Importance Of Whaling

There are two main reasons that whaling holds significant value to the Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth people. These reasons are often overlooked by anti-whaling activists, if not blatantly ignored. The first reason is that by having an entire community come together and act on treaty rights reaffirms the very authority of the treaty itself. This is a lot like the “fish-ins” that took place in Tacoma, where the fish are representative of a larger power struggle. However, I would argue that whaling takes an even larger role in self-determination because of the current legal battle. The Makah people have been “prevented from fully exercising its treaty right to whale”, due to legal preventative measures and pending environmental evaluations (Cote, 166).

One of the biggest reasons is the nutritional aspect of it. The food industry today is bad for the United States as a whole. We have some of the highest rates of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other nutritionally caused illnesses in the entire world. However, commercialized food has an even more adverse affect on native populations. Historically, things like commercial whaling and the Indian Boarding schools forced these communities to abandon healthy, natural foods and adopt processed foods. I remember in the video we watched about the Indian Boarding Schools that one of the kids recalled being forced to eat these sugary, processed foods instead of “boiled fish”like they wanted (Indigenizing Food Sovereignty). The Makah people chose to stop whaling due to the White population killing them off, via commercial whaling and unsustainable hunting, in an attempt to preserve them, and found other ways to feed themselves. In this, they lose a significant amount of nutritional value, like fatty acids that are vital to leading a balanced and healthy life. My family is from Italy and a few smaller Mediterranean islands that share a common diet, yet because we were not forced into abandoning our traditional foods, we continue to stay healthy from olive oil and fish, which both have fatty acids just like whale

This “exploitation and neglect” of children for the benefit of science goes against all sorts of human rights laws (Indigenizing Food Sovereignty). Teaching children to return to the diet of their ancestors, while it does not undo the damage done, reconnects a people to their history which is important because the Indian Boarding Schools were designed to assimilate native populations and destroy culture in ways as simple as food and