual identities (to the extent these are known through photo identification and other techniques). Continuing uncertainty about these whales is cited by the NMFS as another reason why they began the environmental impact review process anew in 2012: “In 2010 and 2011, researchers studying the genetics of ENP and PCFG whales found evidence of population substructure indicating that PCFG whales may warrant consideration as a separate management unit.”[222]

Like the California Fish and Game Commission, the NMFS claims to base all of its decisions in gray whale management on the “best available” science, a phrase that hints at the provisional nature of this science even while sanctifying it sanctifies it. In fact, the incompleteness and contingency of gray whale science is a pivotal part of the Makah whaling story. Scientists have been unable to explain, for instance, either the precipitous increase in gray whale deaths in 1999–2000, when strandings on the West Coast increased sevenfold, or the significant drop in calf production from 1999 to 2001.[223] The NMFS formed a special working group on the strandings, which it termed an “unusual mortality event,” but the group could not provide a definitive explanation for the phenomenon, instead citing a number of possible factors such as starvation due to unavailability of prey brought about by global warming.[224] Although strandings have diminished and calf production has rebounded, opponents of Makah whaling have pointed to these issues as evidence of the fragility of the gray whale population and the insufficiency of the “best available” science on this species.

The NMFS held fast to its overall population estimates for the gray whale through the delisting process and the environmental assessment of the Makah hunt, claiming that gray whales’ “historical abundance” or population before commercial hunting was between 15,000 and 24,000, and that their current population estimate of more than 20,000 indicates their full recovery, thereby justifying their delisting.[225] In 1991, the NMFS proposed delisting the ENP gray whale (but not the Western gray)

based on evidence that this [ENP] stock has recovered to near its estimated original population size and is neither in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range, nor likely to again become endangered within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range.[226]

The Fish and Wildlife Service approved delisting on June 16, 1994, accepting the NMFS’ claims that the current population of ENP whales is close to historic abundance and that the ENP and Western grays are wholly separate stocks. Both of these claims are, in fact, based on uncertain and contested science. Recent research by Alter et al. (2007), based upon genetic analysis of whale meat sold in Japanese markets, suggests that the historical abundance of gray whales may have been as high as 100,000, which casts the current population estimate of more than 20,000 and the delisting decision in an entirely new (and less favorable) light.[227] In their DEIS on the Makah hunt, the NMFS mentions the work of Alter et al. (2007) but dismisses it and stands by its original calculations of historical abundance.[228] Nevertheless, estimates of the historic population of gray whales remain highly contested among scientists.[229]

Biologists are not the only scientists perplexed by gray whales. For decades, this species has presented ethologists with a fascinating behavioral puzzle. In the birthing lagoons of Baja Mexico, locals have named gray whales “Las Ballenas Amistosos” or “friendly whales.” Friendlies, mothers who bring their calves right up to small whale-watching boats to be petted and adored by humans, often bear harpoon scars which indicate that they have encountered human hunters (probably Inupiat Eskimos). Why do whales who have had such experiences choose to approach humans and even encourage contact between their calves and humans? On a whale-watching excursion in Western Baja’s Laguna San Ignacio, author Charles Siebert asked HSUS marine mammal biologist Toni Frohoff if the whales were possibly expressing forgiveness. Frohoff responds:

Those are the kinds of things that for the longest time a scientist wouldn’t dare consider. But thank goodness we’ve gone through a kind of cognitive revolution when it comes to studying the intelligence and emotion of other species. In fact, I’d say now that it’s my obligation as a scientist not to discount that possibility. We do have compelling evidence of the experience of grief in cetaceans; and of joy, anger, frustration and distress and self-awareness and tool-use; and of protecting not just their young but also their companions from humans and other predators. So these are reasons why something like forgiveness is a possibility. And even if it’s not that exactly, I believe it’s something…I’d put my career on the line and challenge anybody to say that these whales are not actively soliciting and engaging in a form of communication with humans, both through eye contact and tactile interaction and perhaps acoustically in ways that we have not yet determined.[230]

The whale watchers in San Ignacio experience not only the whale’s subjectivity—the sense, in ethologist Barbara Smuts’ words, of looking in an animal’s eyes and realizing there is “someone home”—but a moment of interspecies intersubjectivity. A moment of mutual beholding, where whale and human regard one another and say something to one another. Many remark upon the singular experience of being beheld as the whale turns on her side beside the boat and opens her eye to observe them.

The gray whale was pulled back from the brink of extinction in the mid-20th century by international conservation law. As mentioned above, the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (1946) continued an earlier international agreement to protect grays from commercial hunting, with an aboriginal exception. The ICRW created the IWC, whose original mission was not to protect whales per se but rather “to provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry.”[231] The IWC wanted to conserve whales, in other words, so that there would be enough of them to hunt. There is little doubt that signatory nations viewed whales instrumentally, as means to human ends: until 1972, national whaling quotas were allocated in BWUs (blue whale units), with one BWU equaling two fin whales, 2.5 humpback whales, or six Sei whales. The whale was not an individual animal but a number of units of whale—a measurable commodity with a set exchange value. From the 1940s through the 1960s, the IWC set whaling quotas higher than its own Scientific Committee recommended, ignoring the latter’s warnings that several whale species were headed toward extinction.[232]

Beginning in the 1970s, however, the body slowly but perceptibly adopted a more protectionist tone toward whales. To begin with, the U.S. turned decisively toward protectionism. Responding to domestic pressure from environmental and animal protection groups, the U.S. government placed several whale species on the newly created endangered species list and passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972) prohibiting the “taking” of marine mammals domestically. Congress passed the Pelly (1971) and Packwood-Magnuson (1979) amendments to create more leverage for the U.S. to persuade noncompliant nations to abide by international conservation programs and ICRW regulations.[233] At the annual IWC meetings, the U.S. unsuccessfully proposed a global moratorium on commercial whaling in 1972, 1973, 1974, 1979, 1980, and 1981. Finally, in the early 1980s, a number of non-whaling nations joined the IWC, creating the three-fourth supermajority needed to approve the moratorium in 1982.[234] The international body that had been created to protect whales for the whaling industry was now protecting whales from the whaling industry.

The implementation of the moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986 did not end the battle between pro- and anti-whaling nations in the IWC; it merely shifted the terrain. Several nations including Norway, Iceland, and Japan lodged objections to the moratorium, although Japan later withdrew its objection because of pressure from the U.S. government. Under IWC regulations, a member nation which lodges an objection to the body’s decision can flout that decision with impunity, and Norway and Iceland have since resumed commercial whaling.[235] Pro-whaling nations have also sought to exploit the moratorium’s two exceptions—for aboriginal subsistence whaling (ASW) and for “scientific research”—all the while shrugging off condemnation from the IWC and environmental and animal protection organizations worldwide. Japan has continued commercial whaling under the “scientific research” exception, claiming that it needs to kill whales to advance scientific knowledge. It has also argued continuously since the moratorium was enacted that what it calls STCW (small type coastal whaling), traditional hunting conducted with hand implements by coastal villagers, should be considered aboriginal subsistence whaling and thus permitted. Indeed, Japan has accused the U.S. and other anti-whaling nations of having a discriminatory “double standard” when it comes to the ASW exception.[236] In addition, pro-whaling nations have fought assiduously to overturn the moratorium within the IWC. The IWC has become a case study of an international organization struggling without enforcement powers to maintain compliance among member states to a global conservation regime. The moratorium is helping whale populations to recover, but it is a fragile and ongoing accomplishment, vulnerable to being overturned or rendered irrelevant by noncompliance. When the Makah signaled their eagerness to resume whaling in the mid-1990s, their story intersected explosively with this global political battle over whaling.

The Makah whale again: scientific and legal uncertainties

Interest in Makah culture and history was reinvigorated in the 1970s by the discovery of the Ozette site—a Makah village located 30 miles from Neah Bay that had been buried by a mudslide hundreds of years ago. The artifacts at Ozette, which turned out to be one of the most important archaeological finds in Pacific Northwest history, confirmed the historical centrality of whaling to Makah life and generated excitement within the tribe about this practice. The larger political environment in the region and the nation was also conducive to tribal revival. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Makah and other Northwest Coast tribes had been involved in extensive litigation to defend their treaty fishing rights, culminating in the favorable “Boldt” decision of 1974, which imposed a conservation necessity test on state regulation of tribal fishing and guaranteed tribes 50 percent of the harvestable fish in their usual and accustomed fishing grounds.[237] As part of this struggle, the Makah and other tribes had organized “fish-ins,” modeled on the sit-ins of the then-emergent civil rights movement. By the 1970s, movements were flowering within Black, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Asian American, and Native American communities across the nation. Liberation, self-determination, and sovereignty were the principles of the era. In this context, insistence on their right to whale came to be read by many Makah as an assertion of sovereignty and a rebuke to the failed designs of white colonialism.

Discussions about whaling percolated within the Makah tribe and in the 1980s, the Makah, along with other Northwest Coast tribes and fisheries, approached the NMFS about delisting the gray whale. Beck (1996), based on an interview with Makah Fisheries Director Dan Greene, writes that “from 1987 to 1993, [the Makah] were closely involved with NMFS’s eventual 1993 recommendation to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) for de-listing the gray whale from the Endangered Species list, approved by FWS in 1994.”[238] This was the first step on a long journey through the intricacies of U.S. and international regulations relating to whaling, and the Makah brought to this process “political savvy gleaned from decades of experience with legal and political struggles through courts and directly with NMFS officials on issues involving fishing rights.”[239]

This early Makah involvement in delisting the gray whale was behind the scenes and largely off the record, it seems, since neither the Makah tribe nor the NMFS acknowledges it in the official documents they have produced concerning the delisting process and the subsequent tribal proposal to resume whaling. The official record of the NMFS indicates only that the agency received a 1991 petition for delisting from the Northwest Indian Fisheries (of which the Makah are a part) and that the NMFS disregarded the petition since the delisting process was already well underway.[240] The Makah tribe, for its part, implies that it was not involved in lobbying the NMFS for delisting and that it waited patiently until the NMFS acted of its own accord: “Once NOAA determined that the protections of the Endangered Species Act were no longer necessary, the Tribe notified NOAA that it wished to reinitiate a ceremonial and subsistence gray whale hunt.”[241] Just as the NMFS wants to present its decision making as neutral and insulated from political pressure—based on the “best available science”—so, too, does the Makah tribe want to present its actions as environmentally sensitive. It would not enhance the tribe’s image to be seen as pushing the NMFS to delist the gray whale for the sake of resuming the hunt.

Once the ENP grays were delisted, the Makah pressed the NMFS for permission to whale, and the U.S. government agreed to request a quota for the Makah under the ASW exception at the 1996 IWC meeting.[242] Although they came under immediate fire from whaling opponents at home and abroad, U.S. officials interpreted the government’s historic trust responsibility toward the Makah as mandating this action. This trust responsibility toward Native American tribes was first articulated in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), wherein Chief Justice John Marshall held that tribes were “domestic dependent nations,” that their relationship to the state was that of ward to guardian, and that all three branches of the U.S. government had a fiduciary obligation to protect and support them.[243] In the modern era, the trust responsibility has been seen as an “explicit duty binding the U.S. to uphold Indian treaty obligations and act as trustee in promoting the economic and political development of the Indian tribes.”[244] The Indian Tribal Justice Support Act (1993), the Department of Commerce’s American Indian and Alaska Native Policy (March 30, 1995), and Executive Order 13175 (2000) all affirm the government’s unique obligation to Native American tribes.[245]

Opposition to the Makah request emerged before the 1996 IWC meeting convened. Over 300 organizations worldwide signed an “Open Letter to the Makah Nation” asking them to reconsider their plan:

The undersigned groups respectfully appeal to the Makah Nation to refrain from the resumption of whaling. People from many cultures worldwide hold whales to be sacred and consider each species a sovereign nation unto itself, worthy of respect and protection. Gray whales migrate vast distances each year and bring joy to many thousands of whale watchers. They only briefly pass through Makah waters. The resumption of the slaughter of these benign and trusting beings would bring to your nation swift and ongoing world-wide condemnation. We submit that important spiritual traditions must be observed in the context of a planet whose wildlife are being destroyed by habitat reduction, human overpopulation and exploitation, competition for food, and the proliferation of toxic chemicals. As global neighbors also committed to healing our spiritual connection to the natural world, we appeal to you to work with us to pursue creative alternatives to your planned whaling, avoiding a conflict that will have no winners.[246]

Predicting the intense conflict that would envelop the Makah whaling proposal, the letter highlights two counterweights to the Makah argument about cultural tradition: the fact that many other cultures believe that the whale deserves “respect and protection” and the idea that traditions should be flexible enough to take changing (ecological) circumstances into account.

During the 1996 IWC meeting, anti-whaling nations argued that the Makah request did not satisfy the terms of the ASW exception. A 1982 IWC report had clarified the following terms relating to the ASW exception:

Aboriginal subsistence whaling means whaling for purposes of local aboriginal consumption carried out by or on behalf of aboriginal, indigenous, or native peoples who share strong community, familial, social, and cultural ties related to a continuing traditional dependence on whaling and on the use of whales. Local aboriginal consumption means the traditional uses of whale products by local aboriginal, indigenous, or native communities in meeting their nutritional, subsistence, and cultural requirements. The term includes trade in items which are by-products of subsistence catches. Subsistence catches are catches of whales by aboriginal subsistence whaling operations.[247]

Critics argued that the Makah could demonstrate neither a “continuing traditional dependence” upon whaling nor a subsistence requirement for whale meat, and that they were therefore not eligible for the ASW exception. In addition, Alberta Thompson and other dissenting Makah elders arrived at the meeting to speak against their tribe’s request. As Thompson puts it, “[We] were grandmothers arriving at the IWC in wheelchairs.”[248] The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Resources seized the moment to unanimously pass a resolution expressing opposition to the Makah hunt.[249] U.S. officials decided to withdraw the request for a Makah quota.

At the next IWC meeting in 1997, the U.S. did an end run around the quota approval process by folding its gray whale quota request into that of the Chukotka (Indigenous inhabitants of Russia) and trading part of the Alaskan Inupiat’s bowhead whale quota in exchange for some of the Chukotka’s gray whale quota. Member nations opposing Makah whaling were left with little choice but to approve the Chukotka quota, since this people clearly fit the ASW exception and received quotas every year from the IWC. They registered their protest by issuing a statement that the ASW exception applies only to those “whose traditional subsistence and cultural needs have been recognized by the IWC,” but the U.S. succeeded in removing “by the IWC” from the statement, thus leaving the recognizing agent unspecified and the statement virtually meaningless.[250] Coming out of the 1997 IWC meeting, the NMFS and Makah claimed that the IWC had allocated the latter a gray whale quota, and whaling opponents (including anti-whaling nations such as Australia and New Zealand) claimed that the IWC never explicitly recognized the Makah under the ASW exception and that the Makah therefore had no legal right to whale.[251]

In April 1998, the NMFS announced that Makah subsistence and cultural needs had been recognized by both the U.S. and the IWC and issued the tribe a gray whale quota. The Makah hunted a gray whale in May 1999, as described at the opening of this chapter. Before the Makah could hunt again, a coalition of individuals and environmental and animal protection groups took the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—of which the NMFS is a part—to court, arguing that it had shown bias (in favor of the hunt) and had rushed to judgment in its assessment of what kind of environmental impact Makah whaling was likely to have, thus violating the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970.[252] In Metcalf v. Daley (2000), the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, finding that the NOAA had indeed shown bias and violated NEPA by preparing an Environmental Assessment (EA)—which resulted in an FONSI or “finding of no significant impact”—of the proposed hunt after it had already committed itself in writing to supporting the Makah hunt.[253] The court wrote:

It is highly likely that because of the Federal Defendants’ prior written commitment to the Makah and concrete efforts on their behalf, the EA was slanted in favor of finding that the Makah whaling proposal would not significantly affect the environment.[254]

The court also affirmed that the U.S. Supreme Court “has clearly held that treaty rights such as those at stake in this case ‘may be regulated…in the interest of conservation…provided the regulation…does not discriminate against the Indians’.”[255] The NOAA was ordered to set aside the written agreement it had made with the Makah tribe, start the NEPA process again from scratch, and prepare a new EA.

After the NMFS issued a second EA in July 2001, again with a “finding of no significant impact” (FONSI), it found itself back in court. In Anderson v. Evans (2002), the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals once again ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, finding that the NOAA had violated NEPA by preparing an EA rather than a more comprehensive Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).[256] The court argued that the impact of the Makah hunt upon the small population of “local” or “resident” whales was “sufficiently uncertain and controversial to require the full EIS protocol.”[257] The Court also remarked upon the IWC’s ambiguous language about aboriginal and subsistence needs needing to be “recognized”:

We cannot tell whether the IWC intended a quota specifically to benefit the Tribe…[T]he surrounding circumstances of the adoption of the Schedule cast doubt on the intent of the IWC to approve a quota for the Tribe…Whether recognition must formally come from the IWC or from the United States is not clear.[258]

Noting the potential precedential impact of the scenario, the court remarks:

Prior to adoption of this language, the understanding among IWC members was that only the IWC could decide which groups met the subsistence exception. The 1997 IWC gray whale quota, as implemented domestically by the United States, could be used as a precedent for other countries to declare the subsistence need of their own aboriginal groups, thereby making it easier for such groups to gain approval for whaling.[259]

Environmental and animal protectionists expressed deep concern about the Makah hunt opening the door to the claims of other groups across the world. The Court’s remarks recognized the legitimacy of those concerns.

The Anderson court also ruled that the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) of 1972 applies despite the Makah’s treaty rights because the courts have recognized the government’s right to regulate Native American fishing in the name of “conservation necessity.”[260] The Makah were therefore required to apply for a waiver from the MMPA in order to whale. Here the court argued that Article IV of the Treaty of Neah Bay, which grants the Makah fishing, whaling, and sealing rights “in common with all citizens of the United States,” indicates a “cotenancy” relationship over these resources. According to the court, the “in common with” language

prevent[s] Indians from relying on treaty rights to deprive other citizens of a fair apportionment of that resource…[which means] the Makah cannot, consistent with the plain terms of the treaty, hunt whales without regard to processes in place and designed to advance conservation values by preserving marine mammals or to engage in whalewatching, scientific study, and other non-consumptive uses…The MMPA will properly allow the taking of marine mammals only when it will not diminish the sustainability and optimum level of the resource for all citizens.[261]

In other words, gray whales are common property of U.S. citizens—res communis, or part of the global (in this case, national) commons.[262] Thus the Makah treaty right to whale, though valid, must be weighed against other U.S. citizens’ right to have (non-consumptive) access to this resource as well. Unlike the environmental and animal protection groups who made various biocentric assertions in the “Open Letter to the Makah Nation,” the court relied exclusively on anthropocentric claims to make its case. Although the intent is protectionist, the court’s instrumentalizing language is eerily reminiscent of the IWC’s old unit of measurement, Blue Whale Units. Which type of argument has more promise for protecting gray whales—a neoliberal one about resources and property rights or an alternative one about ecological health and animal well-being? Can they be deployed together or are they mutually exclusive?

In 2012, the NMFS abruptly announced that it was discarding the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) it had been working on and starting the process from scratch, citing, as described above, “several substantive scientific issues [which] arose that required an extended period of consideration.”[263] With the NEPA process restarting, it will likely be several more years until a new DEIS is produced, subjected to public comment, and revised into a final EIS. Thus it will be several more years until the decision is made to grant or not the Makah a waiver to the MMPA. The contingency of gray whale science surfaces and shakes things up, highlighting the unstable foundation of scientific management efforts and the uncertain status of the species. The scientific management of the commons in the public interest turns out to be a fraught and deeply political project.

The optics of ecological and ethical harm

Environmental and animal protectionist organizations made two principal types of arguments against the Makah hunt.[264] These are analytically distinct optics that were often combined in practice. The first was that Makah whaling caused real and potential ecological harm by killing members of a species whose status is precarious and opening the door legally and morally to whaling by others around the world. The second was that Makah whaling caused ethical harm by taking the lives of animals who deserve significant moral consideration and, in the eyes of some, a “right to life.” Thus many whale advocates went beyond admonitions about cruelty and the infliction of unnecessary suffering to suggesting that whales, because of their special characteristics, deserve to be protected from hunting altogether.

Staff scientists from the environmental and animal protections groups challenged the NMFS’s “best available science” at every turn—questioning specific studies and claims, requesting up-to-date and impartial research on all aspects of gray whale behavior, biology, and ecology, and emphasizing the indeterminacy of gray whale science. Reporting on the response of these organizations to the 2008 DEIS, the NMFS scoping report drily noted:

Ocean Defense International commented that the EIS needs to examine the methodology of population estimates over the last ten years…because the assessments cannot be made on questionable or out of date data. Cetacean Society International commented that data must be sought from all legitimate sources (not just NMFS-funded), and asked for the EIS to discuss NFMS’ funding priorities, or lack of, for assessments. The comment claimed that because NFMS has not funded and accomplished recent studies, the EIS cannot assert with objectivity that climate, population and habitat trends are suitable to allow whaling in a given future period, much less that the population will remain stable.[265]

In an August 10, 2012 letter to the NMFS, HSUS marine mammal scientist Dr. Naomi Rose urged NMFS officials preparing their new EIS to pay heed to the Alter et al. (2007) study on historical ENP population estimates so that they might develop a “proper environmental baseline” from which to analyze the environmental impact of the Makah hunt.

Whale advocates also warned insistently about the precedential dangers posed by Makah whaling. Some expressed strong concern that the Makah would move from “cultural and subsistence” hunting to resuming full-scale commercial hunting. The fact that IWC regulations allowed the sale of handicrafts made from non-edible whale products seemed to blur the line between aboriginal and commercial whaling. In an October 24, 2005 letter to the NMFS, Cathy Liss, President of the Animal Welfare Institute, wrote: “AWI is concerned that the granting of an additional waiver to the MMPA [to the Makah] for the sale of handicrafts made from whale products within the United States might lead to commercialization of the whale as a resource.”[266]

The Makah Tribal Council had assured the NMFS that they had no plans to resume commercial whaling, and the tribe’s “Application for a Waiver of the Marine Mammal Protection Act Take Moratorium” (2005) clearly stated that the tribe wished to hunt only for local consumption and ceremonial purposes. Yet the Makah had openly discussed the resumption of commercial whaling early on in the approval process. Obtained through an FOIA request, an April 27, 1995 memo from an NMFS staffer to Michael Tillman, the Deputy U.S. Commissioner to the IWC, mentioned that the Makah planned “to operate a processing plant so as to sell [whale meat] to markets outside the U.S….[and] have started discussions with Japan and Norway about selling their whale products to both countries.”[267] John McCarty, Executive Director of the Makah Whaling Commission, remarked: “[S]elling the whale was a thought. And I’ll be honest with you. Selling the whale could be very, very advantageous to the tribe.”[268] In addition, in a May 5, 1995 letter to Will Martin of NOAA and David Colson of the Department of State, Makah Tribal Council member Hubert Markishtum states for the record that the Makah have the treaty right to hunt whales commercially and that they are not waiving that right by applying for an ASW exception.[269]

The precedential danger was magnified, whale protectionists argued, because of the U.S. government’s demonstration of bias during the NEPA and IWC approval processes. The HSUS sent numerous scoping letters to the NMFS alleging the agency’s bias and warning that Makah whaling would open the door to other groups and nations keen on expanding the definition of ASW. In a February 16, 2001 letter to the NMFS, HSUS marine mammal scientist Dr. Naomi Rose wrote that the just-released Draft Environmental Assessment (DEA), with its finding of no significant impact (FONSI), was misguided because it relied on the U.S. delegation’s interpretation of what had occurred at the 1997 IWC meeting—an interpretation which was “entirely erroneous” and “self-serving”: “The HSUS firmly believes that in order to avoid a lawsuit by the Makah Tribe regarding treaty rights, the US has wilfully misinterpreted the unambiguous statements and intentions of other IWC delegations.” Rose points to the verbatim record of the 1997 IWC plenary session, which indicates that a majority of the nations who voted for the Chukotka gray whale quota “specified that their votes were not to be perceived as support for the U.S. request or the Makah Tribe’s ASW claims.” In an October 24, 2005 letter to NMFS, Rose then highlights the IWC definition of “local aboriginal consumption” as including “nutritional, subsistence, and cultural requirements” and argues that transcripts of the 1996 and 1997 IWC meetings indicate dissensus on whether Makah nutritional needs had been adequately established. Finally, in an August 20, 2012 letter to the NMFS, Rose concludes that the Makah hunt does not “conform to international standards of subsistence whaling…and threaten[s] to create (and has indeed de facto created) a new category of whaling—cultural whaling—that does not reflect a true subsistence need.” The NMFS is responsible for this outcome as its actions “have consistently resulted in legal short cuts and questionable policy positions that have weakened domestic and international whale protection.”

The ecological Indian trope was deployed as a disciplinary tool by some whaling opponents (both members of the public and a few advocates).[270] The suggestion here was that the Makah were betraying their Makahness by pursuing an activity that threatened environmental balance. In seeking to whale, they were being non-ecological or bad Indians. Consider this email sent to the NMFS during the scoping period for the 2008 DEIS:

Whales are one of the wonders and treasures of the world, and their sacred being is for all mankind. It is very disheartening to see that the quest for their destruction for profit is still going on. I honor and respect our native peoples and have a reverence for their culture. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the history Oholone tribe has shown that they were one of the most peaceful, spiritual peoples that ever walked planet earth…I believe that any Makah who are willing to destroy one of the most magnificent creatures that the earth has provided are not true to their spirit. Surely, sharing and providing educational opportunities to view and be with these creatures would be a better income producing avenue for the Makah.[271]

A whale advocate made a similar point: “The Makahs are the cowboys here…and we’re the Indians. We’re protecting nature with very few resources; the Makah are hunting with high-caliber weapons, and with the Coast Guard and the U.S government behind them.”[272] The force of this statement, of course, lies in its pointed reversal of the ecological Indian trope. It is the Makah who are the rapacious, powerful despoilers of nature, while their opponents struggle to stymie their destructive advance. The Makah have become so non-ecological that they are like cowboys. Reprising a common theme among whaling opponents, one letter writer to the Seattle Times wrote:

Make your clothing on looms so you will look like your ancestors when you are hunting. Give up Gore-Tex and Thinsulate, wear moccasins instead of sneakers and hiking boots. Grow and hunt the rest of your food, stop going to grocery stores. Stop using electricity and all the appliances it supplies…If you really want to return to the ‘old days’ of your culture, then turn around and go all the way back.[273]

The suggestion here was that the Makah tribe’s embrace of things modern—including modern methods of hunting such as a high-powered rifle and a speedboat—meant that the hunt was not authentic and that they were not acting like authentic Indians.[274] The tone of the quote is sarcastic and disparaging, implying that the Makah are using culture as an excuse to kill whales and that they want to have it both ways by claiming traditionalism while availing themselves of modern conveniences.

The second optic used by whale advocates focused on the ethical harm done by the Makah hunt to unique creatures who deserve human protection. Many of the emails sent by concerned individuals to the NMFS during the public comment period on the DEIS opposed the hunt on the grounds that gray whales were singularly “majestic,” “ancient,” and “intelligent,” with large, complex brains and strong family bonds. Victor Sheffer, former chair of the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission, spoke for many when he stated: “I believe we ought to stop killing them[whales] unless for human survival only…I see no need to extend this protective ethic to rabbits, or chickens, or fish. Whales are different.”[275] The uniqueness argument was an effective strategy for mobilizing public opposition to the Makah hunt, particularly because whales have been emblems of environmental consciousness in the U.S. since the “Save the Whales” campaign of the 1970s. That it straightforwardly asserted a species hierarchy and thus rendered other kinds of animals (rabbits, chickens, fish, and others) more killable, concerned some, including Gillespie (1997), who recommends linking the critique of whaling to a broader discussion about the “the moral considerability of [all] animals.”[276] Interestingly, the ontology explicated by Makah leaders accepts most if not all of these posited whale attributes—and still views whales as edible. Again, this was a wrinkle that environmental and animal advocates did not explore.

Several scholars have directly challenged the IWC’s and NMFS’s scientific management model for its reduction of whales to resources, calling instead for a re-imagining of whales as morally considerable beings. Hawkins (2001) writes:

The central issue…[is] not a matter of whether or not ‘science’ tells us that certain whale populations can be ‘harvested sustainably’ given the industrial economic model; it is, rather, whether or not that model itself is an appropriate one for all, or any, of humanity to adopt and live by.[277]

Addressing the question of Inuit whaling, D’Amato and Chopra (1991) challenge the anthropocentric view that the humans’ (Inuits’) are the only interests at stake:

[T]here is a second interest: that of the great whales in the survival of their species or—even short of claims of survival—in their right to live. The whales find their own sustenance in the oceans; by what right do the Inuit expropriate the bodies of the whales to serve as their food?[278]

The authors point to trends in international conservation law, evolving state practices, and a “broadening international cultural consciousness” as evidence that a “right to life” for whales is emerging as part of binding customary international law.[279] They argue that international institutions regulating whaling have gone through five incremental stages—free resource, regulation, conservation, protection, preservation—and are now entering the sixth stage of “entitlement.”[280]

Of the broad coalition of groups opposing the Makah hunt, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society was the most visible. Unlike the local groups involved, SSCS operates globally and has an international reputation. Unlike broad-stroke groups like the HSUS, SSCS maintains a specific focus on protecting marine life, especially whales. With its outspoken leader, Captain Paul Watson, SSCS has garnered attention as a direct-action group which seeks out dramatic encounters with whaling vessels on the high seas. SSCS holds that whaling by Norway, Japan, and others is illegal because it is done in defiance of (or by exploiting loopholes in) IWC regulations and casts itself in an international law enforcement role, as per the U.N. statement authorizing citizens to undertake such action. The SSCS website lists “12 Primary Reasons for Opposing the Plan to Slaughter Whales by the Makah.” Copied and pasted into many of the citizen emails sent to the NMFS, the list expresses the range of complementary arguments (paraphrased below, except for items 11 and 12, which are directly quoted) made against the hunt:

1. The Makah do not qualify for the IWC’s ASW exception because they do not have an unbroken tradition of whaling and they do not have a subsistence dependence on whale meat.

2. The U.S. abrogated the Treaty of Neah Bay when it signed the IWC in 1946; it does not therefore have the right to grant a whale quota to the Makah.

3. The Makah will ask for quotas on other whales next.

4. Makah whaling will motivate tribes on Vancouver Island to resume whaling.

5. Allowing the Makah to whale will strengthen the position of Japan, Norway, and Iceland as they seek to expand their illegal whaling operations.

6. The original Makah plan was to whale commercially and sell the meat to Japan.

7. The IWC never granted a gray whale quota to the Makah.

8. Makah whaling will threaten resident whales.

9. Makah whaling will stress whales in the area, posing a danger to whale watchers.

10. Many Makah oppose whaling, which has been pushed through without full democratic tribal participation.

11. “Tradition and culture must not be the basis for slaughter. The ancestors of the Makah killed whales because they had to do so for survival. There is no survival necessity today to justify such killing. The treaty that the Makah cite as evidence of their right to whale specifically states that they have the right to whale ‘in common with the people of the United States.’ When the treaty was signed, all Americans had the right to kill whales. When whaling was outlawed for all Americans it included the Makah as the rights are ‘in common’ and not separate. There cannot be unequal rights granted in a system that promotes equality under the law. This is tantamount to extra special rights for a group of people based on race and/or culture and is contrary to the guarantee of equality under the law as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.”

12. “Whales should not be slaughtered anytime or anywhere by any people. These are socially complex, intelligent mammals whose numbers worldwide have been diminished severely. Sea Shepherd is dedicated to the objective of ending the killing of all whales in the world’s oceans forever. In this effort, we speak for the whales as citizens of the Earth whose right to live and survive on this planet must be defended.”[281]

The 11th item reads the “in common with” language from the Treaty of Neah Bay not as indicating “cotenancy” in whales as resources, as the Anderson court asserted, but rather as indicating that the Makah right to whale was abrogated along with other Americans’ right to whale by the ICRW/WCA and the MMPA. The suggestion that the Makah are asking for “special rights” (point 11) reverberates loudly with the claims of opponents of Native American rights and minority rights more generally.

The optic of ecocolonialism

The Makah Tribal Council (MTC) attributed the furor over their attempted resumption of whaling to ecocolonalism or ecoracism—that is, to the continuation of historical colonialism in contemporary ecological garb. Reading environmental and animal activists’ efforts through the lens of anti-colonialism, they rejected their ontological and moral claims outright. In their view, whaling had been central to Makah culture for millennia and it had been secured in perpetuity by their far-thinking ancestors in the Treaty of Neah Bay. To resume whaling meant honoring and connecting with those ancestors, recovering a suppressed tradition, restoring a severed bond between the Makah and the whale, making real a treaty right, and reinvigorating tribal culture and identity. As time went by, it also meant resisting colonial domination and asserting sovereignty, as the firestorm grew and public denunciations of the Makah intensified.

Responding to charges that their culture was reconstructed, adulterated, and inauthentic, Makah tribal leaders emphasized the continuity of their cultural traditions, characterizing the 70-year hiatus from whaling as a brief interruption and pointing out the clear persistence of whaling songs, dances, stories, and images in contemporary Makah culture. Their culture was living and evolving, they argued, and technological change was a continuous part of this process. Just as shifting from using harpoons made of mussel shells to harpoons made of steel had not made the whale hunt less authentic, neither did using a rifle and speedboat, particularly since these latter adaptations were made to make the kill more humane and to enhance the hunters’ safety.[282] A Makah with a rifle was still a Makah and still an Indian, not a cowboy. Makah leaders read criticisms of their practices as thinly veiled expressions of ethnocentrism and hostility—that is, as reiterations of the colonial impulse. In an “Open Letter to the Public from the President of the Makah Whaling Commission” (August 6, 1998), Keith Johnson wrote:

We don’t take well to Sea Shepherd or PAWS telling us we should rise to a ‘higher’ level of culture by not whaling. To us the implication that our culture is inferior if we believe in whaling is demeaning and racist.[283]

On the Makah tribe’s website, www.makah.com, Makah leaders charge their opponents with manufacturing an uproar in an attempt to suppress Makah culture:

Much of this opposition has been whipped up deliberately by organized groups who have put out a blizzard of propaganda attacking us…The anti-whaling community is very well organized and very well financed and puts out a steady stream of propaganda designed to denigrate our culture and play on human sympathy for animals. Perhaps what is lost in all of their rhetoric is an appreciation of the value of preserving the culture of an American Indian Tribe—a culture which has always had to struggle against the assumption by some non-Indians that their values are superior to ours… We can only hope that those whose opposition is most vicious will be able to recognize their ethnocentrism—subordinating our culture to theirs.[284]

Makah leaders directly linked the firestorm over whaling to practices of colonial domination manifested centuries earlier. Wayne Johnson, the captain of the Makah whaling crew in the 1999 hunt, said of protesters: “[T]hem being here is like bringing a blanket of smallpox,” referring to the notorious plans of British officers to use blankets to infect the Delawares with smallpox during the Seige of Fort Pitt in 1758 in the French and Indian War.[285] As one observer noted, “The more the [Makah] tribe discussed the topic of whaling in the media, the more the boundaries between past federal conflicts and modern environmental frictions blurred.”[286]

Some of the public criticism of the Makah lent credence to the notion that a colonialist mindset was at play. While environmental and animal protectionists mostly refrained from making comments on race or indigeneity and steered away from language that was obviously racially fraught, some members of the public did not hesitate to denigrate the Makah as savage, barbaric, and backward. In public scoping comments emailed to the NMFS about the DEIS, one person wrote: “It is difficult for civilized countries to imagine such barbarity towards endangered species of whales…These are primitive and savage acts that reflect badly on the Makah tribe and United States’ citizens” (May 18, 2008). Other emailed comments included “These tribes need to come to terms with evolving with the civilized world” (May 12, 1008) and “It is time for the Makah to come out of the Stone Age” (May 9, 2008).

Other public comments were aggressively threatening and contemptuous toward the Makah. Bumper stickers which read “Save a Whale, Harpoon a Makah” reversed the status of animal and Indian, suggesting that the former deserved moral consideration while the latter was merely animal. In his analysis of letters and calls to the Seattle Times right after the 1999 hunt, Tizon (1998) notes that public opinion ran 10 to 1 against the hunt and categorizes critics of the hunt into three groups: those who decried the killing, those who decried the methods used, and a third, smaller group which expressed racial hatred toward the Makah, including these statements:

“Publish this article but don’t use our last names. We wouldn’t want to lose our scalps.”
“These idiots need to use what little brains they have to do something productive besides getting drunk and spending federal funds to live on.”
“I am anxious to know where I may apply for a license to kill Indians. My forefathers helped settle the west and it was their tradition to kill every Redskin in the way. ‘The only good Indian is a dead Indian,’ they believed. I also want to keep faith with my ancestors.”

These constructions of Native Americans as irredeemably savage, like most racial fantasies, have proven remarkably enduring across spatial and temporal dimensions. The cunning, parasitical Asian, the violent Negro beast, and the savage Indian are stock characters in the American cultural imaginary. The savage Indian is but the flip side of the “ecological Indian,” of course: it is the Indian’s embeddedness in nature, his quasi-animality, that makes him both attuned to ecological considerations and prone to barbarity.

Makah leaders and supporters pointed to Representative Jack Metcalf (R-WA) and Senator Slade Gorton (R-WA), both of whom vigorously opposed Makah whaling, as quintessential ecocolonialists. Gorton had represented Washington State against the U.S. government and Native American tribes in the Boldt decision and was a longtime crusader against treaty fishing rights.[287] Metcalf was the founder of Steelhead and Salmon Protection Action in Washington State (later known as United Property Owners of Washington), a group which opposed tribal rights on behalf of white landowners.[288] According to the League of Conservation Voters, Metcalf had one of the worst environmental voting records in Congress.[289] Metcalf took a prominent role in the fight against Makah whaling, co-sponsoring a unanimous resolution in 1996 by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Resources opposing the Makah hunt and joining other individuals and groups in bringing the Metcalf v. Daley lawsuit in 2000. Both Gorton and Metcalf were white Republicans who supported fishing and hunting, had deep connections to the fishing industry, and devoted a good portion of their public lives to fighting Native American treaty rights as “special rights.”[290] Given their histories, their interest in protecting the gray whales from the Makah struck many as going after Indians under the guise of environmental protection—the very definition of ecocolonialism. Sea Shepherd Conservation Society worked with Metcalf in a highly visible way on the Makah whaling issue, praising his leadership and appearing with him in public. Those familiar with Metcalf’s reputation as an Indian hater excoriated the SSCS for this association and raised questions about the group’s motives for opposing the Makah hunt.[291]

The resumption of whaling promised to be, according to Makah leaders, a salve for the wounds inflicted by historical colonialism. What colonialism had rent asunder, they suggested, only whaling could put back together. In the tribe’s “Application for a Waiver of the Marine Mammal Protection Act Take Moratorium” (2005), numerous social problems (teenage pregnancy, elevated high school dropout rates, drug use, juvenile crime) and economic problems (unemployment, poverty, substandard housing) afflicting the Makah reservation are identified and attributed to the U.S. government’s past assimilation policies. Whaling is then presented as the solution to these problems:

Whaling was the keystone of traditional Makah society. Makah society was mirrored in the structure of the whale hunt, including ceremonial preparation, the hunt itself, and the ultimate acts of butchering and distribution…Ceremonies to prepare whalers and their families for the hunt provided the Makah with a social framework that contributed to governmental, social, and spiritual stability…Given the centrality of whaling to the Tribe’s culture, a revival of subsistence whaling is necessary for the Makah to complete this spiritual renaissance and repair the damage done to the Tribe’s social structure during the years of forced assimilation.[292]

In “Whale Hunting and the Makah Tribe: A Needs Statement” (2012), prepared on behalf of the tribe and submitted by the U.S. to the IWC, Dr. Ann Renker writes: “Current data from Neah Bay High School verifies that, in the absence of active whale hunting and its related preparations, one in seven male high school students was using or experimenting with drugs and/or alcohol in 2010.”[293] Renker’s phrasing suggests that student drug and alcohol use is a direct result of not whaling. Renker then echoes the “Application for a Waiver” by arguing that the resumption of whaling is necessary for the spiritual, cultural, social, and nutritional health of a people still grappling with the effects of colonialism. Prohibiting it would mean “introduc[ing] a new shroud of oppression into the daily life of Makah people.”[294]

Responding to the optics of ecological and ethical harm, Makah leaders emphasized that their whaling proposal reflected their continuing spiritual relationship with nature as Native people.[295] In his “Open Letter to the Public from the President of the Makah Whaling Commission” (August 6, 1998), Keith Johnson writes:

We have an understanding of the relationship between people and the mammals of the sea and land. We are a part of each other’s life. We are all part of the natural world and predation is also part of life on this planet.

Charlotte Coté (2010), writing sympathetically about the Makah as a member of a closely related Nuu-Chah-Nulth tribe, writes:

Our cultures thrived in a world of reciprocity between us and our environment. Our relationship with animals has always been one based on respect and gratitude and there is a sense of sacredness attached to the spirit of the animal for giving itself to us for sustenance.[296]

Coté references the Makah understanding that the whale gives himself or herself to the hunters if they are worthy and have conducted proper spiritual preparations—an understanding that makes it consistent to revere the animal and also kill her.

From the viewpoint of Makah leaders, animal and environmental advocates are attempting to erase the Makah’s historically and spatially embedded understanding of nature and impose their own ahistorical and abstract understandings of nature upon the tribe. If whites tend to define themselves as apart from nature and animals, which they alternately approach as exploiter or protector, Native peoples such as the Makah see themselves as intimately connected to other living beings in the web of life and death. Hunting, for them, is a form of reciprocal exchange between humans and animals (Nadasdy 2007). Moreover, they understand these relationships to be place-specific (Tallbear 2011): the Makah know whales and other sea life—not in the abstract, as rights-bearing subjects or ecological bellwethers, but as particular kin with whom they have shared Neah Bay’s swells, currents, and cliffs for millennia. The sea is their country. Did it make sense for whites, who had nearly driven the gray whale to extinction, to block the Makah’s efforts to resume a tradition of whaling that had always been “sustainable” and respectful toward the animal?

The effort to resume whaling has become inextricably tied to the question of sovereignty. The question “Who decides what the Makah can and cannot do?” hangs over every aspect of the controversy. Resuming whaling has been a costly endeavor: the tribe spent well over a million dollars of its own funds between 2003 and 2012 alone, and at least $335,000 of NMFS funds between 1995 and 1998.[297] For a brief moment, Makah leaders contemplated accepting financial incentives to desist, and some Makah favored developing a lucrative whalewatching industry instead of whaling, but in the end, the decision to pursue whaling was closely tied to a sense of collective self-determination and pride.[298] This is likely what the young Makah man felt as he held up a sign saying “Kill the Whales” in front of protesters.[299] And this is likely what Makah Tribal Council member Marcy Parker meant when she emerged out of a meeting where a financial offer to desist had been discussed and rejected and stated, “You can’t buy our treaty right, and you can’t buy our pride.”[300] As opposition intensified, so did the resolve of many Makah to keep fighting. One scholar notes:

[I]t was almost a badge of honor to be disparaged by non-natives for continuing their cultural traditions. The whale hunters felt a connection to their ancestors who had been arrested for engaging in potlatches, beaten for speaking Indian languages in government boarding schools, or vilified by Christian missionaries as culturally inferior savages. With protests and other attempts to block the tribe’s efforts seen as an extension of ongoing processes of colonization, whaling and the activities surrounding it became a form of resistance to a larger history of cultural oppression.[301]

Interestingly, of the 93 percent of Makah who said in a survey that the tribe should continue to whale, more cited treaty rights as a reason (46 percent) than either cultural tradition (36 percent) or moral/spiritual benefits (20 percent).[302] It was the desire to preserve and exercise sovereign power that led many Makah to engage the whaling issue so passionately. The Makah, struggling with poverty and dispossession on the Neah Bay reservation, wanted to wrest back the power of self-determination that colonialism had stripped away.

The spirit of angry resistance sparked the so-called “rogue hunt” of 2007, where Makah hunters impatient with legal uncertainties decided to kill a whale without federal authorization. The Makah “Application for a Waiver” (2005) painstakingly explicates the tribe’s commitment to humane killing, minimizing harm to whales (especially the PCFA or “resident” whales), protecting the environment, and abiding by federal and international laws. The “rogue hunt” ruptured, at least momentarily, the tribe’s self-consciously projected image of unity, spirituality, ecosensitivity, and respect for the law. On September 8, 2007, five Makah men paddled out in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, where they harpooned a gray whale at least four times and shot him at least 16 times. One reporter narrated:

The big gun misfired and fell overboard, and the only other means of quick dispatch at hand were a shotgun and a rifle. These lacked the strength to pierce the whale’s thick skull, though, and anyway the men shot at the wrong spot. Then they ran out of bullets.[303]

The whale, who bled for 12 hours before dying and sinking to the bottom of the ocean, turned out to be a whale whom scientists had labeled CRC-175, a “resident” gray whale who frequented the area summer after summer.[304] These whalers were not random hunters but central players in the ongoing drama over whaling rights: two of the men were Wayne Johnson and Theron Parker, members of the crew in the 1999 hunt; a third, Andy Noel, was a member of the Makah Whaling Commission. Because the tribe’s application for a waiver from the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 had not yet been granted, the hunt violated this federal statute.

The Makah Tribal Council held a news conference where it officially condemned the hunt and promised to prosecute and punish the five men to the fullest extent under tribal law.[305] The tribe also sent representatives to Washington, DC to reassure concerned government officials. In U.S. District Court, three of the men pled guilty to violating the MMPA and were placed on probation and assigned community service. Wayne Johnson and Andy Noel were convicted in a bench trial and sentenced to five and three months jail time, respectively.[306] A defiant Johnson stated: “I’m proud of what we did. Some people are calling what I did an act of civil disobedience. I don’t know much about that, but if civil is what the government is, then call my part savage disobedience.”[307] Is Johnson an Indian hero, proudly carrying the banner of sovereignty into battle with the U.S. government? Or is he a troubled man struggling with what Cynthia Enloe (1989) calls “masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope,” indifferent to the impact of his acts upon others?[308] Although many Makah expressed concern that the rogue hunt would damage the tribe’s reputation and its chances for a legal waiver from the MMPA, there was sympathy for the hunters, too, and an unwillingness to punish them. In the end, the tribal court could not put an impartial jury of Makah together and tribal judge Stanley Myers dropped all charges against the whalers on the promise of a year’s good behavior.[309]

Some Makah rejected the optic of ecocolonialism and openly dissented from the tribe’s pursuit of whaling. During the 1996 IWC meeting, seven Makah elders, including descendants of whaling chiefs and signatories to the Treaty of Neah Bay, signed and circulated the following petition:

We are elders of the Makah Indian Nation (Ko-Ditch-ee-ot) which means People of the Cape.

We oppose this Whale hunt our tribe is going to do.

The opposition is directly against our leaders, the Makah Tribal Council, Tribal Staff, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is an arm of the U.S. Government.

The Makah Indian Nation has been functioning without a quorum; two Councilmen are off on sick leave for very serious reasons, cancer.

How can any decision be legal when our by-laws state the Treasurer shall be present at every meeting? The Vice Chairman is the other man out.

The whale hunt issue has ever been brought to the people to inform them and there is no spiritual training going on. We believe they, the Council, will just shoot the whale, and we think the word “subsistence” is the wrong thing to say when our people haven’t used or had Whale meat/blubber since the early 1900s.

For these reasons we believe the hunt is only for the money. They can’t say “Traditional, Spiritual and for Subsistence” in the same breath when no training is going on, just talk.

Whale watching is an alternative we support.

The signatories were Isabell Ides (age 96), Harry Claplanhoo (age 78), Margaret Irvin (age 80), Ruth Claplanhoo (age 94), Viola Johson (age 83), Lena McGee (age 92), and Alberta Thompson (age 72).[310] The petition suggests that Makah leaders are driven by greed and willing to violate tribal laws to achieve their aims. Dottie Chamblin, another Makah elder, stated:

They [the tribal leaders] say they’re traditional but they are not listening to or protecting the elders. Shooting a whale with a machine gun is not a spiritual way…no one in this village has a direct relationship with the whale any longer.[311]

Dissenters recounted the harassment and persecution they experienced within the tribe.

Dottie Chamblin commented:

There’s something very wrong here. We created a stir just by seeking the truth and asking them to tell it. Because of this treatment, no one else will speak up for the rest of the people, and that’s a sad state of affairs. They’ve ostracized us. They’ve victimized us. It’s difficult to get health care. They treat me badly. It’s not the Makah way. There is a young, educated faction that is in breach of tradition.[312]

According to Chamblin, the tribal council’s threat to banish dissenters from the reservation discouraged others from supporting or joining the dissenters.[313] The most outspoken dissenting elder was Alberta Thompson, a descendant of three signatories of the Treaty of Neah Bay, granddaughter of a whaler, and survivor of the government-run boarding school for Makah children. Once she publicly opposed whaling, Thompson was fired from her job as a coordinator at the Makah Tribal Senior Center on the grounds that she had spoken with Sea Shepherd Conservation Society representatives while at her job.[314] Her grandson was bullied at school and her dog was taken from her home, killed, and left on the side of the road a mile from her house. The acting chief of police informed Thompson that if she spoke about whaling or even “made a face” she would be arrested. Indeed, the Makah Tribal Council passed a resolution that only tribal council members and their hired public relations advisors could speak to the media. Thompson asked: “What has this old lady done to aggravate them? What am I onto that they would think I’m so dangerous?”[315] In 1997, oceanographer Jean-Michel Cousteau invited Thompson on a whale-watching expedition at San Ignacio. She recounted her experience, her eyes filling with tears:

In Baja, I met what I was fighting for, face to face. A mother whale rose up out of those warm waters right under my hand. She looked me straight in the eye, mother to mother. Then I saw a harpoon scar on her side, probably from up north in Siberia where the native people still hunt the whales for sustenance. The mother brought her baby over to our little boat. I talked to them and I petted them. I felt their spirit of trust was somehow being conveyed to me. I laughed and I cried all the way back to shore, and all that night. I’ve never been the same since. When times get hard, I think of those great big wonderful beings.[316]

Thompson died in 2012. Her pastor “wept as he told the mourners at the packed church about her persecution.”[317]

While surveys indicated overwhelming support for whaling within the tribe, a closer look at the numbers suggests a significant minority opposed the resumption of whaling for a variety of reasons, but this opposition was sub rosa. One survey indicated that 95 percent of Makah respondents said they thought the tribe had the right to whale, but only 75 percent thought they should exercise this right.[318] Barton (2000) writes that most of those who opposed whaling in the survey were critical of the manner in which it was being conducted—that the hunters were not spiritually ready, that the federal government was dictating all of the terms—but that they were not necessarily outspoken about their views. She concludes: “[T]he vast majority of intra-tribal opposition was less visible than the media had portrayed.”[319]

Many Native American organizations and tribes viewed the whaling issue as a matter of sovereignty and strongly supported the Makah. The Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission and Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians voiced their support.[320] Members of the Nuu-Cha-Nulth tribes of Vancouver Island attended the Makah celebration after the 1999 hunt. On June 23, 2004, the National Congress of American Indians, the oldest and largest national organization of Native American and Alaskan Native tribal governments, passed a resolution supporting the Makah tribe’s right to whale.[321] Native scholars, too, celebrated the Makah’s resumption of whaling. For example, Robert Miller, an eastern Shawnee, wrote: “The tribe has exercised its sovereignty and its right of cultural self-determination and has taken on all comers and overcome all obstacles to do so.”[322] Other Native Americans disagreed, arguing that killing whales was not the right way to remedy past wrongs or assert sovereignty today. The First Nations Environmental Network issued an online statement which read: “Not all indigenous people support Makah whaling…While we respect Treaty Rights, this is political reason being used for killing and not a true meaning of need when it comes to the taking of another being’s life.”[323]

Mutual disavowal in the Makah whaling conflict

In the heat of political struggle, the parties to the Makah whaling conflict disavowed the other sets of claims in play. There were partial exceptions to the rule, however. Cetacean Society International (CSI), for example, spoke out in favor of Makah sovereignty and treaty rights and tried to organize start-up funding for a Makah whale-watching business as an alternative to the whale hunt, and Earth Island Institute suggested that the U.S. government gives the Makah “a much larger land base; economic development grants; better health care; overall greater funding”[324] instead of granting them the right to whale. Both organizations attempted to signal that they were both pro-whale and pro-Makah and sought a solution to the conflict that was not zero-sum.[325] But neither organization could escape the dilemma that in rejecting the Makah’s proposed remedy for the damage inflicted by colonialism and proposing other remedies, they were seen as continuing the colonial practice of imposing an external (Western) set of understandings upon the Makah. In the eyes of Makah leaders, friendly colonialism was still colonialism.

The most visible anti-whaling group, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, did not recognize the Makah’s rights or claims in any way and chose instead to adopt the defensive posture that its agenda and actions had “nothing to do with race.” In its “Equality Statement,” SSCS says that it “operates internationally without prejudice towards race, color, nationality, religious belief, or any other consideration except for an impartial adherence to upholding international conservation law to protect endangered marine species and ecosystems.”[326] It then states:

Sea Shepherd operates outside the petty cultural chauvinism of the human species. Our clients are whales, dolphins, seals, turtles, sea-birds, and fish. We represent their interests…We are not anti-any nationality or culture. We are pro-Ocean and we work in the interests of all life on Earth.

SSCS leaders scoff at tribal, racial, and national concerns as narrow matters among humans, as “special interests,” as a trivial distraction from the axis of power that really matters—that of human supremacy over animals. The universalistic language of equality, ecological health, and animal considerability is invoked to provide protection for nature and nonhuman animals—but at the expense of a racialized minority whose claims are derogated as particularistic and selfish.

It is not that SSCS is using eco-speak as a pretext for persecuting the Makah, then, but rather that it is advancing animal and ecological concerns in a way that manifestly trivializes concerns about tribal or racial justice. The history of colonialism and forced assimilation, of white encroachment upon Native fishing and hunting rights, of persistent anti-Indian racism and Makah marginalization—all of this is denied or elided. Moreover, SSCS declines to acknowledge that its own actions might aggravate racial problems by bringing anti-Indian public sentiment to the surface or giving succor to politicians like Jack Metcalf. Instead it insists that its practices are colorblind and its hands are clean.

Both animal protectionists and the Makah claim to revere and love the whale. At issue between them is whether reverence and love are consistent with killing the whale for food. At issue is the meaning of the killing—is it an exercise of unjust and unnecessary violence against another sentient being or is it the grateful acceptance of a gift from a kindred being in the context of the cycle of life and death? In trying to prohibit the hunt, animal and environmental protectionists disavowed (to varying degrees) Makah claims about racism and colonialism as well as Makah leaders’ ontological claims about humans, whales, and nature.

Makah leaders and supporters, for their part, delegitimated the anti-whaling position and reduced it to a hatred of Indians or a desire to control them. They, too, chose not to approach the conflict as a confrontation of two reasonable but incommensurate views of whaling, but instead essentialized whaling opposition as racist and imperialist—as not really being about whales at all. In his “Open Letter to the Public from the President of the Makah Whaling Commission” (August 6, 1998), Keith Johnson writes: “We feel that the whaling issue has been exploited by extremists who have taken liberties with the facts in order to advance their agenda.” And Native scholar Charlotte Coté writes:

The vegan lifestyle is one that some people throughout the world have chosen to embrace, but it is ultimately a personal choice. We Native people do not want people who choose to live that way imposing their dietary rules on us, as this is just another form of cultural imperialism and food hegemony.[327]

Most whaling opponents said nothing about veganism so it may be that Coté raises the issue both because it powerfully evokes an image of Western privilege and because it allows her to depoliticize opposition to whaling as a “lifestyle” choice. Neither Johnson nor Coté acknowledges or attempts to reckon with an alternative ontology whereby respect entails protection and whereby the slaughtering of whales, who are seen as sentient beings and/or rights-bearing subjects, is an unjustifiable exercise of domination. This ontology, by virtue of being of Western origins, is dismissed as a product of and vehicle for colonialism.

The American public has in fact expressed growing concern about whales over the past several decades. In 1979, the U.S. Congress declared that “whales are a unique marine resource of great aesthetic and scientific interest to mankind” and that “the protection and conservation of whales are of particular interest to citizens of the United States.”[328] In 1993, Representative Gerry Studds introduced a House resolution (which passed unanimously) opposing the resumption of commercial whaling, stating: “[N]o other group of animals has so captured the imagination of the American people.”[329] A poll conducted by International Fund for Animal Welfare in 1997 showed that 80 percent of Americans oppose whale hunting.[330] The increasing popularity of whale watching, the success of the Free Willy movie franchise, television programs like Whale Wars, and public interest in real life rescue stories involving gray whales all confirm that Americans believe that whales are due some significant measure of moral consideration and protection.[331] There has been, therefore, a notable cultural shift in American attitudes toward whales in recent decades.

In Coté’s (2010) discussion of a “conservation burden,” she asks: “Why should our culture and traditions be sacrificed upon the altar of the non-Indian conscience to pay for the environmental sins of the dominant culture?”[332] Since it was not the Makah who brought various whale species to the point of extinction, why should they be asked to bear the conservation burden of not whaling now?[333] Viewed anthropocentrically, this question makes a good deal of sense—it goes straight to the question of justice among human communities. But viewed ecocentrically or biocentrically, this question make less sense—if killing whales is a bad idea, for ecological or ethical reasons, it is no less a bad idea when the Makah do it. Gillespie (1997) writes: “[T]he fact that earlier colonial cultures ruthlessly exploited Nature does not give cultures with a traditional interest in the exploitation of Nature the right to finish off the job.”[334] Indeed, one could equally ask, “Why should whales be sacrificed on the altar of Makah sovereignty and anti-colonialism?” Coté (2010) writes: “The anti-whaling groups saw the death of the whale through a Western cultural lens and thus ignored the spiritual and sacred elements attached to the Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth whaling tradition.”[335] One could also say the Makah whalers (and Coté) saw the death of the whale through a Makah cultural lens and thus ignored the perspective(s) of environmentalists, animal protectionists, and the broader public.

What about the perspective(s) of the grays themselves? The question of what gray whales themselves want is a vexed one, of course, since all human interpretations of whale interests and desires are culturally mediated and inescapably so. We do not know what it is like to be a gray whale, as Thomas Nagel would remind us. Contradictory ontological claims about gray whales emerged, raising the question of whale phenomenology. Do whales, as sentient and intelligent creatures with life stories and familial and social worlds of their own, prefer being alive to being chased, harpooned, shot, and killed? In part, this is a matter of observing their behavior. Gray whales either try to flee when they are first harpooned—buoys are attached to the harpoons to keep the whales from diving and escaping—or in some cases fight back by thrashing and overturning the canoe. In the days before motorboats and guns, gray whales would sometimes flee for days, harpoons and buoys attached, lanced and bleeding from various parts of their bodies, before collapsing from exhaustion. Grays in particular used to be known as “devilfish” among hunters because they resisted slaughter.

Paul Nadasdy (2007) rightly cautions against the Western habit of dismissing Native understandings as “beliefs” (that is, superstitions) constructed to rationalize the violence of hunting and urges us to take seriously the possibility that Native understandings might be right. But fully assessing (as opposed to simply endorsing) Makah understandings requires us to consider that they function to cleanse the taint of domination from the act of killing. They function to reconcile reverence for the animal with killing him/her. The whale is not chased down and violently slaughtered; the hunters entreat and perhaps cajole her into giving herself in a spiritual and reciprocal exchange between human and animal. Environmental and animal protectionists doubtless have a stake in their own ontology as well, but there is no compelling reason to declare that the Makah are exempt from the human proclivity for self-rationalization. Westerners should be open to the possibility that the Makah are right. Should the Makah be open to the possibility that they are wrong?

Both Western and Makah ontologies are all too human. Makah ontological understandings about humans, whales, and nature are no more “constructed” or provisional than Western ones, but no less so either. They, too, are products of the human power to describe and attribute meaning to phenomena within the theater of power. We are back to Renteln’s chicken once again, or the irreducibility of the animals’ own phenomenal world(s). Does it matter to the chicken if she is killed in a Santería ritual or by the slaughterhouse worker? Does it matter to the gray whale if she is killed by a Norwegian commercial whaling boat or a canoe of ritual-observant Makah hunters uttering prayers? It may be that a fully developed “ecology of selves,” in Eduardo Kohn’s (2007) words, will reveal the phenomenal world(s) of the gray whales to us. Until then, it may be prudent to err on the side of caution and act as though gray whales wish to live. Otherwise, we humans, Native and non-Native, run the risk of imposing our own systems of meaning upon those who lack the power to contradict us.

Whaling and social domination

Renker (2012) and others speaking for the Makah argue that the resumption of whaling is the essential antidote to colonial domination. What whaling proponents are conspicuously silent about is that Makah whaling historically depended upon various patterns of internal domination relating to class/status and sex as well as species. Historically, Makah society was organized by descent group and ranked strata. Kin groups lived together in longhouses and were divided into chiefs or titleholders and commoners. Slaves acquired through trade, warfare, or purchase from neighboring tribes comprised the third, lowest stratum.[336] Whaling was the exclusive practice of chiefs, who inherited and owned both the physical equipment and ceremonial rituals and songs associated with the practice, and it was a crucial mechanism for shoring up their power and authority. Swan (1869) writes: “[I]t was considered degrading for a chief, or the owner of slaves to perform any labor except hunting, fishing, or killing whales.”[337] By killing whales, chiefs demonstrated that they were gifted and worthy of the favor of the spirits. “Killing a whale,” Coté (2010) writes, “was considered the highest glory: the more whales a chief caught, the more prestige, respect, and physical wealth he received, thus serving to elevate his status and position inside and outside his village or social group.”[338] The butchering of the whale and the distribution of meat followed strict guidelines that reflected the social hierarchy within the tribe. Whale meat and whale oil were also used for consumption and distribution at potlatches, ceremonies that expressed and enhanced a chief’s power over rivals, commoners, and slaves.

According to Donald (1997), slavery played a vital role in Northwest Coast tribal cultures and economies, including the Makah’s:

Titleholders were able to undertake prestige-producing activities because they could control and manage resources and labor to produce the food and other goods and free the time needed for such activities…[S]lavery was essential…because only slaves made it possible for titleholders—the exemplars of Northwest Coast culture—to live and act as titleholders.[339]

The labor of slaves, in other words, helped to underwrite the whaling exploits of chiefs. Slave status in Makah society was hereditary and slaves had no rights or privileges because they did not have membership in any kin groups. They were the property of their owners—exploited for their labor, traded for other goods, given as gifts, destroyed to demonstrate wealth and power. Slaves were sometimes killed during the funerals of Makah chiefs “both to accompany the deceased as servants in the next world and to show the power of the heir.”[340] Among the many rituals whalers practiced, one involved draping a corpse across one’s body as a charm to gain spirit power.[341] Parts of a deceased whaler’s body were especially favored, but sometimes, according to Curtis (1916), a small child was killed for this purpose, presumably a slave.[342]

The link between social hierarchy and whaling was sufficiently strong that when assimilation policies, disease, and other factors disrupted social structure, whaling became increasingly infeasible. The (selectively) egalitarian ideology of U.S. government agents also played a role: “For example, the American philosophy of social equality made it difficult for Makahs to select crew members and organize whaling canoes, and therefore households, according to the ancestral patterns.”[343] In 1855, the U.S. government inserted into the Treaty of Neah Bay an article prohibiting slavery on the Makah reservation. Article XII states: “The said tribe agrees to free all slaves now held by its people, and not to purchase or acquire others hereafter.” Subsequently, as Colson (1953) relates, “[T]he social status of the former slaves was ignored by [U.S. government] agents who attempted to treat all Makah as thought they were on the same social level” and forbade “discrimination along the lines of status institutionalized in Makah society.”[344] Although slavery did not end completely for several decades, these actions initiated its decline. “The presence of white men has exerted a salutary influence in this respect,” Swan (1869) writes, “and the fear of being held responsible renders [the Makah] more gentle in their deportment to their slaves.”[345] Ironically, then, slavery and social inequality were mitigated within Makah society through the imposition of colonial power on the part of a federal government that was itself a slave state (until the mid-1860s). While the requisite social structure for whaling was being dismantled, the “more egalitarian pursuit of sealing”[346] was open to all regardless of family or inherited privileges and displaced whaling among the Makah by the late 1800s.

As Gaard (2001) indicates, Makah whaling also reinforced traditional sex relations within the tribe. Women could not be chiefs and therefore could not whale. If a whaler’s wife was menstruating at the time of the hunt, she was not allowed to touch the gear or come near him.[347] During the hunt, she was required to lie silent and motionless and to go without food or water so that the whale would stay calm and not swim out to sea:

[D]uring the hunt, the whaler’s wife would act as if she had become the whale. Her movements would determine the behavior of the whale—if she moved about too much, the whale her husband was hunting would be equally active and difficult to spear; if she lay quietly, the whale would give itself to her husband. Towing chants often reflected this association, and the whalers addressed the dead carcass using a term that refers to a chief’s wife.[348]

The woman was animalized, the animal feminized. The chief demonstrated his greatness by exercising mastery over whale, woman, and nature. In this scenario, women sometimes bore the blame for the failure of the hunt. One whaler’s wife recalled what happened after she ate and drank a bit during a hunt: “When my husband came back he walked up to me and said, ‘You drank something when you got up; we got a whale but he is not fat.’ This frightened me very much and after that I never drank anything again.”[349]

Makah tribal leaders argue that whaling will restore social order and unity. Do they mean to suggest that it will reinvigorate the stabilizing social hierarchies of the past? Might the resumption of whaling reinforce old status distinctions among Makah families and sharpen inequalities between men and women in the tribe? In a gesture of democratic intent, the tribe invited all Makah families to participate in the Makah Whaling Commission in the 1990s, but this did not prevent concerns about family prerogatives and status from emerging in force. Dougherty (2001) reports that power struggles emerged over the composition of the 1999 whaling crew and that some members of the chosen crew “despised each other.” Van Ginkel (2004) adds:

There was even greater animosity as to who was to be the captain of the whaling team…[Harpooner Theron Parker] and [Wayne] Johnson could not get along with each other, to put it mildly, but they finally worked out some kind of modus vivendi although the crew remained ‘bitterly divided.’[350]

Parker and Johnson argued over whose family sacred whaling song would be sung when the whale was beached. Johnson recalled:

I told Theron there was going to be no family songs and dances...I didn’t want just one family to take the glory. So when we got on the beach, he down-feathered it, claimed it with eagle feathers, sang his songs…I didn’t want that to happen.[351]

When Parker then took the first cut of whale meat, Johnson bristled again: “That was my job to do that. Not his job. It’s not his whale. It’s my whale.”[352]

There are also signs that the gendered aspects of whaling would persist. Makah women were excluded from the whaling crew in the 1999 hunt. Denise Dailey, a Makah Fisheries biologist, was appointed to be Executive Director for the hunt, but “[b]ecause she was a woman, the [Makah whaling] commission insisted that she not speak for the crew, so Keith Johnson, the president of the whaling commission, was dubbed the spokesman for the hunt.” Dailey remarked: “I’ll never hunt a whale because I’m a woman and I’m okay with that.”[353] Prior to the hunt, women were instructed about the historic rituals of lying silent and motionless and the “wives, partners, and mothers of the crew” chose to do this.[354] Also,

a group of young girls from the Neah Bay school went to their teacher and asked if they could take ten minutes to lie still and be quiet and pray while the hunt was taking place, because they had been told that that was historically what young women in the community did.[355]

In one of Renker’s surveys, of the few who opposed the hunt, some cited “the inequality of women’s involvement in the hunt” as a reason.[356] Gaard (2001) suggests a connection between the masculinist, elitist aspects of whaling and “the tribe’s current practices of silencing the dissenting voices of women elders who oppose the renewed hunt.”[357] As Dottie Chamblin said, “It’s grandmothers fighting this fight against them.”[358] The argument over Makah whaling has been structured publicly as an argument between those concerned about colonial domination over the Makah and those concerned about human domination over animals. Perhaps the intimate connection of Makah whaling to other forms of social domination and inequality should figure in this debate as well.

Critique and avowal

The dilemma facing Cetacean Society International and Earth Island Institute, I mentioned above, was that their opposition to Makah whaling was taken as de facto evidence of colonial intent, regardless of their public stance calling for the federal government to redress the injuries inflicted upon the tribe by colonialism. The member of the public who sent this email to the NMFS during the October 2005 scoping period was also trying to be both pro-whale and pro-Makah:

I strongly believe that the United States Government has broken most of the treaties it has negotiated with Native Americans and many administrations in the 1800s were guilty of ethnic cleansing and genocide. I am generally in favor of giving Native American tribes the benefit of the doubt in most of their claims against state and federal governments. However, when it comes to whale hunting I believe that their traditions and treaties cannot take precedence over the lives of intelligent, self-aware animals such as whales.[359]

Is it possible to critique a specific Makah practice (and the understandings associated with it) in the name of anti-subordination and still meaningfully support Makah claims to sovereignty and redress? Can one argue against whaling and still be anti-colonialist? One might respond that the Makah’s ontology is central to their way of life so that a rejection of its implications for whaling is, in effect, a rejection of the entire Makah way of being. But, as discussed below, other Pacific Northwest tribes with similar ontologies have elected to observe a continued moratorium on whaling and have not found their ways of life significantly compromised. For if Native American/Canadian ontologies hold whaling to be morally and spiritually permissible, they do not deem it morally or spiritually compulsory.

In the Makah whaling conflict, multi-optic analysis helps us to perceive clearly the varied perspectives, claims, and stakes involved. This does not have to lead to political or moral paralysis, but it should contour political action in particular ways. Thus seeing multi-optically would not necessarily stop someone from opposing Makah whaling (on anti-subordination grounds), but it would influence them to do so in a way that respected rather than denied the colonial context. Thoughtful critique of a racially marginalized group can be joined, then, to a posture of avowal toward that group’s moral and political claims toward the larger society.

In this scenario, animal and environmental activists who chose to fight the resumption of Makah whaling would begin by recognizing their own racial situatedness and its implications for this story. They would learn about and respectfully engage Makah ontological claims about humans and whales, even if they ultimately disagreed with these claims and their implications. They would educate themselves deeply on the history of U.S. colonialism toward the Makah; think through the ongoing economic, social, and psychological effects of past and present governmental policies on the tribe; repudiate (rather than allying themselves with) the organized white political and economic interests who continuously seek to encroach on tribal fishing and hunting rights; actively condemn anti-Indian sentiments expressed by the public; and promote the Makah struggle for sovereignty and redress. They would connect the historical practices of colonialism with the violence against whales they are trying to curtail, while thinking through the impact of their activism on both. Rather than treating the question of whaling as an isolated issue that can be detached from the context of U.S.-Makah relations, they would situate the critique of whaling within a larger framework of justice that challenges multiple, interconnected forms of domination (including colonial domination) at once.

In this scenario, Makah leaders would not presumptively reduce all alternative perspectives to colonialism. They would take seriously and engage environmental and animal advocates’ understandings and claims about both the ecological status of whales and what whales deserve and want, as well as learning about the long history of global activism to protect whales and the American public’s growing concern about their protection. They would reflect upon the connections between colonialism and the mastery of nature and animals and question whether their own cultural understandings, too, might bear traces of domination (and self-rationalization). Rather than focusing exclusively on Coté’s argument about the unfair “conservation burden” placed on the Makah, they would be open to assessing the possibly destructive implications of whaling, in particular the precedential dangers of stretching the ASW exemption in international conservation law.[360] Precisely because their culture is dynamic and living and evolving, they would consider and debate whether the fight for Makah sovereignty might be productively uncoupled from the issue of whaling, as Alberta Thompson and the other dissenting elders suggested. They would not need to repudiate their ontology or cultural understandings or tribal sovereignty to consider whether whaling is, all told, a practice worth resuming.

There are precedents for deciding that it is not. Down the coast of Washington from Neah Bay, the Quileute Tribal Council in La Push passed a resolution to not whale in 1988. Fred Woodruff, a member of the Quileute, hopes to build a whale watching business using traditional whaling canoes. He comments:

Our tribe fully supports our Makah neighbors in their treaty rights. But our Quileute elders have made a different decision. Even though we and other tribes along the coast have the same treaty rights to hunt, our elders have chosen to support the gray whale. For thousands of years, this whale has been valuable under subsistence, but now the value is in its life. The gray whale is more valuable to the Quileutes living than hunted. We must begin the healing here in our village and hope it can help others, as well. We Quileutes would like to offer a new vision and a different model for other tribes, as well as peoples.[361]

Fred’s brother, tribal chairman Russell Woodruff, adds:

We see the damage of what’s taking place in Makah. Our neighbors do not own the story of the gray whales…The Quileute tribe would like to declare a Welcoming the Whale spring ceremony and invite all peoples to come celebrate the gray whales.[362]

In 2006, five groups of Nuu-Chah-Nulth on Vancouver Island (peoples who are closely related culturally and linguistically to the Makah) came together under the name Maa-Nulth and signed a historic treaty with the Canadian and British Columbia governments. The Maa-Nulth receive more than 24,000 hectares of land, $90 million in cash, up to $45 million for potential revenue sharing projects, and $150 million for program financing.[363] In a side agreement, they promise not to hunt gray or sei whales for 25 years. The Maa-Nulth thus pursued reparations and redress while also protecting their right to whale—and they have chosen not to exercise this right, at least for the time being.

In this chapter, I have analyzed the Makah whaling controversy, tracing the history of the dispute and explicating the optics of ethical harm, ecological harm, and ecocolonialism. I discussed how the parties to the conflict advanced incommensurate ontologies about humans, whales, and nature, and how they disavowed one another’s claims in the course of political struggle. I then suggested that animal and environmental activists can critique Makah whaling mindfully, that is, in a way that engages and takes seriously the Makah’s ontology and tribal justice claims. I also argued that the Makah, for their part, can move toward opening themselves to animal and environmental protectionist claims, building upon the example of some other Native American tribes and Canadian First Nations.

The question has arisen whether non-Alaskan natives would, in the near future, pursue traditional whaling and sealing activities. To date, only the Makah Tribe has expressed such an interest, but it is unclear at this time whether they would be interested in pursuing open-boat whaling or could satisfy subsistence and/or cultural needs by other means. For any Native American group to begin harvesting large whales, they would need to demonstrate a subsistence need and request (through the Bureau of Indian Affairs) the U.S. Commissioner to the IWC to petition that body for a portion of the subsistence quota for gray whales. Such a scenario is considered unlikely at this time.

U.S. Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, National Marine Fisheries Service, “Endangered Fish and Wildlife; Gray Whale,” 3132.

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Section II. Revisiting the stereotypes of Indigenous peoples’ relationships with animals

4 Veganism and Mi’kmaq legends

Margaret Robinson

This chapter proposes a postcolonial ecofeminist reading of Mi’kmaq legends as the basis for a vegan diet rooted in Indigenous culture. I refer primarily to veganism throughout this work because unlike vegetarianism, it is not only a diet but a lifestyle that, for ethical reasons, eschews the use of animal products. Constructing an Indigenous veganism faces two significant barriers—the first being the association of veganism with whiteness.

In a joke at the beginning of his documentary, Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew, Ojibwa playwright Drew Hayden Taylor asks, “What do you call a Native vegetarian?” His answer is: “A very bad hunter.” The implication is that for an Indigenous person, choosing a non-meat diet is a kind of failure. In Stuff White People Like, satirical author Christian Lander portrays veganism as a tactic for maintaining white supremacy. He writes, “As with many white-people activities, being vegan/vegetarian enables them to feel as though they are helping the environment and it gives them a sweet way to feel superior to others.”[364] Ecologist Robert Hunter depicts vegans as “Eco-Jesuits” and “veggie fundamentalists,” who “force Natives to do things the white man’s way.”[365] By projecting white imperialism onto vegans, Hunter enables white omnivores, such as himself, to bond with Indigenous people over meat-eating. When veganism is constructed as white, Indigenous people who eschew the use of animal products are depicted as sacrificing our cultural authenticity. This presents a challenge for those of us who view our veganism as ethically, spiritually, and culturally compatible with our Indigeneity.

A second barrier to Indigenous veganism is the portrayal of veganism as a product of class privilege. Opponents claim that a vegan diet is an indulgence since the poor (among whom Indigenous people are disproportionately represented) must eat whatever is available, and cannot afford to be so picky. This argument assumes that highly processed specialty products make up the bulk of a vegan diet. Such an argument also overlooks the economic and environmental cost of meat, and assumes that the subsidized meat and dairy industries in North America are representative of the world.

My proposal is not that we replace a vibrant traditional food culture with one associated with privileged white culture. The eating habits of the majority of the Mi’kmaq have already been colonized, and are further complicated by poverty. As a participant in Bonita Lawrence’s study of mixed-blood urban Native identity explained, “people have been habituated to think that poverty is Native—and so your macaroni soup and your poor diet is Native.”[366] Lack of access to nutrient-rich foods is a problem Indigenous people have in common with other racialized and economically oppressed groups. Konju Briggs Jr. argues, “In the US, poor communities of color are often bereft of access to fresh healthy foods, and disproportionately find themselves afflicted with the diseases of Western diets and lifestyles.” He identifies this as a tactic of class warfare, aimed at “keeping the most chronically impoverished from being able to be healthy, long-lived and highly functioning, and from excelling as human beings.”[367] Several researchers (e.g., Johnson, Travers, and the Mi’kmaq Health Research Group) have noted that the reserve system has begotten a diet high in sugar and carbohydrates and low in protein and fibre. As a result, Mi’kmaq people have seen a serious increase in diabetes mellitus, and gallstones. Professor of human ecology, Kim Travers, cites three causes of nutrient-poor diet among the Mi’kmaq: low income; lack of access to transportation; and reserve land unsuitable for agriculture, fishing, or hunting. Travers notes that Mi’kmaq people living on reserve are often limited to eating highly processed protein such as peanut butter, wieners, or bologna.

Traditionally, the Mi’kmaq diet was meat-heavy, consisting of beaver, fish, eel, birds, porcupine, and sometimes larger animals such as whales, moose, or caribou, supplemented by vegetables, roots, nuts, and berries. The use of animals as food also figures prominently in our Mi’kmaq legends. Food production is gendered in Mi’kmaq culture. While women were trained in food gathering, cleaning, and preparation, hunting was a traditionally male activity connected with the maintenance of virility. The killing of a moose acted as a symbol of a boy’s entry into manhood.[368] To reject such practices undercuts methods of male Mi’kmaq identity construction. Yet the context in which this identity develops has changed significantly since the arrival of the European colonialists. Meat, as a symbol of patriarchy shared with colonizing forces, arguably binds us with white colonial culture to a greater degree than practices such as veganism, which, although overwhelmingly white itself, is far from hegemonic.

Carol J. Adams argues that the creation of meat as a concept requires the removal from our consciousness of the animal whose dead body we are redefining as food. Adams writes:

The function of the absent referent is to keep our “meat” separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal…to keep something from being seen as someone. Once the existence of meat is disconnected from the existence of an animal who was killed to become that “meat,” meat becomes unanchored by its original referent (the animal) becoming instead a free-floating image, used often to reflect women’s status as well as animals.[369]

While evident in the fur trade, the fishing industry, and factory farming, the detachment that Adams describes is not foundational to the Mi’kmaq oral tradition. In our stories, the othering of animal life that makes meat-eating psychologically comfortable is replaced by a model of creation in which animals are portrayed as our siblings. Mi’kmaq legends view humanity and animal life as being on a continuum, spiritually and physically. Animals speak, are able to change into humans, and some humans marry these shapeshifting creatures and raise animal children.[370] Human magicians may take animal form, some people may transform into their teomul, or totem animal, and still others are changed into animals against their wishes.[371] An ecofeminist exegesis of Mi’kmaq legends enables us to frame veganism as a spiritual practice that recognizes that humans and other animals possess a shared personhood.

Mi’kmaq legends portray human beings as intimately connected with the natural world, not as entities distinct from it. Glooscap is formed from the red clay of the soil and initially lacks mobility, remaining on his back in the dirt.[372] His grandmother was originally a rock, his nephew sea foam, and his mother a leaf. In “Nukumi and Fire,” the Creator makes an old woman from a dew-covered rock. Glooscap meets her and she agrees to become his grandmother, providing wisdom for him if he will provide food for her. Nukumi explains that as an old woman meat is necessary for her because she cannot live on plants and berries alone. Glooscap calls to Marten, and asks him to give his life so Glooscap’s grandmother may live. Marten agrees because of his friendship with Glooscap. For this sacrifice, Glooscap makes Marten his brother. Based on this story, Glooscap, the archetype of the human being, would appear to have not been a hunter prior to the arrival of his grandmother. This story also represents, through the characters of Glooscap and Martin, the basic relation of the Mi’kmaq people with the creatures around them. The animals are willing to provide food and clothing, shelter and tools, but always they must be treated with the respect given a brother and friend.

A Mi’kmaq creation story tells of the birth of Glooscap’s nephew from seafoam caught in sweetgrass.[373] To celebrate the nephew’s arrival, Glooscap and his family have a feast of fish. Glooscap called upon the salmon of the rivers and seas to come to shore and give up their lives. Although not unproblematic, this dynamic is at least open to the possibility of refusal on the part of the animal. As well, the story undermines the widespread view that humans have an innate right to use animal flesh as food. Glooscap and his family do not want to kill all the animals for their survival, indicating moderation in their fishing practices. The theme is one of dependence, not dominion. Human survival is the justification for the death of Glooscap’s animal friends. The animals have independent life, their own purpose and their own relationships with the creator. They are not made for food, but willingly become food as a sacrifice for their friends. This is a far cry from the perspective of the white colonial hunter, in which animals are constructed as requiring population control, turning slaughter into a service performed, rather than one received.

An interesting exception to this thread is the Wabanaki story of “Glooscap and His People,” which blames the animals themselves for man’s aggression toward them. In this tale Malsum, an evil counterpart to Glooscap, turns the animals against Glooscap. Glooscap announces, “I made the animals to be man’s friends, but they have acted with selfishness and treachery. Hereafter, they shall be your servants and provide you with food and clothing.”[374] The original vision of harmony is lost and inequality takes its place as the punishment for listening to Malsum. In this way, the story is similar to the Genesis story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Glooscap shows the men how to make bows, arrows, and spears, and shows the women how to scrape hides and make clothing.

“Now you have power over even the largest wild creatures,” he said. “Yet I charge you to use this power gently. If you take more game than you need for food and clothing, or kill for the pleasure of killing, then you will be visited by a pitiless giant named Famine.”[375] Even in this story, which attempts to justify dominion, the proper relation to the animals is only for food and clothing. Exceptions to this principle appear in stories where a malevolent human magician has taken the form of an animal. In these cases the protagonists often kill the animal without purpose other than defeating their human enemy. These stories characterize animals as independent people with rights, wills, and freedom. If animal consent is required to justify their consumption, then it opens the possibility that such consent may be revoked. Overfishing, overhunting, and the wholesale destruction of their natural habitat could certainly give the animals cause to rethink the bargain.

Another feature of Mi’kmaq stories is the regret that comes with animal death. In “The Legend of the Wild Goose,” Glooscap is concerned for the safety of the small migrating birds and charges the Canada Goose with their protection. In “Nukumi and Fire,” Glooscap snaps Marten’s neck and placed him on the ground but immediately regrets his actions. Nukumi speaks to the Creator and Marten comes back to life and returns to his home in the river. On the ground now lays the body of another marten. This story is far from a straightforward tale of why we eat animals. Marten is both dead and alive: dead as a marten available for consumption by the grandmother, but alive as Marten, the friend of Glooscap and his people. “The Adventures of Katoogwasees”[376] tells how Glooscap’s grandmother used magic to obtain unlimited amounts of beaver meat from a single bone, reflecting a wish for abundance disconnected from the need to hunt.[377]

Regret and kinship also feature in the story of “Muin, The Bear’s Child.” In one version of this tale a young boy, Siko, is trapped in a cave by his evil stepfather and left to die. The animals hear him crying and attempt to save him but only the bear is strong enough to move the rocks blocking the cave entrance. Siko is adopted and raised as a bear. Later, Siko’s bear family is attacked by hunters and his mother is killed. He addresses the hunters, “I am a human, like you. Spare the she-cub, my adopted sister.” The amazed hunters put down their weapons and gladly spare the cub. In addition, they are sorry for having killed the bear who had been so good to Siko. Here we see that regret at animal death is contextualized in the kinship relation between humans and animals. At the end of the story Siko declares, “I shall be called Muin, the bear’s son, from this day forwards. And when I am grown, and a hunter, never will I kill a mother bear, or bear children!” And Muin never did.

This regret is also expressed in rituals surrounding the act of hunting. Mi’kmaq Elder Murdena Marshall describes one such ritual, a dance “to thank the spirit of the animal for giving its life for food. In the dance, one displays hunting abilities and skills through a re-enactment of the hunt. People sing and share stories as the dance is performed.”[378] In contrast to the enlightenment view of humans as distinguished from animals by speech and thought, here animals are not only capable of thought and speech, but can also be said to be persons. The value of the animal lies not in its utility to man, but in its very essence as a living being.

Not all Mi’kmaq food traditions centre upon meat. Glooscap’s mother was a leaf on a tree given life and human form by the sun.[379] The feast celebrating her birth is entirely vegetarian, consisting of plants, roots, berries, nuts, and fruit, and the nephew, whose role is usually that of hunter, becomes the gather in this instance. If we recognize that activities traditionally performed by Mi’kmaq women, such as fruit, vegetable, and nut gathering, are also fully Indigenous traditions then we can form Indigenous counter-narratives to the promotion of meat.

The values obtained from an ecofeminist exegesis of Mi’kmaq stories can serve as a starting point for an Indigenous veganism. The personhood of animals, their self-determination, and our regret at their death, all show that choosing not to ask for their sacrifice is a legitimately Indigenous option. Since the consumption of animals for food, clothing, and shelter is no longer necessary, as vegan culture testifies, then the Mi’kmaq tradition, as manifested in our legends, suggests that hunting and killing our animal brothers is no longer authorized.

Because Indigenous people are the targets of genocide the cultural practices we adopt or reject are vitally important. Bonita Lawrence notes that daily life practices have historically been used to assess the authenticity of Native identity claims, and accord Indian status.[380] Some may argue that the embodiment of Mi’kmaq values into new practices, such as veganism, is not a legitimate development, and may even threaten the ways our treaty rights are assessed by others. Yet those who value only the preservation of an unchanging tradition join with the colonial powers in seeing no place for a contemporary indigeneity. There is more to our culture and to our relationship with the land, particularly as women, than hunting and killing animals.

The modern commercial fishery, often touted as offering economic security for Indigenous communities, is actually further removed from our Mi’kmaq values than modern-day vegan practices are. The former views fish as objects to be collected for exchange, with economic power taking the place of sustenance, while the latter is rooted in a relationship with the animals based upon respect and responsibility. Again, the theme is one of necessity, not pleasure. If women initiated the hunt, as in the story of Glooscap’s grandmother, then surely changing circumstances can empower us to end it.

One must also be aware of changing circumstances and needs among the Mi’kmaq population. Few of us can sustain ourselves through traditional hunting, fishing, or gathering. As research shows, those Mi’kmaq people living on reserve are usually dependant on store-bought food. In addition, half of Canada’s Indigenous population live in urban areas.[381] When Indigeneity is defined as a primordial lifestyle, it reflects our intentional extinction as a people.

The reinterpretation of tradition and the malleability of ritual enabled our ancestors to survive genocide, famine, disease, forced moves, isolation on reserves, residential schooling, and a host of other colonial ills. Similarly, we must find ways to adapt to the increasing individuality of urban life. One solution is to embody our traditional values in new rituals. With the adoption of a vegan diet our meal preparation and consumption can become infused with transcendent significance, as we recall our connection with other animals, our shared connection to the Creator, and prefigure a time when we can live in harmony with the animals, as Glooscap did before the invention of hunting. Shared food practices, values, and daily life rituals can create ties between Indigenous people that help counteract the isolation and individualism of urban life. Veganism offers us a sense of belonging to a moral community, whose principles are made concrete through daily practices that are in keeping with the values of our ancestors, even if they may be at odds with their traditional practice.

At stake in the creation of an Indigenous veganism is the authority of Indigenous people, especially women, to determine cultural authenticity for ourselves. Dominant white discourse portrays our cultures as embedded in the pre-colonial past. This perspective must be replaced with the recognition that Indigenous cultures are living traditions, responsive to changing social and environmental circumstances. In retelling our stories, bringing postcolonial and ecofeminist interpretations to them, or in creating new stories, Indigenous women claim authority over our oral traditions. In doing so we recognize that our oral culture is not fixed in time and space, but is adaptable to our needs, to the needs of our animal siblings, and to the needs of the land itself.

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