LOLITA FROM PENN COVE by Emma Hine
On July 27, 2019, a woman named both Squil-le-he-le and Raynell Morris stood at a cluster of microphones. Flags behind her snapped in the wind. She was here to make an announcement. When she spoke her voice wavered, cracked. Another woman, named both Tah-mahs and Ellie Kinley, put a hand on her shoulder. “We are exercising our inherent right to file an intention to sue,” Morris told the gathered crowd. Their object: to bring a long-lost member of their family home. “We care,” Morris said. “We’re not gonna stand by. We’re gonna take action.”
More than three thousand miles away, a killer whale named Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut, Tokitae, and Lolita spent most of that same day motionless. Sometimes, sure, she swam the restless, repetitive circles of a caged predator. Sometimes she scraped against her concrete wall. Sometimes she bobbed her head. She was probably given a cocktail of medications. She earned her fish by leaping into the air, shrieking with her mouth open, dancing to piped music – sometimes, in a sad twist of irony, Rihanna’s “Only Girl (In the World).” This is how she spends every day. “Although humans are feeling the stress of isolation,” a PETA spokesperson told the Miami New Times in April 2020, “it’s nothing compared to the way the lone orca Lolita must feel,” adding that Lolita is “quarantined away from her ocean home and isolated from any member of her own species.” In August, Kinley told Miami’s Local 10 news station the following: “We’ve been in quarantine for five months and she’s been in quarantine for fifty years. She hasn’t been around any of her family. It’s time.”
On that July day in 2019, Morris wore the traditional black and red of the Lummi Nation, the third largest tribe in Washington State. Her people have fished the Salish Sea for twelve thousand years. With her stood more Lummi tribal members, and others; a tattooed man bounced a baby, patted it gently on the back, but the rest of the crowd stood very still, listening. Many bowed their heads. A red flag occasionally unfurled enough to reveal part of what it said: Point Elliott Treaty, and below that, a rippling drawing that was maybe a salmon, maybe an orca, and below that, the year 1855. This was the lands settlement agreement in which the tribes of Puget Sound ceded “all their right title and interest in and to the lands and country occupied by them” in exchange for reserved land parcels, of which the Lummi Reservation is one – about thirteen thousand acres of tidelands between Seattle and Vancouver.
Lolita is twenty-two feet long and weighs almost eight thousand pounds. Her oblong tank at the Miami Seaquarium is roughly one hundred feet long, thirty-five feet wide, and thirty-five feet deep at its deepest. The math appalls. Former senior SeaWorld trainer John Hargrove has called her tank “without question the smallest and most barren I have ever seen an orca forced to live in.” Lolita is approximately fifty-four years old. She has lived in this tank, which is concrete and featureless and known as the Whale Bowl, for fifty years. In the course of this half-century she’s been the subject of multiple books and documentaries; schoolchildren in Washington have painted murals of her; and a ferry between Puget Sound’s Whidbey Island and the mainland has adopted her name – not her glitzy stage name, with its aftertaste of kidnap and childhood lost, nor her more recent Lummi name, but the name she was first given when she was taken from the wild, and what her trainers and vets and handlers may still call her in private. Tokitae, Toki for short, a Salish word that translates to something like nice day, pretty colors. She waves, she dives, she splashes tourists. “What a nice day,” some probably say to each other, to their children, thinking her name is Lolita. “What pretty colors,” pointing to her black-and-white juxtaposed against the chemical blue.
After Morris spoke, Ellie Kinley addressed the gathered crowd: “We’ve been ignored for too long. We can’t let her keep living where she’s living, in that small little pond. It’s time for her to come back home and be with her family.”
Toki is the only solitary orca in captivity. She is also the last surviving captive southern resident – a subspecies of Orcinus orca, a designation coined by Linneaus in 1758. There are also northern resident orcas, transient orcas, offshore orcas, and several other subspecies, but these distinctions weren’t as well understood back when Toki was born. Each subspecies has a unique language, diet, size, and range, as well as minute differences in the white markings that lap like cartoon waves against an orca’s dark side. The transients are, as they sound, nomadic, and it was their feeding preferences – seals and sea lions and even other whales – that gave the orca the common name of “whale killer” and, later, “killer whale.” Offshore orcas travel hundreds or thousands of miles from the coastline to hunt sharks in the Pacific. Northern residents range the coastline of British Columbia. Southern residents like Toki live in the lower Salish Sea year-round, traveling along the region’s pocketed coast and eating, when they can find it, Chinook salmon. All save Toki live in one of three family pods: J, K, and L. (Toki was born into L pod.) While there are about 50,000 orcas around the world, the southern resident subspecies is in danger of extinction. According to the Center for Whale Research, as of July 2019 there were only seventy-three wild southern residents left – seventy-four if you count Lolita.
Orcas recur in the oral traditions of many Native American northwest tribes: the Yup’ik of Nelson Island believed that orcas would intentionally allow blubber from their whale kills to float to the surface as gifts for the humans; the Tlingit would ask the whales to drive seals toward their hunters; the Haida envisioned orcas living like people in underwater towns. This merging of human and orca is still an important part of the Native conversation about the whales today; central to the current environmental activism of the Lummi Nation is the Xwlemi Chosen, or Lummi language, word for the animal: Qwe ‘lhol mechen, which means “our relations below the waves.”
The same day as the press conference, these two women, Morris and Kinley, filed an intent to sue Miami Seaquarium for Toki’s repatriation under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which requires federally funded institutions to return Native American human remains and objects of “cultural patrimony” to the people or tribes, or their linear descendants, from whom they were taken.
The Miami Seaquarium has received federal funding on multiple occasions, including for research, for animal rehabilitation, and for disaster relief, and the acceptance of an animal as cultural patrimony was made precedent by the 2005 case Dugong vs. Rumsfeld, about a manatee-like marine mammal off the coast of Japan. Even so, “This one is pushing the envelope a little,” Tim McKeown, a legal anthropologist and NAGPRA expert hired by the Lummi Nation to explore the viability of their suit, told the Seattle Times. But, “in terms of a situation where people pay to see something and putting it back in its cultural context, that is exactly what NAGPRA is for.”
“The intention to sue is a white way we’ve had to go,” Morris said at the press conference. “We have tried, others have tried from around the world to reach out to Seaquarium to ask to meet with them so we can explain why she’s important to us, who she is to us, that our family calls out to her, she calls out to her family every night, singing her song. We’re answering that. We are going to get her home. If we have to walk in the legal world and file a suit in the Ninth Circuit under the Native American Indian Graves and Repatriation Act, that’s what we have to do.” The crowd cheered. A member of the press called out to ask if this would be the first time the NAGPRA would be used to repatriate a living creature. Morris answered, “This would be historical, but that’s what we do. Whatever it takes.”
And the Lummi Nation is not standing alone – the red flag flying at the press conference was actually the official flag of the Stillaguamish tribe. After Morris spoke, several witnesses addressed the crowd, including a Squamish representative, who said, “The southern resident killer whales are salmon fishermen, just like the Lummi people are, just like my people from the Squamish tribe are, just like all the people from the Northwest are.” A Native spokesperson from Papua New Guinea said, “We share the same ocean.”
An essay about orcas can never actually, or at least only, be about orcas. It’s about the stories we tell of them, the weight we make them bear. Like many, I first learned about southern residents in the summer of 2018, when a twenty-year-old orca from J pod – J35, also known as Tahlequah – made international news. J pod hadn’t seen a viable birth in three years, and Tahlequah had been pregnant for the full seventeen months of an orca’s gestation. On July 24 she gave birth to a live calf, and then, about thirty minutes later, it died, and then, instead of letting her calf’s body fall to the Salish Sea floor, Tahlequah carried it with her for a thousand miles and seventeen days. One day for each month of her pregnancy. The internet, myself included, watched her journey. Scientists and social media alike called this a “tour of grief.”
What struck me about the photos in the New York Times, in National Geographic, honestly everywhere, was how unmistakably orca-like the dead calf was, its dark little flippers, its small open mouth. I’d never thought about how saturated popular culture is with images of orcas: in the wild they surface like dolphins against incredible backdrops, in marine parks they smile at their trainers and leap for fish. Tahlequah’s determined and nearly suicidal show of maternal grief lay completely outside the conceptions of a species I hadn’t even known I harbored. Nor had I known that a subspecies of orca native to the United States is critically endangered, that its population is shrinking, and that, as with so much else, time is running out.
Howard Garrett, the cofounder of the nonprofit Orca Network, a 501(c)3 dedicated to raising awareness about the resident and transient populations in the Pacific Northwest, told me that these days, “many, many people are totally engrossed, immersed in the lives of the whales.” People move across the country to be nearer to them, he says. They follow their movements devotedly online.
This hasn’t always been the predominant attitude toward orcas, though – Garrett has noticed a gradual change over the past couple of decades that is “continually ramping up.” Outside of Native cultures, the whales used to be understood differently. Melville, 1851: “Call him the Hyena whale, if you please. His voracity is well known.” Then there’s the 1897 article in Sacramento’s Record-Union entitled “The Terrible Orca: More Destructive Than Any Other Monster of the Deep,” the 1917 National Geographic article “Giant Wolves of the Sea: Ruthless Killer Whales Swim in Ranks Like Well-Trained Soldiers,” the 1927 article that made the rounds in local California newspapers entitled “Killer Whale Has No Equal in Ferocity.” One of these noted, “The evil impression is well justified, since killers are the most savage and remorseless of whales.” Another quoted a hobby marine biologist: “‘Everything that swims the waters of the earth dreads the terrible killer whale.’”
These pervasive characterizations had real-life consequences. In 1910, the Olympia Daily Recorder commended two teenage boys who found a young orca in shallow water, shot out its eyes with a .22 rifle, and slashed its throat with a knife. (A 2018 Seattle Times article about orca captivity cited this particular example of brutality.) In 1931, two fishermen saw an orca in a school of smaller fish and shot it more than fifty times, also with a .22, and the Roseville Press-Tribune published a photograph of the dead orca hanging from a wooden scaffold by its tail. A 1910 account called Recreations of a Sportsman on the Pacific Coast, by Charles Frederick Holder, shows a series of photographs captioned “Mr. Gifford Pinchot Hunting the Killer Whale with a Revolver.” He stands at the stern of a small sailboat with his left hand on his hip and his right hand extended before him like he’s about to drop something distasteful into the sea. In that hand is a small black gun. In the ocean is a dorsal fin. “Pinchot fired at them,” wrote Holder. “I fancied I heard the thud of the bullet against the massive body, and I am sure that he could have hit any spot on the animal that could have been seen, yet the big killer sank out of sight in a dignified manner, followed by the others.” According to Jason Michael Colby in his 2018 book Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean’s Greatest Predator, by the 1950s hundreds or even thousands of orcas were killed by humans every year.
A man named Ted Griffin credits himself with the twentieth-century shift in the non-Native opinion about orcas. Griffin owned the first public aquarium in Seattle, and in 1965 he paid $8,000 for a live bull orca that had been caught in a fisherman’s net near Vancouver Island. Sandra Pollard tells the story in her 2014 book Puget Sound Whales for Sale: The Fight to End Orca Captivity. Griffin transported the whale – a northern resident he named Namu, after a nearby cannery village – more than four hundred miles south to Seattle in a steel-and-net pen towed by a series of boats. Early in the eighteen-day journey, a cow orca and two calves followed behind the pen, squealing. Late in the journey, after what was presumably part of Namu’s family had fallen behind, thousands of onlookers found ways to see him – from boats, from bridges, from the banks of Fidalgo and Whidbey Islands – as the makeshift contraption passed by. By the time he reached Seattle, Namu was a cultural phenomenon. Thousands more people paid to see the killer whale leap for salmon in his tank at the Seattle Marine Aquarium. Many, many more saw the movie Namu, the Killer Whale (tellingly re-released a few years later as Namu, My Best Friend) that starred Namu opposite Robert Lansing, who played a fictional biologist desperate to convince a fishing community that the killer whales they so feared were merely misunderstood.
“I wanted people to see the whale the way I see the whale,” Griffin told the Seattle Times in 2018. “I want to humanize that person in the sea. Up until this time it is just a beast, it is nothing. I see it as saving the whale from all this mischief, all these bad thoughts. How can I get the public to understand that this is not what they think it is?”
Griffin and his longtime business partner, Don Goldsberry, certainly did play a key – maybe even the key – role in changing the way mainstream America thought of orcas. But their relationship to the killer whale is far more nuanced, and far darker, than this single repeated motive to make an animal beloved. After all, memory is complicated, and we humans have a way of later simplifying why we’ve done what we’ve done. In a nutshell: Namu created a demand for captive orcas, and Griffin and Goldsberry became the primary supply. According to Colby in Orca, in the 1960s and 1970s at least 270 killer whales were netted in the Pacific Northwest, some of them multiple times. At least twelve whales died during capture attempts. More than fifty whales, many of them southern residents, were sold to marine parks around the world, including a calf named Shamu, for She-Namu, to a small San Diego operation called SeaWorld – and a young whale called Lolita to the Miami Seaquarium.
I learned about Lolita’s story in the context of a particularly violent capture that took place long ago in one of Whidbey Island’s many coves, while working on a different essay, one about urban poaching and populations of animals that suddenly shrink or disappear. I’d been walking my dog in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park one morning and noticed that every telephone pole along my route bore the same printout flier: Did anyone know what had happened to the park lake’s seven swans? There was an email address, there was speculation of abduction. It turns out that sometimes people do this, round up urban wildlife and sell them for food or sport. For instance, there’s at least one guy who nets pigeons in Manhattan, stuffs them into his van, and sells them by the hundreds to live-skeet-shooting places in Pennsylvania.
This is basically what happened to the whales.
After Namu, when he realized how much money and worldwide attention a captive orca would fetch, Griffin teamed up with Goldsberry and started experimenting with how to best bring the massive animals in. According to Pollard’s Puget Sound Whales for Sale, the two men started by using seine-fishing boats and helicopters to chase small groups and hone in on certain orcas – particularly young ones, easier to transport and, hypothetically, train. They caught and sold Shamu to SeaWorld, a young male named Hugo to Miami Seaquarium, and a few other orcas to similar operations around the country and world. But the southern residents were quickly getting wise to their tactics. Griffin and Goldsberry would find themselves chasing a single, decoy adult while the calves in a pod escaped. The orcas were rolling in the water, hiding their dorsal fins so they’d be harder to spot. The chasers needed to change the terms of warfare so they’d be sure to win. So they brought in speedboats. They brought in loud, low-flying planes. They brought in underwater bombs.
The incident in the cove, the one I first learned of, happened in August 1970, just over fifty years ago exactly. Among all the Salish Sea whale captures this one, along with a similar capture a year later, stands alone in terms of scale, in terms of visibility, and in terms of loss.
I talked to John Stone, who witnessed the capture. We’d corresponded initially by email – he signs his name “Captain John Stone” and begins every message with, “Ahoy!” – and he was about half an hour late to our phone call because there had been a bit of a blow and someone at the marina had called to say that his boat, an educational sailing vessel called Cutty Sark, was – keeling? – a little – starboard, I think? – and he should go take a look, in case she had sprung a leak. (She hadn’t.) (This was before my recorder clicked on.) When we finally connected, I pulled up a map of Whidbey Island and he talked me through the sequence of events.
Whidbey Island is shaped like a distorted w drawn with a shaky hand, and wherever the pencil wobbled there’s a cove. The day the 1970 capture began – it lasted over two weeks – more than ninety whales from all three of the southern resident pods were gathered in Possession Sound, off the south end of Whidbey Island, in what’s known as a superpod – a behavior unique to the residents, which Stone believes ensures genetic diversity, to “meet up with third and fourth cousins, so to speak, sort of like the royal families of Europe.” According to Stone, Griffin originally wanted to corral the orcas in Holmes Harbor, the big bay that makes up one of the w’s two main indents. But despite the boats, the planes, and the underwater explosives, the whales were able to elude him for a while and swim beyond Holmes Harbor. Eventually, though, Griffin was able to corner them in the w’s other v, an east-west body of water known as Penn Cove. He corralled about half of the superpod, and over nearly two weeks he, Goldsberry, and the other whalers lassoed seven adolescent orcas from the group one by one.
“Here’s the thing,” Stone told me, “that was amazing to me at the time, and is still amazing to me now, well, fifty years later”: that even though only half the superpod was trapped in Griffin’s makeshift corrals, the other forty or more whales stayed in Penn Cove with them for half a month, just beyond the nets. They cried, loudly, above the water, and Stone says you could hear this all around Penn Cove. Since there wouldn’t have been much salmon in the cove at that time of year, they were probably also hungry. “But they were staying with their family, which you can anthropomorphize and” – Stone interrupted himself – “my degree’s in anthropology so I know we should not anthropomorphize, but we do anyway.”
Stone’s parents ran the Captain Whidbey Inn on Penn Cove, and he was home from college during the summer of 1970, helping out around the place. The whalers had hired his younger brother to keep curious onlookers from getting too close to the nets, but Stone wanted nothing to do with the capture. Instead, he called up an old family friend, Wally Funk, who edited the Whidbey News-Times and served as its photographer. Stone had an aluminum Smoker Craft, and he used this to guide Funk around Penn Cove to get photographs of the captures that are used in almost every article or documentary about orca captivity to this day. In one of Funk’s photos, at least four orcas roil in a narrow netted channel beside a dock. In another, a dorsal fin with a rope draped over it protrudes from the water beside an idling speedboat. In a third, two adults wedge a young female so tightly between them, she’s almost entirely above water. The natural curve of her small mouth makes it look like she’s smiling. The adults’ noses are inches away from a submerged net. Behind them, at the top of the frame, two men are sitting on the dock. One of them, a diver still wearing his wetsuit and tank, seems to be drinking something. The other is scratching his forehead, looking out toward the whales.
Another photograph from the Penn Cove captures, which Pollard used as the cover of her 2019 book A Puget Sound Orca in Captivity: The Fight to Bring Lolita Home, shows eight men standing on a dock wearing the aviators and wide-legged jeans of their era. They’re all heaving backward, like a group of cousins at a barbecue tug-of‑war, on a rope that extends down to the water in the left of the frame. At the end of the rope is a lassoed orca. It’s facing away from them, clearly trying to swim. The sun is reflecting brightly off its blowhole. From the size of its dorsal fin, you can tell it’s a female, probably very young.
Five whales are known to have died in Penn Cove in August 1970. At first, the public was only aware of one, an adult female whose body was away for study. According to Pollard, though, a diver named Terry Newby overheard the whalers arguing in the Captain Whidbey Inn bar over what to do with some calves that had also died. Should they turn these bodies over, too, for study? After all, hunting whales wasn’t illegal, as long as they had a state license to net. It would be a publicity nightmare, though, and protesters were already petitioning the state government to put anti-capture legislation in place. So, they decided to hide all evidence of the deaths.
Less than a month later, a dead calf washed up on a Penn Cove beach. In November, two more dead calves came ashore nearby, and, soon after, a fourth was found on another beach on Whidbey Island. Their bellies had all been slit open and filled with rocks, to release the gases that cause dead mammals to float and to weigh them down. Griffin and Goldsberry initially denied having ordered the divers to do this, and then, slowly, began to admit it was true.
According to Stone, Garrett, and others, the free portion of the superpod remained nearby through all of this, but after the last captured calf was lifted from the water in a canvas sling, they turned quietly toward open water and left the cove. Their seven adolescents were taken by flatbed truck to the Seattle Marine Aquarium, where they waited in a concrete tank for distribution. Toki, soon to be Lolita, went on to Miami. Another, known as Lil’ Nooka, was sent to Galveston; the others were bound for France, England, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Newby took an iconic photograph of one of them, often assumed to be Toki, as she was waiting above-water for transport. It’s just her eye, heavy-lidded, looking right at the viewer through a hole in a chain link-style net.
It’s stories and images like this that have in recent years caused yet another shift in the public attitude to orcas, particularly captive ones. Most notable, of course, is 2013’s breakout documentary Blackfish about Tilikum, a SeaWorld orca responsible for three human deaths. The film, which premiered at Sundance and was later broadcast by CNN, explores the consequences of keeping orcas captive and can be linked directly to drops in attendance at SeaWorld; this decline is now known as the “Blackfish effect.” Three years after the film’s release, SeaWorld announced intentions to stop breeding captive orcas and to phase out orca performances in their parks.
In addition to Blackfish and other publicity around orca captivity, the Orca Network’s Howard Garrett also attributes the post-1960s shift in attitude to the extensive orca field studies that began in earnest in the 1970s; “by the mid-eighties or so,” he says, “people had heard one way or another about the different communities and the family loyalties.” Either way, it “all came together. And people are really appalled by the whole capture industry.”
I asked Garrett if there was anything he most wanted the public to take away from the orca captures in general and the Penn Cove story in particular. He paused, then said, “Well, I’ve been trying to focus on her. Lolita, Tokitae, Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut, however you want to call her, because she is extraordinary in so many ways. . . . She is a survivor, to have lived in those conditions for all this time.”
This alone, sadly, makes her extraordinary, as captive orcas have a way of dying very young. The average lifespan for a male in the wild is thirty years old, with some living up to age sixty, and while a female’s average life expectancy in the wild is forty-six, they’ve been known to survive to age ninety. The original Shamu lasted six years in captivity after her capture as a calf. Skana, a whale at a marine park in Vancouver, survived for more than thirteen. Ramu, who died at SeaWorld Orlando in 1982, lasted fifteen. While much shorter than Toki’s fifty-years-and-counting, these are outlying examples. There are accounts of whales dying after three months in captivity, nine months, a year. The most common cause of death in captive orcas is pneumonia; they have also died of ruptured aortas, lung infections, gastric ulcers, and even drowning, which in marine mammals is often known to be intentional. Hugo, Toki’s companion at Miami Seaquarium for the first few years of her time there, died of a brain hemorrhage after repeatedly ramming his head against the tank wall. In total, at least 165 orcas are known to have died in captivity to this day, 134 of which were captured in the wild.
Sandra Pollard outlines all of this in Puget Sound Whales for Sale, and in A Puget Sound Orca in Captivity, she combs through years of Miami Seaquarium reports to describe the conditions under which Toki continues to survive. The medications alone stagger. She’s regularly taking antibiotics to prevent or treat infections from when the dolphins she shares her tank with rake her with their teeth. (Records show she has been raked well over three hundred times.) She’s on a pain-killer called Tramadol, a stress-ulcer treatment called ranitidine, a fungal infection treatment called fluconazole, multiple eye drops, a form of birth control also used to treat various ovarian conditions, and skin infection medications for the abrasions she receives from regular contact with her small tank’s bottom and walls.
According to Garrett, Toki’s near-miraculous survival under these circumstances is “an indication of her strength and her courage and character and her ability to not only cope but hope – that she can return and that this is all a horrible nightmare that will be over someday. And she’ll be back with her family.”
One of her coping mechanisms, he says, is little acts of mischief, like splashing trainers – but unlike other captive orcas, including her companion Hugo and Blackfish’s Tilikum most famously, she has never expressed hostility. Garrett thinks her occasional pranks give her “a sense of agency,” allowing her to “occasionally go outside the bounds of what she’s supposed to do . . . She’s not just trained. She’s not habituated. She knows the rules and she plays by them. But it’s conscious, and she’ll be very happy not to do that anymore.”
Garrett has been working to make this happen since 1995. He first fell in love with orcas in the early 1980s, as a recent college graduate visiting his older brother, Ken Balcomb, in Washington’s San Juan Islands. Balcomb is a marine scientist, and the founder of Washington’s Center for Whale Research, whose studies of the area’s orca populations were absolutely crucial to what we now know about the animals. Garrett was captivated, he stayed, and, in 1995, he and his wife, Susan Berta, began what is known as the Lolita Campaign.
That April, the Center for Whale Research published “Marine Biologist Ken Balcomb’s Comprehensive Retirement Plan,” in which Balcomb, Garrett, and Berta outlined how they would go about bringing Toki home. Step one, which the Lummi Nation is now working to accomplish, was “to reach a sensible business agreement with Lolita’s owner(s) to retire her from show business and transport her back to her home waters.”
For nearly twenty-five years, the Lolita Campaign’s basic goal has remained the same, and occasionally it’s looked like they might catch a break, most notably when they fought to have the southern resident population listed as an endangered species, which would hopefully make Toki much easier to free. In 2005, they succeeded, but with a devastating caveat: the federal government recognized all free-ranging southern residents under the Endangered Species Act, but any captive members of the species were excluded from the designation. By that time, Toki was the only captive southern resident left. Ten years later, in 2015, she was officially designated as a member of an endangered species, but this success turned out to be a complicated one; now that she is, moving her to a sea pen will require approval from the National Marine Fisheries Service.
In 2017, the Miami Beach Commission passed a symbolic resolution to free Toki. In March 2018, the governor of Washington State signed an executive order to restore the southern resident population and appointed a special task force to oversee the effort. That same month, the Lummi Nation’s council announced their intention to fight for Toki’s return. “This was just music to my ears,” Garrett told me, “because we’ve always known that we don’t have the administrative capacity to bring her back.” He explained that, as a small nonprofit, the Orca Network could advocate for Toki and raise public awareness of her plight, but they were never able to handle the financial or organizational burden of transporting a whale cross-country. (The total cost of freeing Toki is expected to be 3.6 million dollars the first year, including transport, and .7 million for monitoring and limited care every year after that.) The Lummi Nation has the resources, though, as well as the political power to make it all seem possible; they’ve recently stopped a proposal for what would have been the continent’s largest coal export facility.
In May 2018, the Lummi Nation began a twenty-seven-day, thirteen-stop totem journey from Washington to Florida calling attention to Toki’s plight – another tour of grief. The totem pole, carved in her honor by master carver Jewell James and the House of Tears Carvers, was over sixteen feet tall and weighed two tons; it and two eight-foot-long supporting poles were lashed to a flatbed trailer for the trip. Jay Julius, Chairman of the Lummi Nation, released the following statement at the beginning of the journey: “Tokitae’s story is more than a story of a whale. Her story is the story of the Native peoples of this country who have been subjected to bad policies. Because of the failure of policymakers to protect our wildlife, she was stolen from her family forty-seven years ago and taken to the Miami Seaquarium. Because she is a relative of the Lummi people, it is our sacred obligation to bring her safely home to the Salish Sea.”
So, what happens if the NAGPRA suit is successful and the Lummi Nation and the Orca Network suddenly have a free-able whale on their hands?
First, they’re acquiring land on Orcas Island that includes a protected cove, East Sound, for Toki’s sea pen and a salmon hatchery to keep her well-fed. When it’s time, they’ll begin acclimating Toki to the different mechanisms involved in her transport. And once she and the sea pen are ready to go, they’ll transport her in a custom-made stretcher from Miami Seaquarium to the Miami airport, then by plane in a water-filled cradle to Bellingham, Washington, then by truck and barge to East Sound.
The plan is beautifully, almost tragically, detailed. She is called Lolita until the moment she is lowered into Salish Sea water, when she becomes Tokitae. The water in her transport cradle will reach the tops of her eye patches but no higher, so she can breathe and to keep her from moving in the stretcher, which might cause her to chafe her pectoral fins. Her water temperature will be manually regulated with ice cubes. Two personnel will be with her in the cradle. She will be facing forward at all times. Written in the future tense, it reads like a wish, a heartfelt manifestation, which I guess it is.
The East Sound sea pen, her transitional home, will be about 600 by 400 feet, and it will have a smaller medical pool where she can be contained if necessary. Once there, she’ll be given time to acclimate, and then she’ll begin a training regimen meant to ready her for survival in the wild. By the end of this training, she will be able to sustain herself entirely through foraging and will no longer associate humans with food, though she’ll still respond to an underwater recall tone when necessary.
The plan, despite its details, has its skeptics – partially because Toki wouldn’t be the first captive orca to ever be released. After the success of Free Willy, the 1993 film that ends with the eponymous killer whale swimming joyfully into open waters, a national campaign began to free the movie-star orca, Keiko, who had been captured in 1979 at about age two off the coast of Iceland. The campaign raised millions of dollars, and in the summer of 2002, after years spent adapting to the ocean in a sea pen near where he was captured, Keiko went free.
In the months that followed, Keiko was seen paying attention to other orcas from afar, but he failed to make any sort of connection with them. Instead, he sought out human contact; within a few months of his release he was swimming around a Norwegian fjord allowing human children to ride on his back. He died of pneumonia in the fjords in December 2003, at an estimated age of twenty-seven. It had been just over a year since his release.
Those fighting for Toki’s freedom argue that Keiko’s failures – his inability to bond with other orcas, his continuing need for human interaction – aren’t applicable here, mostly because of the southern residents’ close familial structure. While Keiko was released near his capture site, he wasn’t dropped back into his native pod; Toki, however, would be reintegrated with her immediate family, including the matriarch believed to be her mother. That said, there are still many reasons to worry, not the least of which is Toki’s adaptability, particularly in her middle age. One of her former trainers told the Miami Herald that she is notoriously bad at change: “The running joke was that if you were going to build her a new whale stadium, you have to build it next to the old one and put a gate between them to come home at night.”
Dr. Ingrid Visser, a marine biologist featured in a short video called “A Day in the Life of Lolita, the Performing Orca” in 2013, points out, “You know, the only way Lolita’s going to retire otherwise is if she dies.” But the Miami Herald also spoke with a dozen orca experts from around the country, and the majority of these argued against transporting Toki back to her home waters, citing both possible impacts on her health and that of the wild orcas she’d have contact with. Douglas Wartzok, a professor emeritus and professor of biology at Florida International University, was one of these. He said, “You have to face the fact that this is not a theoretical animal. This is one real animal that I think people on both sides of the conversation have to step back and say, ‘What’s best for this particular animal at this particular stage of her life?’”
It all comes back to this, doesn’t it? The real versus the theoretical animal – the orca itself, stripped of human meaning, versus the orca we see, be this the quarantined animal, the grieving mother, the monster, the relative, the tame wonder, the hostile captive, the abductee still yearning for home.
Leslie Jamison considers this question in her The Atavist essay “52 Blue,” with regard to the blue whale calling on a different frequency than all the others: the human world claims that he’s lonely, yearning, even prophetic, but there’s actually no way to know. His iconic, 52‑hertz song was first picked up, ironically, on Whidbey Island, at a naval air station monitoring ocean sounds in 1992. Jamison tracked down a transcript of the last interview one of this whale’s researchers, Mary Ann Daher, gave before she stopped speaking to the press, likely out of frustration over all the anthropomorphism. Daher said, “People like to imagine this creature just out there swimming by his lonesome, just singing away and nobody’s listening. But I can’t say that . . . Is he successful reproductively? I haven’t the vaguest idea. Nobody can answer those questions. Is he lonely? I hate to attach human emotions like that. Do whales get lonely? I don’t know. I don’t even want to touch that topic.”
Susan Casey, who is the author of several books about oceans, considers this question, too, in her New York Times article “The Orca, Her Dead Calf and Us,” published on the tenth day of Tahlequah’s journey. In it, she weighs reasons to both celebrate and be wary of our tendency to anthropomorphize: while “a fast route to empathy,” projecting ourselves onto animals denies that “their inner lives deserve to be evaluated on their terms – not ours.” But there are times, as with Tahlequah, when the real and theoretical animals really do seem to align, “when an animal’s emotional state is obvious to anyone with eyes and a heart.” Toki’s family stayed, and cried, and did not leave to eat until she was lifted from the water. Keiko sought out children in the Norwegian fjords.
So when is anthropomorphism anthropomorphism, and when is it an ability to recognize complex emotional life? The answer, Casey argues, lies in science’s ability to back up what we think we see. And science tells us that the Lummi people’s characterization of orcas as Qwe ‘lhol mechen, their “relations below the waves,” may be closest to the animals’ own inner lives. Not on a literal level – primates and cetaceans haven’t shared a common ancestor in ninety-five million years – but on an emotional and sociological level. The orca’s paralimbic node and insular cortex, both of which are connected to emotion, are especially developed. Their brains contain the same rare von Economo neurons as humans’ brains do, cells connected to communication, social awareness, and empathy. They teach each other. They’re built to live in multigenerational family groups.
However – and this is important – the concept of anthropomorphism is a decidedly Western and non-Native one, because to endow an animal with imagined human traits you must first acknowledge a marked distinction between humans and the animal in question. By definition, the Lummi people are not anthropomorphizing Toki, but recognizing that she and they are Qwe ‘lhol mechen, relations, the same. The Lummi website puts it this way: “Sometimes science and Native knowledge reflect one another.”
In her Times article, Casey goes on to say that feeling for a specific whale is “the easy part. What’s harder,” she says, is channeling this grief for one individual into conservation initiatives that will help the whole species. “If we aren’t willing to turn our empathy into action, then one day in the near future we will explain to our children and grandchildren how incredible the orcas were, and how bad we felt about their fate. How their pain resonated with us and caught our attention. How deeply we felt their loss. Just not enough to do what was required to save them.”
Perhaps the question isn’t, should we anthropomorphize animals, but rather, what purpose does this anthropomorphism serve? Sometimes this goes against the animal’s interests, as in the case of orcas gunned down before the capture era. (Hyenas, too, have been negatively affected by human stereotypes, perhaps best summed up by The Lion King’s inaccurate portrayal of the animal as “slobbering, mangy, stupid poachers;” a hyena biologist is actually said to have sued Disney for defamation of character.) But as Casey points out, encouraging empathy for animals by endowing them with human traits can also be an effective strategy in conservation. Let’s face it: there’s a lot to grieve, we’re in danger of empathy fatigue, and we as a species thrive on narrative. Tell us the story of one remarkable creature, then gesture more broadly, and we might be hooked.
So what about Toki and the very specific hopes and intentions attributed to her? It seems impossible to delineate between the real and theoretical versions of an animal whose past fifty years have been defined by humans; Dr. Visser says that in the Whale Bowl, Toki is made to be “a facsimile, a puppet of what a real orca is.” And to complicate things further, just like with Tahlequah, the fight for Toki – made possible by the poignancy of her story, the way our hearts hurt when we think of her spending fifty years alone in that tank – does not end with Toki. As the Lummi Nation website puts it, “She is even more important as an ambassador for the Salish Sea.”
The Salish Sea’s capture era ended in 1976, after Griffin and Goldsberry’s roundup in Budd Inlet drew enough protest that it became the last orca hunt in U.S. waters. That same year, the southern resident community was recorded at only sixty-eight members; they’re thought to have lost at least forty-four to the captures. They started to bounce back, with ninety-eight orcas counted in 2005, but then the numbers fell again, down to seventy-eight in 2019. Three-quarters of southern resident calves born in the last twenty years have failed to survive. This nosedive is largely due to malnutrition; Tahlequah’s newborn calf died because it was so emaciated, there wasn’t enough blubber to keep it afloat.
The southern residents’ main source of food is Chinook salmon, which have been dramatically affected by overfishing, habitat loss, and the controversial damming of rivers in Washington State. The Lummi Nation is advocating for the restoration of 1985’s salmon levels – beginning with a transnational, cumulative impact assessment of all the Salish Sea’s stressors, including underwater noise, pollution, and vessel traffic. The increase in Chinook to 1985’s levels would, hopefully, be enough to preserve both the orca population and the Salish fishermen’s way of life.
The Lummi Nation website explains, “Blackfish are apex predators, and thus are key indicators of their ecosystem’s health. If we are to provide effectively for Tokitae and her family, we must restore the salmon runs and vitality of the Salish Sea. The peoples, cultures, and ecosystems of the Salish Sea are all connected, and they have long suffered the violences and stresses of colonialism.”
“The Salish Sea is crying out to us,” said Ellie Kinley during her announcement about filing the NAGPRA lawsuit. “It needs our help. There’s many things we need to do. Bringing [Toki] home, bringing her back to her family, bringing her back to us, is just a small part of it. It’s unfortunate that this is the way we need to do it, but hopefully it’s going to get it done, hopefully they’re going to listen, they’re going to respond.”
Where are we now? We’re in isolation, we’re quarantined, we’re waiting. The lawsuit, pending coronavirus-related delays, draws closer. And every day Toki – the particular and the concept, the animal and the
s t o r y – i s o u t t h e r e , s w i m m i n g i n c i r c l e s i n h e r s m a l l t a n k .
WORKS CITED
Aguirre, Louis and Michelle Solomon. “Tribe returns to Seaquarium for annual quest to bring whale home,” Local 10 Miami, September 24, 2020. https://www.local10.com/news/local/2020/09/24/tribe-returns-to‑seaquarium-for-annual-quest-to‑bring-whale-home/
Azarian, Daniel. A Day in the Life of Lolita, the Performing Orca. Filmed in summer of 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6EzCHKpWvo
Balcomb, Ken. “Marine Biologist Ken Balcomb’s Comprehensive Retirement Plan.” Center for Whale Research, April 1995. http://www.orcanetwork.org/Main/PDF/KCBplan1995.pdf
Blackfish (2013). https://www.blackfishmovie.com/
“Capture of Marine Life.” Animal Welfare Institute. https://awionline.org/content/capture-marine-life
Casey, Susan. “The Orca, Her Dead Calf and Us.” The New York Times, August 4, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/04/opinion/sunday/the-orca-her-dead-calf-and-us.html
Cetacean Database. Updated June 18, 2019. http://www.cetabase.org/captive/cetacean/us-canada
Christianson, Carl, and Sharon Grace and Jim Waddell. “The Case for Breaching the Four Lower Snake River Dams to Recover Wild Snake River Salmon.” Orca Network. http://www.orcanetwork.org/Main/PDF/Snake%20River%20Endangered%20Salmon%20White%20Paper%2011%204%2015.pdf
Cuthbert, Lori. “Orca Mother Drops Calf, After Unprecedented 17 Days of Mourning,” National Geographic, August 13, 2018. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/08/orca-mourning-calf-killer-whale-northwest-news/
Dugong v. Rumsfeld, District Court, ND California, 2005. https://coast.noaa.gov/data/Documents/OceanLawSearch/Dugong%20v.%20%20Rumsfeld,%202005%20WL%20522106%20(N.D.%20Cal.%202005).pdf
Feldman, Dana. “New Doc ‘Long Gone Wild’ Details How Orcas Suffer in Captivity, Offers Hope with Seaside Sanctuary Project,” Forbes, July 10, 2019. https://www.forbes.com/sites/danafeldman/2019/07/10/new-doc-long-gone-wild-details-how-orcas-suffer-in‑captivity-offers-hope-with-seaside-sanctuary-project/#2f738d644069
“Fishermen Bag Killer Whale,” The Press-Tribune, August 5, 1931. https://www.newspapers.com/image/474250535/?terms=%22killer%2Bwhale%22
“Giant Wolves of the Sea,” The New York Times, January 7, 1917. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1917/01/07/102307913.html?pageNumber=100
Herrera, Chabeli. “Lolita may never go free. And that could be what’s best for her, scientists say.” Miami Herald. November 20, 2017. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article185517463.html
Holder, Charles Frederick. Recreations of a Sportsman on the Pacific Coast.
https://archive.org/stream/recreationsofspo00holdiala#page/324/mode/2up/search/orca
“Howard Garrett and the Orca Network.” Orca Aware, September 27, 2012. http://www.orcaaware.org/howard-garrett-and-the-orca-network
“Hundreds Stand with Lummi Nation in Call to Bring Captured Orca Home.” Sacred Sea. https://sacredsea.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/DownloadablePressKit.pdf
Jamison, Leslie. “52 Blue.” The Atavist. https://magazine.atavist.com/52‑blue
Johnson, Gene. “SeaWorld Publishes Decades of Orca Data to Help Wild Whales,” Associated Press, April 22, 2019. https://apnews.com/article/b02b4d3523534524a2d3f9719980e26d
Julius, Jay. “Tokitae’s return is part of their larger vision to protect and restore the Salish Sea.” Bellingham Herald, May 11, 2018. https://www.bellinghamherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article210826344.html
Kendall, Jonathan. “Quarantine ‘Nothing Compared’ to Lolita’s 50‑Year Captivity, PETA Says,” Miami New Times, April 29, 2020. https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/peta-says-lolita-has-been-quarantined-at-miami-seaquarium-11627735#:~:text=%22Although%20humans%20are%20feeling%20the,member%20of%20her%20own%20species.%22
Leigh, Wendy. “Hope dwindles as resident orcas disappear.” South Whidbey Record, August 23, 2019. https://www.southwhidbeyrecord.com/life/hope-dwindles-as‑resident-orcas-disappear/
“Lolita’s Capture,” Orca Network. https://www.orcanetwork.org/Main/index.php?categories_file=Lolitas%20Capture
Mapes, Lynda V. “‘Empty all the tanks’: Group proposes sanctuary in San Juan Islands to retire captive orcas.” The Seattle Times. July 15, 2019.
Mapes, Lynda V. “The orca and the orca catcher: How a generation of killer whales was taken from Puget Sound,” The Seattle Times. December 13, 2018. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/the-orca-and-the-orca-catcher-how-a-generation-of‑killer-whales-was-taken-from-puget-sound/
Mapes, Lynda V. “Lummi tribal members could sue under repatriation act to free captive orca in Miami.” The Seattle Times, July 27, 2019. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/lummi-nation-could-sue-under-repatriation-act-to‑free-captive-orca-in‑miami/
“Man seen netting pigeons, hauling them off from New York City streets.” CBS Local News. February 17, 2017. https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2017/02/17/brooklyn-pigeon-netting/
McMillan, Alan D. “Non-Human Whalers in Nuu-chah-nulth Art and Ritual: Reappraising Orca in Archaeological Context,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 29:2, 309‑326, 2019. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/nonhuman-whalers-in‑nuuchahnulth-art-and-ritual-reappraising-orca-in‑archaeological-context/FE6EFEEE292A1B18D4A2F5C1EC18F9F6/share/344ce058c07aa5a8f5e2f81480d71d08244178d0#pf10
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. https://archive.org/details/mobydickorwhale01melvuoft/page/174
“Miami Beach Commission votes unanimously to free Lolita.” Miami Herald, October 24, 2017. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article180639366.html
Morris, Raynell and Ellie Kinley. Press Release. July 27, 2019. https://sacredsea.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/LOItoSue_Skalichelh-tenaut.2.pdf
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), reproduced from Archaeological Method and Theory: An Encyclopedia. National Parks Service. https://www.nps.gov/archeology/tools/laws/nagpra.htm
“Natsilane: A Tlingit Legend.” First People. https://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/Natsilane-Tlingit.html
Pollard, Sandra. A Puget Sound Orca in Captivity: The Fight to Bring Lolita Home. History Press, 2019. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Puget_Sound_Orca_in_Captivity_A_The_Figh/fqF8DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
Pollard, Sandra. Puget Sound Whales for Sale: The Fight to End Orca Hunting. History Press, 2014. https://www.amazon.com/Puget-Sound-Whales-Sale-Hunting/dp/1626196028
Press conference, July 27, 2019. Sacred Sea. Video provided by Sacred Sea.
“Proposal to Retire the Orca Tokitae/Lolita to Her Native Habitat in the Pacific Northwest.” Orca Network. http://www.orcanetwork.org/Main/index.php?categories_file=Lolita
“Recovery of Southern Resident Orcas,” Puget Sound Partnership. https://www.psp.wa.gov/recovery-of‑southern-resident-orcas.php#:~:text=In%20March%202018%2C%20Governor%20Inslee,to%20recover%20the%20southern%20residents.
“Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut,” Sacred Sea. https://sacredsea.org/skalichelhtenaut/
The Signal, September 22, 1927. https://www.newspapers.com/image/333306865/?terms=%22killer%2Bwhale%22
“The Southern Resident Community,” Orca Network. http://www.orcanetwork.org/nathist/imagesnat/SRCfacts.pdf
“The Terrible Orca,” The Record-Union, August 16, 1897. https://www.newspapers.com/image/42206807/?terms=%22killer%2Bwhale%22
Treaty of Point Elliott, 1855. Governor’s Office of Indian Affairs. https://goia.wa.gov/tribal-government/treaty-point-elliott-1855
Townsend, Mark. “Free at last? New row as Keiko dies,” The Guardian, December 13, 2003. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/dec/14/animalwelfare.filmnews
Townsend, Mark. “Keiko’s love of children puts his life in danger.” The Guardian, September 7, 2002.
White, Catriona. “Animals Who’ve Had a PR ‘Mare Thanks to Disney,” BBC, July 26, 2016. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/9c7990b9‑7cbc-4625‑8607‑3398a9bc13ec#:~:text=Hyenas%20%E2%80%93%20The%20Lion%20King&text=A%20hyena%20biologist%20sued%20Disney,villains%20in%20The%20Lion%20King.&text=It’s%20rumoured%20that%20one%20hyena,studios%20for%20defamation%20of%20character
Zimmerman, Tim. “The Killer in the Pool.” Outside Magazine, July 20, 2010. https://www.outsideonline.com/1924946/killer-pool
Zimmerman, Tim. “Tilikum, SeaWorld’s Most Famous Killer Whale, Dies.” Outside Magazine, January 6, 2017. https://www.outsideonline.com/2147196/tilikum-seaworlds-most-famous-killer-whale-diesEmma Hine’s essays have appeared in Guernica Magazine and Poets & Writers. She is the author of the poetry collection Stay Safe (Sarabande Books, 2021). Her poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Colorado Review, The Missouri Review, The Paris Review, and The Southern Review.