"With bloody hands, you have tied yourselves to pain and death. With bloody hands, you have called forth Kali, Destroyer of Worlds. And, with bloody hands, She will come to you!" -- Cast by me three times on the border of the Makah reservation
I awoke Monday, May 17, to the shrill ring of the telephone. It was Erin, a friend of mine. "They've killed a whale. We have to get up there, now!" Details were hastily agreed upon. As I waited for my wife to get out of the bathroom, a vision hit me. I saw a Y (the shape of a whale's mouth) in dark red, outlined in black. Words came to me, something about bloody hands, the turning of the wheel and death. I knew I had to do a ritual for Yabis, the slain gray whale. I couldn't see it all, but I knew it would come.
I packed hurriedly. Waters of the World (for Yabis), my Coyote amulet and so on. The Waters of the World are a tradition from Starhawk's Reclaiming Collective down in San Francisco. Every year, as part of the Brigid celebration, people bring water to the collective for Her cauldron. The water is sacred water that people collect from all over the Earth. Water from every continent has gone into the cauldron over the years. After Brigid stirs the cauldron, the water is mostly given back to the people at the ritual. Some is saved, each year, to form the start of next year's cauldron. That means that each year's water contains some of all the water that ever went into the cauldron. I knew Yabis would like it.
For some reason, when packing my tools, I didn't want my athamé. Instead, I took my Kali wand. I made that wand as part of a class about the "shadow self." In the three years since I made it, I had never used it, but something had always prevented me from throwing it out. Now, I knew its time had come.
I was in Bellevue. I drove over to Seattle, picked up Erin, and we drove to the ferry. On the way, I picked up 9 feet of red ribbon and 9 feet of black ribbon, blood and death, cut into 3-foot segments. On the ferry, passing over water, the ritual came to me. Yabis would get the Waters of the World, but the bulk of the ritual was about the Makah. By actually killing Yabis, they turned the Wheel of Life and the world changed. Things were different now, and I had to mark that.
Once we got off the ferry, we drove all the way to Sekiu. There, we boarded the Sea Shepherd ship Sirenian. The Sea Shepherds are a group of activists that have been fighting since the '70s to "save the whales." We reached Neah Bay just as Yabis was being brought in. It was Makah elder Alberta Thompson, by the way, who named Yabis. It means "beloved" in Makah.
This was supposed to be a sacred hunt. By now, everyone knows of the sacred machine gun that the Makah used to blow Yabis away and the oh-so-traditional powerboats that towed Yabis in, so I won't go into them too much. Yes, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) says a machine gun is more humane, but it is also more effective. It is doubtful that the Makah could have murdered Yabis without it. Until now, I had been split on this issue. I empathized with the idea of a cultural tradition, so I wanted to see if what happened to the whale really was traditional, or if it was, as the other activists told me, a Japanese-sponsored money hunt.
When Yabis was towed in, there was a party on the beach. People were cheering and dancing. People climbed on the whale and were doing back flips off it into the water. Traditionally, this was solemn occasion as a great spirit gave its life for the tribe. What I saw was not a sacred rite, it was the celebration of a football team that had just won the big game, complete with the idiot jocks. They did not care enough to respect Yabis; they just danced on her body. The only people showing respect for the whale were on the Sirenian. This went on for hours.
At 11 p.m., myself and two friends, Erin and Jonathon, returned on foot to Neah Bay. We brought still and video cameras. We wanted some accurate record of what happened to Yabis beyond the media snippets. All day, the media had been showing the same clips of the sacred butchering of the whale. Some people in traditional grab cutting whale blubber and giving it to smiling children. The occasional Makah prayer and so on. We needed to know the rest of the story.
In disguise, we went to the reservation, cameras ready. Erin and Jonathon mostly took video and I did prints, but we all switched around. When we crossed the border, I could feel a dark energy in the air. By the time we reached the beach where Yabis was being slaughtered, the energy was intense and painful. Waves of pain and death radiated from the whale's body.
Hunting is a violent process. You murder things. Even the killing of farm chickens leaves noticeable bad vibes. That is what the rituals are for. Ritual eases the animal's spirit into the next world and dissipates the bad energy of the death for those who remain. Perhaps because no one at Neah Bay had ever performed the rituals before, or maybe because they changed the rituals and added "in Jesus' name, amen" to the end of everything, or probably just because no one believed anymore, the rituals failed. I've been to rituals of all sorts, including Native American rituals, and you can tell when they work. These didn't. The atmosphere was very bad.
The news teams went home after the live-at-11 updates, and things changed radically. Without any cameras watching (except ours, of course) the Makah gave up any pretense of ritual. Then the problems began. The Makah didn't know how to butcher a whale. They brought an Inuit person down from Alaska to tell them how to do it. Instead of that happening, the Inuit guy wound up doing the butchering. He would cut some meat off and offer it for Makah to take. No one wanted any more, and they started dumping it on a plastic tarp.
If the Makah had any clue how to perform a traditional hunt, they would have brought the whale in at high tide,
like their ancestors did. They brought Yabis in at low tide. Around 11:30p.m., the tide started coming in and they started panicking. The whale was maybe one-third butchered at this point, and the tide was going to re-claim Yabis' body.
An army truck painted in camouflage came in to pull the whale farther up the beach. Chains were attached to Yabis' tail (after her flukes had been cut off). The truck started pulling. The chain ripped into Yabis' spinal cord and yanked her tail rigid. The truck pulled and pulled, but the whale would not move.
Once again, it was clear the Makah had no tradition. A tradition would have told them that whales are way too heavy to move with a truck. People were worried that Yabis' spinal cord would snap, splattering everyone with whale guts. This went on for about an hour. During that time, the Makah mostly went home. They got bored and didn't care what happened to Yabis, the sacred whale whose every part would be used (or so they told us).
On the beach were a few Makah teenagers, two mothers with children who felt it was important to watch, some reporters (who had been told that they couldn't film anymore), a bunch of National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) scientists, the Inuit guy and us.
Someone had the bright idea that maybe if they cut Yabis' guts out, she would be lighter and then they could drag her up the beach. The NMFS people and the Inuit guy went to work cutting into Yabis. Yes, the sacred whale butchering was being done not by any Makah person, but by U. S. government scientists. When excerpts of our tapes were aired on the news, the NMFS said that they were just taking samples. Our four hours of tapes show they lied and were, in fact, butchering the whale. They made the mistake of thinking the highlights tape was all we had.
After a while, the government cut into Yabis' stomach cavity. A pool of yellow stomach acid erupted, covering everything. They had no clue what it was, at first, and no one would touch it. After a while, the NMFS guy figured it out and dumped garbage buckets of water on it, to wash it away.
Then they started removing intestines. The Inuit guy, whose culture does have a real native tradition of whaling, realized that this was really bad, magickally. He started calling out: "We need some Makah here to do this. Where are the Makah?" No one came to help him. They took out about 50 feet or so of intestines.
That was when we saw the rainbow. It had been raining since about midnight or so. All of a sudden, people started looking up. "Look, what's that? It's a rainbow. A white rainbow." A pale band crossed the sky. It was a rainbow, but completely devoid of color. Until I saw it, I would have thought that such a thing was impossible. A rainbow symbolizes rebirth. Bright and colorful, it is the beauty after the dark storm. This one was different. It was rebirth, but a dark rebirth. As the NMFS scientist butchered the sacred whale, the Makah were reborn as commercial whale hunters in our greed-driven culture. The beautiful colors of their sacred traditions were gone, leaving only a pale band of raw power.
This was not a moonbow, a halo around the moon, or any such natural thing. It was colorless and mechanistic, probably cast by the combined headlights of all the trucks on the beach. A perfect symbol of what was happening. Jonathon tried to record the rainbow on film, but it wouldn't register.
The Inuit guy was worried now. He shouted: "Does anyone know how to reach the captain (of the whaling team) or the tribe? Does anyone have a cell phone?" No one came to help. Finally, some of the young kids came to help. Much vomiting followed, with people throwing up on the whale. My, it felt ever so sacred standing knee-deep in blood-filled water as kids threw up on Yabis because of the smell.
I heard one of the kids talking with the Inuit guy -- Kid: "Do you do this a lot?" Inuit guy: "Yes, but we butcher our own whales." The disrespect for Yabis, the sacred whale, was plain. The one person who really understood sacred whaling knew this and felt guilty about it. He also knew that this shouldn't be known. When he later realized that we were filming everything, he confronted us and wanted assurances that weren't going to show our stuff to the media. We assured him. We lied, of course....
After getting about 400 feet of intestine out, they gave up on that idea and got more trucks. With three trucks working together, they dragged the whale up the beach. Then they covered it with a tarp and went home. It was 1 p.m. the next day before they got back to the whale. By that time, after hours in the sun, the remaining "sacred meat" had spoiled. Traditionally, the whale would have been brought in at high tide. The whole village would have come out to help in the slaughter so they could remove the approximately 20,000 pounds of good meat before it spoiled. There would have been no scientists.
We left after the whale had been dragged up the beach and our film ran out.
On way out, we stopped just past the border of the reservation. I got out of the car to do the ritual. Erin and Jonathon, my nonpagan friends, were tired and mystified. "Can't we do this tomorrow? Shouldn't we do this back at Sekiu?" They just didn't understand. I left, alone, and walked to the border.
I am dedicated to Gaia, and Coyote has claimed me as one of his own, but it was Kali who walked with me that night. If Gaia is my patron, Kali could be considered a good friend. I'm an environmental activist. She has been there, with me, those times when the loggers have won and Gaia's treasures have been murdered for profit. Death and rebirth are her forté. We had the death, and I invoked Kali to see what the Makah had wrought.
Three times did I utter the above words. With each repetition, I tied a red and black ribbon together and then around a tree. With each repetition, the power grew. At the end, I tied a special triple knot sealing the wand of Kali into the spell.
Before I go on, I want to talk a little about the ethics of spell-casting. Spells are powerful; they have effects. Casting such magick should not be done lightly. Ethically, most pagans I have met tend to be great believers in the end of the Wiccan rede: "An it harm none, do as you will." Unfortunately, the rede is woefully inadequate when it comes to protecting others from harm. Often, you must do things that the recipients would consider harm to prevent even greater harm. The rede would better be reformulated as "An it harm none, do as you will, but to minimize harm, do as you must."
There are a few things to keep in mind when performing magick to minimize harm. First, you must be careful not to project your own energy into the mix. Spells should focus on what the harmers have done and use that energy to bring about change. It is their fault, if you will, and their energy that brings about the consequences of those actions. Spells cast to bring serial rapists to justice often involve their missteps haunting them and the police catching them. In this case, the Makah have tied themselves to their fate. "With bloody hands..." They have done these things. They killed Yabis. I just helped facilitate their threefold payback.
That brings up the second thing to consider: What if you are wrong? What if you completely misunderstand an issue and do harm with your own magick? That is where the Goddess or God come in. On issues like the whale hunt, it is best to let the Goddess decide. That is why my spell, really, just uses some of the energy of Yabis' murder to invoke Kali. Let the Goddess Who most embodies life and death together judge what happened. I don't specify results in my spell; I just call the Goddess and let Her work on it. Within the parameters of my working, She could show up and bestow a blessing on the Makah for reviving a sacred ritual of life and death. I don't think that is likely, but that is for Kali to decide. Once again, I just facilitate Her actions.
I would have created this ritual differently if I had a choice. The ritual basically came to me in a vision. At first, my mind kept trying to substitute "By your own hands" for the "With bloody hands." At the time, I didn't fully understand the bloody nature of the killing. Later it became apparent how it must go, and I gave up fighting and did what the Goddess told me.
The invocation left me utterly drained. My mind filled with the horror of the beach and visions of Kali, I went back to the car. My friends had looked for me and had not found me. They were worried. We started driving back to Sekiu again, Jonathon and I in the front seats, Erin in the back.
As we drove, a wind came up outside, and I could feel the energy changing. Kali was coming. I started to tingle all over, and it felt as if there was wind inside the car too. We rounded a bend, and the road was covered in huge pools of blood. The road signs had been blown over, and trees were knocked asunder. Jonathon said "What the hell?" and jammed on the brakes. We stopped. I looked out at the destruction in shock. Erin, in the back seat, said: "What? What are you looking at?" "There, right there!" Jonathon said. "Can't you see it?" I added. She couldn't, and then it faded and the road was perfectly normal again. Something had passed us on its way to Neah Bay. Neither Erin or Jonathon are practicing pagans. Jonathon could see the vision, and Erin couldn't.
We finished the trip back and were warmly welcomed by the other activists. We edited the tapes and sent them to the press. We had two press conferences on Wednesday and made the news. The tapes also went to the International Whaling Commission meeting in Grenada, where indigenous whaling is being discussed as I write this.
The Makah have turned the Wheel of Life, as they meant to. Things are different now. Unfortunately, I don't think the Makah are going to like the results. They have returned their tribe to when it was a whaling tribe. Not the isolated whaling tribe of happier times, but a native whaling tribe in the pres-ence of Anglo-Saxon culture. When they were last in this position, they did not fare well. They were driven off their lands and sent to the reservation. They were nearly destroyed. They have returned to those times.
By Tuesday, the next day, the tribe had received several bomb threats. Anti-native sentiment is growing, and anti-native congressmen are talking again about repealing native sovereignty. The indigenous rights movement has lost much of the support it had from the counterculture. The Makah have bound themselves to pain and death, and the threefold law is already bringing it back.
Of course, my friends and I are tied in by what we witnessed and felt. We are also bound by that energy. While many images of that night are forever burned into our minds, we can't seem to agree on other simple details such as which of us did exactly what. We each remember different things clearly. Important decisions, things that should be easy for friends to work out, turn into shouting matches.
We have the tapes to help us, and the tapes don't lie. But even they are not immune to the energy. They have taken on what I started calling the One Ring effect. In Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, there was one all-powerful ring. Friends and allies in the war against evil fought over the ring. Bilbo and Frodo, its bearers, couldn't even show it to people without worrying. And they wouldn't let others even touch the ring. In some ways, the master tapes are like that. Things have gotten better now that we all have copies of the tapes, but there is still strange magick around the masters.
In short, the culture wasn't there, the rituals didn't work, and the energy was highly negative. As soon as the cameras left, the Makah abandoned Yabis, their sacred whale, to the scientists of the National Marine Fisheries Service. It was a money hunt, pure and simple, with some ritual trappings thrown in to help get cultural whaling approved by the International Whaling Commission.
I've been talking to people and showing the tape since the murder, and I get a few reactions that I would like to address. First, there are lots of people who are convinced of the wrong of the hunt by the tape. Of the unconvinced people, their reactions fall into a few categories:
"It's only one whale." I think I can agree, in principle, with people who say this. If it were only one whale, or something really common like chickens, I wouldn't object. The problem is, it isn't. The gray whale is in danger of extinction. The only reason it isn't still on the endangered species list is because the Makah spent lots of Japanese fishing industry money lobbying to get it removed. It is still a threatened spe-cies. The Makah have started a new kind of hunt, a "cultural" hunt. Dozens of other groups, including Japanese and Norwegian coastal fishermen, have filed for their own "cultural" hunts since Yabis was killed.
I'm not going to go into too much detail here, because it isn't really pagan, but worldwide gray whale numbers are around 20,000. New grays born each year number around 2000. Gray whales who die each year fall at about 800 (this includes whales who die of age, mystery wash-ups and so on). Subsistence kills number around 700. Subsistence whaling is done by native peoples who need to eat the whale to live. That leaves around 500 "spare" whales each year. The estimated com-bined kills of all the groups who say they will whale if the Makah get away with it is greater than 500. That leaves a net population loss each year, which will cause species extinction.
By the way, the Makah can kill as many whales as they feel like. They issued their own hunting permit, not the International Whaling Commission. The IWC specifically said they did not approve this hunt. The Makah traded some of their salmon fishing rights indirectly to Siberian natives who had an approved gray whale hunt. The Siberians had their hunt approved because they need the whale meat (or salmon, apparently) to live. If you think that trade is okay, ask yourself if it would still be okay if a Japanese industrial fishing company bought up all the approximately 700 approved subsistence kills.
"The Makah did the best ritual they could." No, dumping the whale after the TV cameras went home and leaving it to the tender mercies of the National Marine Fisheries Service is not "the best they could do." They said part of their ritual was the sacred butchering. They didn't do it; the NMFS did.
"Death is natural." Death may be natural; murder is not. It takes man to drive species to extinction. (Yes, yes... asteroids kill and all that. Nonetheless, animals don't generally drive other animals to extinction.) While there may have never been a time when man lived in balance with nature, it is my goal to make this time that time. It should be a goal of anyone who claims to worship nature.
"We are bad too, so we can't stop them." I hear this all the time and am continually amazed by how stupid it is. By this logic, rapists should go unpunished because many cops break speeding laws. No one is perfect. That doesn't means we all shouldn't fight for what is right.
Some people believe the Makah's plight is our responsibility. They are right. It is our fault. It is not Yabis' fault, and the gray whale should not become extinct to pay for our crimes. That is why I also work on indigenous rights. I'm in favor of giving the Makah back their land if they stop whaling. There aren't very many people out there; it could be done painlessly.
The Wheel has turned. We can't go back. Hopefully, good things will come of Yabis' sacrifice. People watched her die on TV, and that is influencing legislation. When the Makah see that Yabis' death doesn't end alcoholism and drug use on the reservation, they may reconsider their hunts. The IWC may see that "cultural" whaling is a sham. It took an actual killing to make the situation real to most of the world. Let's hope that this will be enough to end these murders forever.
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