I really have a problem with this bidness. I’m all for hunting and harvesting various game, but this is just wasting a magnificent animal on the altar of some wishful feigned connection to a long vanished culture.
I don’t dispute that tribes have historically done whaling. But they didn’t use .50cal rifles and powerboats either. I’m guessing that in the old days they lost a whole lot of indians on these hunts, and rarely if ever actually got a whale to the beach. I’d bet money that an ancient Makah tribal elder could’ve counted on one hand the number of whales he had actually seen harvested in his lifetime.
Then to see the last hunt be such a circus. A ridiculous display of phoney playacting. With no actual records of what a whale hunt was like they just make up new ceremonies and fool the news crews into treating it as something “culturally enriching”.
Then they finally taste whale meat, realize that it tastes awful, and pretty much the whole thing is wasted.
All for a phony show of make-believe indian history. Enough already.
/rant :-)
All of this mess isn’t going to make whaling any easier for the Makah, mainly in terms of the PR aspect of it all, which was never easy business the first time around.
After all of this mess is over with, I’ll wager they will just let the whole matter of whaling take a rest for a very, very long time.
I never heard of any tremendous benefit that the last whaling effort brought to them, and this current legal stuff casts a very unpleasant shadow over the whole situation.
I’ll be watching the classifieds for a Barrett up for sale, used twice and only shot about 20 times :-)