Les Beldo begins his ethnography by recounting a historic event that some recall with pride and joy and others with sadness and pain. On May 17, 1999, a dugout canoe full of men from the Makah Indian Nation paddled vigorously in the shallow ocean waters off of Cape Alva in Neah Bay for hours, attempting to harpoon a gray whale in a fashion similar to their ancestors. Long before this particular hunt began, the news of it had spread far and wide. The last Makah whaling hunt took place more than seven decades ago, and the media, circling above in helicopters, were eager to capture this momentous occasion on film. Circling around the canoe below were other boats loaded with onlookers, some hostile and others supportive. At least one of the boats belonged to the federal government, which authorized the hunt; observers on board were charged with ensuring that the hunt proceeded safely and legally. Other boats belonged to anti-whaling activist groups determined to disrupt the hunt at any cost; their priority was to save the whales. After two days of paddling around without success, the whalers finally killed a young female gray whale and hauled her body to shore, bringing to a climax the event, which had been in the planning stages for years.
The most important anthropological significance of this event, according to Beldo, is not related to the “clash of cultures” – Indigenous whalers and the federal government vs. animal rights activists. Rather, it is related to whales; in particular, humanity’s inability to consider whales as individual autonomous agents with values and desires of their own: “As an ethnographic theory and method,” writes Beldo “decentering the human is among the worthiest of anthropological aspirations. . . ” (7). In this context, decentering the human means exploring why that particular young female whale approached the hunters’ canoe when she did. Beldo admits that this is very difficult to do, considering that the other participants in this story already speak for whales if they consider the whale’s perspective at all. The federal government falls into this latter category, as its agents regard the whale as a fish—a resource to be managed. The Makah, by contrast, believe that the whale wanted to be killed, underscoring a spiritual connection uniting predator and prey. The anti-whaling activists, for their part, claimed that this whale was deceived; she approached the hunters thinking they would pet her as other whale-watching tourists do.
To Beldo, these one-sentence descriptions of the whale’s alleged motives are deceptively simple; they conceal a more complicated set of perspectives and opinions about animals, humanity, and the ways in which these two groups relate (and/or ideas about how they should relate) to each other. While renting a modest apartment on the Makah Reservation during his eight months of fieldwork, Beldo visited with many local families, including those who supported the revival of Makah whaling from the beginning and those who were more recent converts. He also conducted extensive interviews in the homes of anti-whaling activists living in neighboring towns, many of whom had supported the Makah on other environmental issues. In addition to participant-observation and interviews, Beldo’s research also involved sifting through a significant amount of archival material – the texts of federal laws, trial proceedings, court rulings, newspa