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Nuu-chah-nulth whaling: A tradition dating back thousands of years
This is Tla-o-qui-aht canoe carver Joe Martin. Tla-o-qui-aht are one of the Nuu-chah-nulth tribes, and their traditional territory extends from the Tofino region, to northern Long Beach, and to Kennedy Lake (Haa’uukmin).
Joe is holding a traditional whale-hunting harpoon head. It is traditional in every respect except for some of the materials. The cutting edge of the harpoon head, instead of being made of finely sharpened but fragile mussel shell, is made of metal.
Much of traditional Nuu-chah-nulth territory lies on the outer shores of Vancouver Island. Hunting whales on the open ocean was one very important part of Nuu-chah-nulth culture—both for its spiritual significance and for the abundant food a whale could provide to a community. Traditional Nuu-chah-nulth whalers respected the whale, and the gift it would give to their community.
The whale hunt was a very serious endeavour, and whalers undertook weeks of ritual in preparation for a hunt, which included praying, sacred bathing, and sexual abstinence. They acknowledged the danger of the hunt, too—how close they would have to approach the giant animals in their canoes in order to thrust the harpoon into the whale.
The harpoon itself was extremely heavy, and the role of the harpooner was a highly respected role, usually undertaken by a chief. The actual harpoon head was attached by a cord to the harpoon shaft. Once the harpoon was thrust into the whale’s flesh, the head detached from the shaft. Sealskin floats on the cord allowed the whalers to track the whale, striking it again and again, and attaching more floats until it could no longer dive. The whale was then killed and its mouth was stitched up for towing. If the whale was caught far from the village, it might take a day or more to tow it home.
By the time Europeans were keeping regular written records here, most of the whales that the Nuu-chah-nulth were hunting were gray whales. However, humpback whales were their preferred prey. By a century or so ago, though, European whalers had hunted the humpbacks to near extinction, and gray whales were all that were left.
Archeological evidence also attests to the importance of whaling, and its long history. Excavations at the village of Yuquot, up the coast at Nootka Sound, have found tools made of whale bone, as well as harpoon heads used for hunting sea mammals that are up to 3,000 years old. Although fragments of whale bone are found throughout all ages of the archeological deposits here, they are too broken up to identify the species.
But in the layers that are 2,200 years old or younger, there are pieces of a type of barnacle that only lives on humpback whales—indirect evidence that humpback whales were being hunted and then processed at the village.
Life size Nuu-Chah-Nulth (formerly Nootka) whaling canoe sculpture in Port Alberni, BC. The piece used to be in the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria.
Joe Martin feels very strongly about his people’s tradition of whale-hunting, including a sense of sadness that this tradition is unlikely to come back—partly because the harvesting of marine resources is no longer under Nuu-chah-nulth control, but also because he recognizes that most of his people no longer have the discipline to go through the training and ritual that a respectful whale hunt requires.
In 1999, the Makah (a tribe from northern Washington state who are closely related to the Nuu-chah-nulth) reasserted their right to traditional whaling. That year, they hunted and killed one gray whale, and Joe Martin carved the canoe that they used for this hunt. But in 2001, the US government declared it illegal for the Makah to hunt whales, and this right is still being disputed.
Further reading:
- Text and photos 1 & 2 by Jacqueline Windh©; Last photo by Kevstan (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons
