Ep. 911: Makah Whaling Practices, Treaty Rights, and Regulatory Challenges

Steven Rinella https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella talks with the Makah Tribe about: whaling techniques; whale sushi; the history of Makah whaling; regulatory hurdles; and more. Presented by Can-Am, the leader in ATVs, SxS, and Utility Vehicles www.can-am.brp.com Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  911, what's your emergency? We need help, they're everywhere. We think they're murder hornets.

• 0:13Speaker 02

  911 Nashville returns.

• 0:15Speaker 03

  It's a homicide detective down here.

• 0:17Speaker 02

  Three bodies on the ground. With emergencies of biblical proportions.

• 0:21Speaker 03

  All sins swarms upon you and upon your people. That's one of the plagues of the Bible. And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville.

• 0:28Speaker 02

  Brian Phillipich wants 911 Nashville. All new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu.

• 0:34Speaker 04

  This is the story of the one. As a shipping manager, he's running the dock, stocking supplies, and making sure every order goes out on time. And Granger helps him stay prepared. From shipping supplies to PPE to hand tools, he counts on Granger to keep products moving and trucks rolling. So his operation runs smoothly, no matter the shift. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com, or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.

• 1:05Speaker 05

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:45Steven Rinella?

  This is the Meat Eater Podcast, coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We're the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Brought to you by First Light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds no compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com.

• 2:19Steven Rinella?

  Okay, folks, saddle up or put your life jackets on, because we're going to talk about whaling, modern day whaling. Specifically, the traditional and modern day whale hunting practices and challenges of the Makah tribe from Washington State's Olympic Peninsula. We're joined by, depends how you look at it, either three or four guests.

• 2:41Steven Rinella?

  We have Chairman TJ Green, who is the Chairman of the Makah Tribal Council. And his areas of expertise include policy, legal hurdles, tribal politics, and historical organizational context. Okay. You've been with the Tribal Council for nine years?

• 2:59Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 3:00Steven Rinella?

  All right. We got Daniel Green, who's the Vice President of the Whaling Commission, and has been involved in whale hunts, butchering whales, all that kind of stuff. All the above. We have Lupe Castaneda, am I saying that right?

• 3:18Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:18Steven Rinella?

  Who's a-

• 3:18Speaker 07

  Castaneda.

• 3:20Steven Rinella?

  Yep, who's a council member and a first foods expert. He's going to help us understand a little bit about nutrition, health impacts, and environmental toxins that can be found in whale meat. And we have Chris Martinez, who he's just, he's just hanging out. But just quick, tell people what you do do. I'm the Chief of Staff for the Makah Tribal Council. I also sit as the Secretary of the Makah Whaling Commission. Got it. So I'm here just hanging out. All right. So let's start with this man. And TJ, you can answer this question. Explain, who are the Makah? Okay. And what does that word mean?

• 4:03Speaker 07

  All right.

• 4:03Steven Rinella?

  And what do you regard as, like, what do you guys regard as your your traditional homeland? What do you regard as your homeland now?

• 4:15Speaker 07

  Well, the Makah tribe is very northwestern tip of Washington State. We've been there since the first light, is how we say it.

• 4:24Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 4:25Speaker 07

  Yeah. And we're, you know, we got about 3,100 members and 1,600 live on a reservation. It's a federal Indian reservation now.

• 4:33Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 4:34Speaker 07

  And, you know, we're ocean people. You know, we're connected to that ocean. That's been the lifeblood and our spiritual existence and our cultural practices all revolve around activities on that ocean.

• 4:48Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 4:48Speaker 07

  And so, you know, that's who we are. You know, Makah is not our word.

• 4:54Steven Rinella?

  Okay, it's not.

• 4:55Speaker 07

  It's not our word, it's a Salish word. Our neighboring tribe was a Salish nation.

• 5:03Speaker 07

  Called us Makah, and that means generous host.

• 5:06Steven Rinella?

  Oh, because a lot of times those names are like, a lot of times there's names that get picked up that are not great.

• 5:13Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 5:13Steven Rinella?

  That translate to sort of like, you know, like the enemy, the enemy or whatever, you know?

• 5:17Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 5:18Steven Rinella?

  So yeah, generous host.

• 5:19Speaker 07

  Generous host, even though we had wars with that nation.

• 5:22Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you did, okay.

• 5:23Speaker 07

  That's what they called us.

• 5:24Steven Rinella?

  That's what Makah means.

• 5:25Speaker 07

  That's what Makah means.

• 5:26Steven Rinella?

  What was your traditional, like, not traditional, but what was, what did the Makah call themselves at the time that the sailors started calling them the Makah?

• 5:36Speaker 07

  Quidditchat.

• 5:38Steven Rinella?

  Oh, what's that mean? That's a harder word to say.

• 5:41Speaker 07

  People who live amongst the rocks and seagulls.

• 5:43Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 5:44Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 5:45Steven Rinella?

  That was a name?

• 5:45Speaker 07

  That's-

• 5:46Steven Rinella?

  Do you guys still use that name now?

• 5:47Speaker 07

  We do, yes.

• 5:48Steven Rinella?

  Okay, I see.

• 5:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 5:51Steven Rinella?

  So, but in your relationships with the government, like in the media, you're the Makah tribe, the Makah.

• 5:57Speaker 07

  Correct, that's during the treaty negotiations, 1855 Treaty in Ibay. That's what Governor Stevens, Governor Isaac Stevens, you know, he, he couldn't say quidditchat, I'm sure, so.

• 6:10Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really? He was like me, man, he couldn't say it. Huh, that's interesting, man.

• 6:16Steven Rinella?

  Here's one for, for the most part, you guys could just decide amongst yourselves who's best to answer a question. If you want to both take a stab at it, you can both take a stab at it. But I wanted to ask, because Daniel's had experience with, you know, sort of on the ground experience, maybe all you guys have had on the ground experience with whaling, but with like historically, and is it annoying if I say historically?

• 6:40Speaker 07

  No.

• 6:40Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Because that's the thing, like in white dudes' heads, a lot of times, you know, you know this, in white dudes' heads, there was like, there was Native Americans and they kind of like stopped. Do you know what I mean? People view it like they like stopped and then became that something different happened. So if I say to you historically and you go like, what do you mean? I mean, I don't know, like a while ago, or, you know? But in this question, I mean, historically, how serious, how serious were the Makah about whaling? You know, I mean, like, how did it, how did it fit into the seasonal?

• 7:17Speaker 07

  Well, if I can just start out.

• 7:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, please.

• 7:19Speaker 07

  It was, it was, it was a focal point of our society.

• 7:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Whaling.

• 7:24Speaker 07

  It was our main nutritional, it's how we fed our people.

• 7:27Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 7:28Speaker 07

  You know, we have no big rivers out there that are lush with salmon or anything like that.

• 7:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 7:34Speaker 07

  So we were out on that ocean and whales were swimming there and we, yeah, so we-

• 7:39Steven Rinella?

  Understood.

• 7:39Speaker 07

  We harvested them for a nutritional source and it became a source of wealth for us in the society that we built for over thousands of years.

• 7:48Steven Rinella?

  Explain that, when you say wealth, as a trade item?

• 7:51Speaker 07

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 7:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and what components of a whale would be used? What components of a whale would be? I mean, I can imagine the parts that would be used internally, but what would be an item that you could, that you could barter with or that you could monetize off a whale?

• 8:06Speaker 07

  Whale oil is one that's, you get a lot of whale oil from whale.

• 8:10Steven Rinella?

  An interior, like I imagine like interior people would want it.

• 8:14Speaker 07

  Right.

• 8:15Steven Rinella?

  Because they didn't have, they didn't have an equivalent.

• 8:17Speaker 07

  Correct, yeah.

• 8:18Steven Rinella?

  I got it, I got it. And then, how, how were whales hunted? I mean, physically, like, how were they hunted? If you went back, just pick like, pick a title, let's say, let's say we go back to,

• 8:33Steven Rinella?

  I don't know, 200 years ago, 300 years ago, how was the whale caught?

• 8:38Speaker 07

  Out of a, we'd go out in a cedar dugout canoe.

• 8:41Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 8:42Speaker 07

  You'd have, you know, seven paddlers or so on, in that canoe, and everyone had their own, their own job. Someone harpooned it, someone steered the canoe, and then you had your paddlers. And we had a, the harpoon was made of a U-wood shaft, and it was in three pieces. So it would come apart, you know, we probably learned that the hard way, right? Like, probably stabbed a whale with a, one that wasn't in three pieces and that whale rolled around, probably smacked the heck out of people.

• 9:13Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's a good point, man, yeah. Yeah, imagine that, right?

• 9:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, so it comes apart and the harpoon tip was made of muscle shell.

• 9:23Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 9:24Speaker 07

  Yeah. Muscle shell and elk, what part of the bone? I need a little help on that. Yeah, like the valve, the toggle.

• 9:32Steven Rinella?

  Get a little closer to that mic, bud.

• 9:34Speaker 07

  Oh, it was the toggle, the, yeah.

• 9:36Steven Rinella?

  So that muscle shell would be like, like barbs or prongs embedded into that thing?

• 9:42Speaker 07

  Uh, yeah, it was shaped, shaped just like a, like a regular harpoon, I guess.

• 9:46Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 9:47Speaker 07

  Had a like broad tip, but-

• 9:48Steven Rinella?

  But it'd stay in there good?

• 9:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, it would stay in there good. Yeah, and it was tempered and aged and hardened, so, you know, there's a lot that went into it, so.

• 9:58Steven Rinella?

  Do you, well, two things. What, was there one specific type of whale? Or did you get opportunities on multiple kinds of whales in your? I know now the focus is on gray whales.

• 10:10Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 10:11Steven Rinella?

  We're going to talk a lot about gray whales, but, but like, your people might have had that that was the one they wanted? Or was there other kinds of whales that might be targeted at different times?

• 10:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's definitely a lot of different whales. We hunted Echubik old whale, right whales. We hunted-

• 10:27Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 10:27Speaker 07

  Gray whales, humpbacks, anything that swam, pretty much. But gray whales were the tastiest.

• 10:35Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 10:36Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 10:36Steven Rinella?

  That was a preferred whale?

• 10:37Speaker 07

  It was a preferred whale, just I think due to the abundance also, and the migration patterns were near shore.

• 10:43Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 10:43Speaker 07

  Humpbacks are a little further offshore.

• 10:46Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 10:46Speaker 07

  We did target those also, so.

• 10:48Steven Rinella?

  Do you know, in the, like, in your traditions or, were a lot of dudes killed hunting whales?

• 10:57Steven Rinella?

  I mean, it had to have been a hazardous business, man.

• 11:00Speaker 07

  So that's what, that's what it is, and that, that leads, you know, into the preparation and stuff, so. You know, essentially, yeah, you are preparing for death when you're training with, you know, the eight guys in the canoe.

• 11:12Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 11:12Speaker 07

  And it's, and it's a, understand, it's the biggest creature on earth.

• 11:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:20Speaker 07

  Then they have, they have, they want to live also, so they have a wild side and-

• 11:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's it's it's pretty scary.

• 11:29Steven Rinella?

  It can be dangerous.

• 11:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, it could be very dangerous.

• 11:31Steven Rinella?

  You know, you mentioned like biggest, it's it's the thing I always bring up to my kids is that like all, you know, kids are always tripped out about dinosaurs and stuff. But the biggest animal to ever live on earth is now.

• 11:45Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 11:46Steven Rinella?

  You know, like a blue whale.

• 11:48Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 11:49Steven Rinella?

  As big as it seems like, you know, these like dinosaur statues and stuff are, it's like the biggest critter is there now. You're like, you go see the damn thing, like big whales, you know?

• 11:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 11:58Steven Rinella?

  How mu- what does what like, what does a gray whale, what do you, what is that, what does that thing weigh?

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Twenty so about twenty seven hundred pounds on average. It's a little bit, we kind of target that general area. It's about thirty thousand pounds. About twenty seven thousand.

• 12:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, twenty thirty thousand pounds.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's about a ton of foot. Yeah. Of the length, one ton per foot.

• 12:23Steven Rinella?

  The the main focus of our conversation is gonna be like the resumption of whaling, okay? And and you guys fights with, you know, maybe don't use the word fight, you guys' negotiations with the American government and others about what you're, what you're allowed to do by the treaty you signed with the American government, right? Like and and whether or not you can do it and what it takes to do it. But for background,

• 12:49Steven Rinella?

  walk me through, like, how did, how did whaling wind down and when did it wind down? Like, when did it, when did it go from being a, an annual occurrence to, to being a thing that faded out? What was the process of it, of it going away?

• 13:04Speaker 07

  Well, in the early nineteen hundreds,

• 13:06Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 13:07Speaker 07

  you had, commercial whaling was really ramping up around the world.

• 13:10Steven Rinella?

  I see, yeah, yeah.

• 13:12Speaker 07

  Um, so our whaling, our whalers at that time were noticing it was harder and harder to, to do our traditional hunts. So in the nineteen twenties, um, we made the decision on our own to, to not whale anymore because they just weren't in our area the way they used to be.

• 13:31Steven Rinella?

  Cause of the impact of the commercial whalers.

• 13:33Speaker 07

  Right, yes.

• 13:34Steven Rinella?

  Like the Moby Dick type dudes.

• 13:36Speaker 07

  Right.

• 13:36Steven Rinella?

  Like rendering, you know, killing them, like industrially.

• 13:40Speaker 07

  Industrially, you know, the, the big old harpoons on the big ships.

• 13:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, rendering all that oil and selling all that oil in Massachusetts and stuff, yeah.

• 13:48Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 13:49Steven Rinella?

  So tho- so that was whittling away the whale population.

• 13:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, I was whittling that away and, and so we stopped in the late nineteen twenties. We had our last, last harvest before we did the one in ninety nine and then, you know, it took the world a while to catch up, you know? Twenty years later, you get the Whaling Convention Act and, and those agreements, those international agreements to, to start,

• 14:14Speaker 07

  you know, trying to be more responsible with, you know, with the stocks that are around the world there and.

• 14:19Steven Rinella?

  When, when you say it took the world a while to catch up, you mean it took the world a while to respond to the industrial slaughter?

• 14:28Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 14:28Steven Rinella?

  To regulate it?

• 14:29Speaker 07

  To regulate.

• 14:30Steven Rinella?

  Like they let it get, it got bad?

• 14:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, it got bad. Yeah, I mean, you, populations were at near extinction.

• 14:37Steven Rinella?

  Do you, do you guys have much idea when the, when the disease epidemics came from Europeans?

• 14:47Steven Rinella?

  Did it, did those diseases hit, did they like hit the macaque like suddenly and hard? Were there, were, were, were there was just huge losses of people or did it, was it, with you guys, was it a slower thing that played out over centuries?

• 15:03Speaker 07

  No, it was, it hit us hard. We had two major smallpox, um, epidemics in our communities. Um, you know, one in the, uh, I believe it was eighteen twenties and then another in the, in the late eighteen forties.

• 15:19Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 15:21Speaker 07

  Took, took out ninety percent of our population.

• 15:24Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 15:24Speaker 07

  And, and then what was left from, from that ninety percent negotiated the eighteen fifty five treaty in Neabey.

• 15:33Steven Rinella?

  That's the thing, man, that's the thing I talk to people a lot about, that I just don't think, like, a lot of Americans can't picture it. You know, can't picture that kind of loss. But the only way to really get there is just try to imagine in, like, I don't know, pick whatever town you live in, right? Like, picture that you live in Toledo, Ohio, right? And then imagine that all of a sudden, over the course of a couple of years,

• 16:01Steven Rinella?

  of, that, that nine out of ten of the people in Toledo, Ohio die. Or wherever, right? Nine out of ten of them die and you look at your broader family structure, your siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents. Nine, like, if you count them all up and you go, I have twenty family members.

• 16:25Steven Rinella?

  Okay, uh, eighteen are now dead.

• 16:30Steven Rinella?

  Now come tell me about your family and come tell me about how your family functions.

• 16:35Speaker 07

  Right.

• 16:35Steven Rinella?

  Like, people cannot picture it, man.

• 16:37Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 16:37Steven Rinella?

  People can't picture it.

• 16:38Speaker 07

  No, I, I appreciate that because, you know, when I thought about that, you know, growing up and reaching the age I'm at now and, and what we have as a tribe and how rich we are and our language and our culture and our traditions. You know, that ten percent that, that survived that, you know, gave that to us. They, they carried that on.

• 16:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 16:57Speaker 07

  So I think, how rich was our society before that?

• 17:02Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that the ten percent.

• 17:03Speaker 07

  The ten percent.

• 17:04Steven Rinella?

  The ten percent remains of richness, cause think about what gets lost.

• 17:07Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 17:08Steven Rinella?

  Huge things get lost, man, all the history. And that's the thing is especially with, with our, like, now everything gets so captured. Captured written word.

• 17:19Speaker 07

  Right.

• 17:20Steven Rinella?

  Captured, you know, captured and banked in the internet, but like all of a sudden, like eighty percent of the narratives are gone. Eighty percent of the, oh, yeah, but we, we came from here and your grandfather was this and, right? And that's all wiped?

• 17:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 17:34Steven Rinella?

  You got, and you got, of those ten, you got two people left, like, here's what I think happened, but I'm not really sure. People lose sight, I mean, it's just too hard to comprehend. People flipped out during the COVID pandemic.

• 17:45Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:45Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean? Like, people, like, like people in wherever, like, really hard hit places, like, people flipping out in Manhattan because I don't know what it was percentage, but like, it was overwhelming the morgues. It's like, dude, that is nothing, nothing compared, nothing compared to what was happening to native communities of smallpox.

• 18:03Speaker 07

  Right.

• 18:04Steven Rinella?

  You know, it, it took, to get the equivalent, you'd have had to go into Manhattan and remove, I don't know, ten million people

• 18:11Steven Rinella?

  in Manhattan and you'd be like, that would be, that would give you an idea, what will, that'd give you an idea what went on.

• 18:16Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 18:16Steven Rinella?

  It's staggering. So.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  Oh, sorry. Even, even with those diseases, we, we as macaque, we did, we did a really good job at avoiding them for quite a while because we would catch wind of it. Depending on where it was and we would keep people out of certain areas and we'd steer clear of certain areas and.

• 18:34Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that right?

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, and like, towards, you know, eighteen, the eighteen fifties is when Ted Stevens actually caught wind of, you know, oh, the macaws are hit hard right now, smallpox hit them. And that's kind of when he's like, let's, let's go get this treaty. That's kind of when he came out and you can even see in the notes that

• 18:55Speaker 02

  even a year ago, we weren't the big chiefs, we wouldn't have been the ones signing this, we're here now and there was a lot of sadness in the notes because they've lost so many of their family and loved ones.

• 19:06Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that right? That's in, that's in, cause that dude inked a lot of treaties in the Pacific Northwest, Stevens did.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:12Steven Rinella?

  He kind of made like a big run, man.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Cause he knew he couldn't take us, and we were full force in them before disease hit us, but he's like, oh, he caught wind and he's like, you know, it's probably a good time to negotiate.

• 19:25Steven Rinella?

  Huh. Cause you guys are in a weakened position.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:29Steven Rinella?

  Militarily, yeah.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  And then even, even with the, during the COVID, like, we avoided, you know, we locked down the reservation. He was the chairman, needed a really good job, he kept, we avoided a case for, sure, he, how long was it until there was finally one in, in the reservation?

• 19:48Speaker 07

  It was about three, four months.

• 19:51Steven Rinella?

  But you, you guys held out for that long without any infections or?

• 19:54Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 19:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 19:55Speaker 07

  And we didn't, no loss of life.

• 19:57Steven Rinella?

  There, there's, you know, as you know well, we have maybe seven reservations in Montana, five or seven. Um, and during the pandemic, you know, there was, you'd go down to the, I can't remember if it was Northern Cheyenne or the, the Crow Reservation.

• 20:14Steven Rinella?

  There's basically signs like, don't stop on the highway passing through. And I was like, you know, to my kids, I was like, man, you gotta understand the history here of, like, pandemics, that means something totally different. That means something totally different in native communities, man, because they got a fresh memory of that stuff, you know?

• 20:30Speaker 07

  Right.

• 20:31Steven Rinella?

  Um, after,

• 20:35Steven Rinella?

  so, well, let me ask about that, the quitting whaling. Was it, would you describe it more like, more like it just wasn't worth it and it faded or was it a formal decision to quit?

• 20:49Speaker 07

  It was a formal decision, you know, it, like I mentioned in the introduction, it defined our, our societal structure.

• 20:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 20:58Speaker 07

  And, and we still have that reverence for it today. It's, it's that important. That's why, you know, we, we went seventy years between a harvest and kept that knowledge and, you know, that how to and, and how we pass that on. Um, made that available to, to people so we could carry that on through all those generations that, that, uh, um, spanned that seventy years.

• 21:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 07

  Like my, my lifetime, I, I would have loved to be a whaler, you know, I'm fifty four now, you know, it's not likely in the cards for me, but.

• 21:33Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that right?

• 21:34Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 21:35Steven Rinella?

  Well, we'll talk about that. So,

• 21:39Steven Rinella?

  a se- so almost a century later, so if you, if you imagine that, that, that the macaque quit whaling in, let's say nineteen twenty, is that, that's close?

• 21:49Speaker 07

  Twenty, I don't know, it was like twenty seven.

• 21:52Steven Rinella?

  Okay, nineteen twenty seven.

• 21:53Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 21:54Steven Rinella?

  And then fast forward up to the lead up to the, to the next whale that was harvested by your, your tribe. And that, that whale was harvested, what year?

• 22:06Speaker 07

  Nineteen ninety nine.

• 22:07Steven Rinella?

  Ninety nine.

• 22:10Steven Rinella?

  Walk me through.

• 22:14Steven Rinella?

  The the years prior to 99, like what needed to happen? Because when you quit, when you guys quit, you quit because you decided to quit. But you weren't at liberty to decide to start. Right? I mean, a lot happened.

• 22:29Speaker 07

  Right.

• 22:30Steven Rinella?

  Right? You couldn't just be like, hey, we're going out.

• 22:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, well.

• 22:34Steven Rinella?

  Because this whole world had been built up around marine mammals, right? This whole protection world. So what what did that look like to go to say like, hey, man? We're gonna go. We're gonna resume our treaty rights. There's enough whales now. We're gonna go whaling. Um, like, who who do you pick up the phone? You know, I mean, like, who do you call, right? When you want to go get a whale?

• 22:54Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, for for tribal nations, our our first call, you know, the our main contact in the federal government is Department of Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs.

• 23:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 23:04Speaker 07

  You know, so it's their responsibility to to advocate for for those rights for us in the federal government.

• 23:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 23:11Speaker 07

  They're our trustee, is what we say. And and then from interior, you know, the whaling falls under Department of Commerce. So, you know, through NOAA and National Marine Fisheries and and those regulations, you know, were set up, you know, by different federal acts like the Marine Mammal Protection Act. You know, so in 72, that Marine Mammal Protection Act was passed. And the gray whales were listed, you know, as an endangered species as well, you know, the ESA comes into play. And so when in the 90s, when the population was recovering so well, you know, you're getting some pretty high, um,

• 23:52Speaker 07

  you know, at least record numbers in in in our lifetime, you know, near 30,000 whales in in the 90s. And and so it was proposed to be delisted, you know, that that was the trigger for us.

• 24:04Steven Rinella?

  That that's what did it.

• 24:05Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 24:06Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 24:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, the delisting of the Eastern North Pacific gray whale population was was our trigger to resume.

• 24:12Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 24:13Speaker 07

  Our our treaty right.

• 24:15Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 24:16Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 24:16Steven Rinella?

  But why? This is probably it's ultra complicated question.

• 24:24Steven Rinella?

  If if you have an agreement as if you have an agreement as a sovereign nation, you have agreement with the government. Right? And you have certain levels of autonomy. Would it have like? Were you be were you guys being nice? By bringing it up? Like, why couldn't it be that just one day you just went and did it?

• 24:45Speaker 07

  No, you're you're right on that. That was a discussion of leadership at that time.

• 24:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 24:50Speaker 07

  Actually, Daniel's father, my older brother, you know, he was he was part of those discussions as as well as his grandfather.

• 24:59Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 24:59Speaker 07

  Ben Johnson, the former chairman.

• 25:01Steven Rinella?

  Internal discussions.

• 25:02Speaker 07

  Internal discussions about that, you know, should. What prevents us from just going? It's in our treaty. It's not listed. You know, but, yeah, we I would say we were being nice and and we, you know, we met with the federal government. And, you know, the federal government has these international agreements in place, right? They they work with the International Whaling Commission. They're a member of it.

• 25:25Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 25:26Speaker 07

  And so they wanted us to be a part of that process, like the Alaskan Eskimos on on the North Slope.

• 25:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 25:34Speaker 07

  So so we we agreed to to do that, you know, we went and advocated for a quota, worked with the Alaskan Eskimos and the Chakotins in Russia to to get Aboriginal subsistence whaling quota through the International Whaling Commission.

• 25:50Steven Rinella?

  And what kind of quota were you looking for? One?

• 25:53Speaker 07

  Well, they they do it over over multiple years.

• 25:55Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 25:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, so so it was like, um, at that time, it was it was up to five whales in in any given year over a you know, like a five, six year period.

• 26:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 26:05Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 26:06Steven Rinella?

  And you guys hit enormous resistance.

• 26:09Speaker 07

  Absolutely, yes.

• 26:11Steven Rinella?

  Where in that first go around back in the 90s?

• 26:18Steven Rinella?

  Was was the was government resistance or social resistance? Strongest?

• 26:25Speaker 07

  I think the social resistance was strongest, but that translates into government resistance, right? You know?

• 26:29Steven Rinella?

  I see, yeah.

• 26:30Speaker 07

  You know, things get, you know, where's the political temperature of my constituents if you're politician in DC and and how much do I want to support this issue?

• 26:41Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 26:42Speaker 07

  Right? So those things come into play, but um, it it was pretty bad for, um, you know, these guys when they were when they were younger in school, you know, there were. Um, our community was getting threatened, you know, physically threatened.

• 26:58Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 26:58Speaker 07

  Bomb threats in our in our schools.

• 27:00Steven Rinella?

  By who, though?

• 27:02Speaker 07

  Uh, you know, there there were, uh, it's mainly your, um, animal welfare groups.

• 27:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So the but as I'm saying, so the organizations were doing this. Was it like like Greenpeace or what were the organizations that were coming after you? Or was it just like crackpot individuals?

• 27:17Speaker 07

  Uh, there was a lot of crackpot individuals, but there was one organization, Sea Shepherd Society.

• 27:22Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, that that was the main one that that, um, you know, they're they're very aggressive and and, you know, they'd send their ships into our harbor that we have and get on the loudspeaker and, you know, just start putting insults out there to our community, which.

• 27:38Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 27:39Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah. We had to get a federal restraining order on them and.

• 27:44Steven Rinella?

  Did you really?

• 27:45Speaker 07

  And the Coast Guard enforced that and eventually kept them away, but, yeah, it wasn't good for a while.

• 27:52Steven Rinella?

  They were coming into your bay, into your harbor?

• 27:55Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 27:56Steven Rinella?

  In a in a ship? I mean, obviously.

• 27:58Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 27:58Steven Rinella?

  Huh. And and you guys you guys never you guys it didn't ever blow into like fistfights and brawls and stuff?

• 28:08Speaker 07

  No, there was some very very close, I guess, encounters.

• 28:13Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, there was. There might have been some rock throwing and

• 28:16Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 28:17Speaker 07

  things of that nature. The community got fed up with them, right?

• 28:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 28:20Speaker 07

  So.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  911, what's your emergency? Oh, please help us. They're everywhere. We think they're murder hornets. 911 Nashville returns. It's a homicide detective doing here. Three bodies on the ground. With emergencies of biblical proportions. Oh, since swarms upon you and upon your people. That's one of the plagues of the Bible. And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  Brian Philippi joins 911 Nashville, all new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu. Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 29:22Speaker 05

  Breathe in and reset with Lincoln Rejuvenate. An available multi-sensory feature in the 2027 Lincoln Navigator SUV. Experience the luxurious massage, visuals, and scents to help you relax in the driver's seat. It's your time for a reset. Visit lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln Rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park. When the vehicle is off or if any doors open, do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. Lincoln and Navigator are trademarks of Ford or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

• 29:53Steven Rinella?

  So within your community in the 90s, was there division

• 30:03Steven Rinella?

  around the idea of resuming whaling, or was it pretty much unanimous within with within the McCall? Was it like, this is our right, this is what we're gonna go do, the population is strong enough to support limited harvest? Or was it a fight amongst you guys?

• 30:16Speaker 07

  No, it was it was heavily supported.

• 30:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 30:19Speaker 07

  I mean, we have a need statement, you know, 80. I think in the 90s, it was like 84, 85% of the community wants to go back and do this.

• 30:30Steven Rinella?

  So overwhelming.

• 30:30Speaker 07

  Overwhelming, yeah. In our need statements, we've done, we have to do those for the international whaling quota that we get. And that's just gone up since then, but it, you know, there were people that didn't want to go back to it and and we just worked through that.

• 30:48Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:48Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 30:49Steven Rinella?

  Did you? I mean, that turned in, I followed that whole thing. I forgot a lot of the details now, but I remember being very interested in it and it turned into. I mean, it turned into a media spectacle.

• 31:03Speaker 07

  It did.

• 31:04Steven Rinella?

  Like, everybody had an opinion about it, right? It kind of like. Maybe not for you guys, but for the, in the normal, in the normal, like if you're just a dude that followed the news, the main thing that was reported was like, was the social fight. Right? It was, it became a news story about this, this dispute. That seemed to over, probably maybe not from your community, but that seemed to, the coverage of, of the argument overshadowed any conversation about, you know, how many whales are there? What is your treaty, right? It just, it became, like the, the story became the dispute.

• 31:47Speaker 07

  No, it, it certainly did. Yeah, it certainly did. I, I think, um, your local media, which is out of Seattle, you know, those, those stations, um,

• 31:59Speaker 07

  you know, they, they covered it.

• 32:00Steven Rinella?

  Were they supportive generally?

• 32:04Speaker 07

  Then, I, I, I wouldn't say they were generally supportive.

• 32:07Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 32:07Speaker 07

  You know, I mean, they were looking to get the story. They, you know, they would go, um, get on the ship with, with Paul Watson and on his, whatever the heck his sea shepherd boat was.

• 32:19Steven Rinella?

  Well, they would cover it from that angle.

• 32:20Speaker 07

  They cover it from that angle as well. And, and that, you know, that didn't sit well with us, you know, it's, it's like how, how can we build trust and,

• 32:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 32:28Speaker 07

  and think we're gonna get a fair shake in the media if, you know, if we have those things going on. That was.

• 32:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. But you guys then, you got, you, you got a whale. Did, what, when you went out to get a whale, after this hundred year break in whaling, you went out to get a whale, did you launch out and go get a whale? Because you got all your paperwork in order, or did it become a point when you just went for it?

• 32:56Steven Rinella?

  Um, or did you have like your little permits and shit all printed out? You know, I mean, like what, what, what ultimately happened?

• 33:02Speaker 07

  Yeah. Well, we, we did, uh, you know, agree on, on doing a, a permit system with, with the federal government at that time.

• 33:11Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 33:12Speaker 07

  Um, and we'd have a permit issued, you know, for a hunt period, and you know, we wouldn't give specifics on a date and time, right? But it's like, hey, we're gonna, there's a permit, covers, covers this amount of time and, and then, you know, that permit would be issued by the government and then we'd issue our own permit to our whaling crew to, to go, to go do the hunt.

• 33:40Steven Rinella?

  So you could keep a little bit secret, like when this was gonna go down?

• 33:43Speaker 07

  Yes. Yeah. For their safety.

• 33:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 33:46Speaker 07

  For their safety.

• 33:47Steven Rinella?

  Oh, sure, man.

• 33:47Speaker 07

  Cause it was, um, yeah, I mean, you may have seen the video of uh, our whalers, um, being charged by,

• 33:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 33:57Speaker 07

  uh, activists out there on the water on jet skis, you know, getting, looking like they're gonna ram them and, you know, the coast guard took them out before they took our canoe out.

• 34:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Cause they were just waiting.

• 34:09Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 34:10Steven Rinella?

  So walk, walk me through that day. Walk me through that day. Um,

• 34:16Steven Rinella?

  like, like how, how did that hunt day go down? I mean, like, let's forget, let's forget for a minute,

• 34:22Steven Rinella?

  the jet skiers and the protesters and whatnot, but like, like, how, how, how did the day play out? Just from a hunter's perspective, from a hunting, a whaling perspective, what happened that day?

• 34:32Speaker 07

  But, you know, Daniel, you wanna go through that or? Yeah.

• 34:37Speaker 07

  I guess the, the day before, I think they had a, a lot of success on, on approaches. And so, it was, uh,

• 34:47Speaker 07

  pretty well known that they were gonna get it that next day. I think all the stars were aligning, all the prayer training, everything, you know, came, came together that day and it was kind of a, a feeling that, that everyone had.

• 34:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Speaker 07

  And so they're getting, they're getting it down, right? The, the approaches, the, the, the studying of the whales, the, um, watching the feeding currents and.

• 35:09Steven Rinella?

  Got it. And when you say approaches, you mean just getting the boat up to it? Like how to approach, how to,

• 35:13Speaker 07

  How to approach.

• 35:14Steven Rinella?

  Approach the whale?

• 35:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. All the teachings are coming, coming together.

• 35:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 35:18Speaker 07

  Time on the water was paying off. And so, yeah, it was, it was a magical moment when they harpooned the whale.

• 35:24Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 35:25Speaker 07

  It's ingrained in every Makah's mind, I think, that day. Um,

• 35:31Steven Rinella?

  At what, at what distance today? Like, like, how close did you have to approach that whale?

• 35:36Speaker 07

  You had to be pretty close, pretty much right on top of it. Um, yeah.

• 35:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Cause you know, you don't normally, you know, we spent a lot of time in Southeast Alaska, there's always whales around.

• 35:46Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 35:47Steven Rinella?

  You don't, you don't wind up right on top of them.

• 35:50Speaker 07

  No.

• 35:50Steven Rinella?

  Like, you know, they, they gotta, they know what's going on, you know, I mean, they don't, you know?

• 35:56Speaker 07

  Yep. You're watching, studying them, just like, like you watch elk and study elk. Um, their feeding habits, you're watching the currents and, and you're knowing where to position yourself, you know, to have a successful strike.

• 36:06Steven Rinella?

  So, so you're trying to, you're trying to, when it goes down, I imagine, you're trying to anticipate where it's gonna come up.

• 36:13Speaker 07

  Where it's gonna come up. And then you're watching its breathing. I mean, there's a, there's a lot of different, uh, techniques that go into it. Yeah. Um, they're up at the surface for X amount of time and,

• 36:21Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 36:22Speaker 07

  Before they go under. And then, yeah, you never do, when they're feeding, you never know where they're gonna come up again. So.

• 36:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And the approach, um, I'm guessing the approach has gotta be like on its sixth position, like you're coming from behind it?

• 36:37Speaker 07

  There's a couple of different ways to, yes. Um, that is one of them. Um,

• 36:43Speaker 07

  yeah, you don't want them to, you know, tail slap you or something.

• 36:46Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 36:47Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 36:48Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 36:48Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 36:50Steven Rinella?

  So when they got, they, they hand harpooned it?

• 36:53Speaker 07

  Hand harpooned it, yes.

• 36:55Steven Rinella?

  And, and how did you guys make the,

• 36:58Steven Rinella?

  how did you guys build your harpoon? Like what, what, what did you do? What kind of thought did you put into that?

• 37:02Speaker 07

  It was the trish, traditional harpoon. Um, so the, all those techniques are passed down for generations. Um, so we quit whaling in the 1920s, but we never quit, uh, teaching about it.

• 37:12Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I see.

• 37:13Speaker 07

  So the importance of it, like you said, is the pinnacle of our society. So, um, you know, we held on to those teachings.

• 37:19Steven Rinella?

  Did, did people hold on to some of the equipment?

• 37:21Speaker 07

  The equipment also, yes. So, yeah, we do have.

• 37:23Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 37:24Speaker 07

  Yeah. So we have equipment from a long time ago.

• 37:26Steven Rinella?

  Do you really?

• 37:27Speaker 07

  Yeah. And each family had their own, so.

• 37:29Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that right? Okay.

• 37:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. Along with, uh, you know, sealing and, and, you know, other, other marine mammals.

• 37:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So they, they got a harpoon into it and it's got a detachable head on it, or somehow it's connected to a line?

• 37:45Speaker 07

  The first piece, yeah. Yeah. Or the valve, whatever you call it.

• 37:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. That gets into it. And then there's a float system.

• 37:54Speaker 07

  Yep. So it starts paying out and then the, there's a buoy tender that's sitting to the right of the harpooner and he's clipping on buoys while they're slowing down. You have to be one, uh, the crew has to be in unison.

• 38:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 38:04Speaker 07

  So to turn the canoe into the right direction and get heading forward so the line don't pay out, you know, too fast. You have a line tender, buoy tender.

• 38:12Steven Rinella?

  How much line?

• 38:13Speaker 07

  Um, it, it depends about, you know, 270 feet or so or more.

• 38:17Steven Rinella?

  And you're clipping buoys on as it goes?

• 38:19Speaker 07

  Clipping buoys as it goes, yeah.

• 38:21Steven Rinella?

  Is that thing at risk of sinking?

• 38:23Speaker 07

  Definitely. Yeah. So the more buoys are better. So.

• 38:26Steven Rinella?

  So it's not just to slow it down, but to keep it from sinking?

• 38:29Speaker 07

  Keep it from sinking, yes.

• 38:31Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Should've chatted about the seal skin float system.

• 38:35Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. The, the old floats were made out of seal skins. Um, they're skinned in such a way where you could turn them inside out and, and inflate them.

• 38:44Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 38:45Speaker 07

  Um, yeah, they're big, you know, big floats. Some of them were, you know, six feet or more. So.

• 38:51Steven Rinella?

  And, and when this was happening,

• 38:54Steven Rinella?

  there's, how, how many people are observing this?

• 38:57Speaker 07

  The actual hunt?

• 38:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 38:59Speaker 07

  Uh, the 99 hunt or?

• 39:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, the, yeah, the 99 hunt.

• 39:01Speaker 07

  Oh, there is hundreds of people, uh, you know, outside the zone. The coast guard set a, a zone for the hunters.

• 39:07Steven Rinella?

  Oh, they set a perimeter.

• 39:08Speaker 07

  Perimeter.

• 39:09Steven Rinella?

  So your people could be in the perimeter, but other people had to stay out of the perimeter?

• 39:12Speaker 07

  Our canoe and our, our, uh, chase boat, so.

• 39:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. How, how far was it? How far, how far out to sea are you when this is happening? Like how far from your, how far from your reservation are you?

• 39:23Speaker 07

  Uh, we're, you know, they migrate past our front door. So.

• 39:26Steven Rinella?

  So you just hunt close to home?

• 39:28Speaker 07

  We hunt close to home. Yeah. We could also hunt, you know, out further at sea if we're going after different, if we went after different species. So.

• 39:35Steven Rinella?

  Okay. And you're, and you're not,

• 39:39Steven Rinella?

  do they draw, like, does the government draw a line and, and say, these waters are okay?

• 39:46Speaker 07

  Um, they did do a restricted zone, right? For, but, to harvest a whale in?

• 39:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah. Like, let's say you wanted to take off, like you, you would never go take off and be like, oh, hey, we're gonna go whale up, um, we're gonna go whale up in Alaska and, and try that out, right?

• 40:01Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 40:01Steven Rinella?

  They, they had to specify in some way where you can go.

• 40:04Speaker 07

  Well, that, that's a really, really great question. And, um, I got a couple of answers for that, actually.

• 40:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 40:10Speaker 07

  There's a, so for the 99 hunt, yes, there was a defined hunt area.

• 40:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 40:15Speaker 07

  Uh, we agreed to stay out of the, uh, Strait of Wanafuka and just on the Pacific Ocean.

• 40:19Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 40:20Speaker 07

  The tribe has a usual and a custom fishing area.

• 40:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 40:24Speaker 07

  That's adjudicated. That went to the Supreme Court.

• 40:26Steven Rinella?

  From that Stevens treaty?

• 40:28Speaker 07

  From that Stevens treaty. So, so we have a defined area, but that's only for fishing. We do not have a defined area for whaling.

• 40:37Steven Rinella?

  I got it.

• 40:38Speaker 07

  And, and the court was very specific about that. Cause we, in, in that court case, we, we brought forward our whaling and sealing activities as part of that. And, and the government said, we're here to just talk about fishing, your usual and accustomed fishing area. We, we acknowledge that you, you've gone a hu- 80 to a hundred miles offshore for whaling, but we're not gonna allow that evidence as part of that case.

• 41:04Steven Rinella?

  Why did they wanna punt on that question?

• 41:07Speaker 07

  I, well, I, I think it's a limit, uh, to limit us, really. It's to limit.

• 41:13Steven Rinella?

  Oh, because they're like, let's talk about the local stuff. Let's not talk about the far out stuff.

• 41:18Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 41:19Steven Rinella?

  Cause they wanted, they wanted to shrink that zone.

• 41:21Speaker 07

  They wanted to put us in a box. Cause before that case,

• 41:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 41:24Speaker 07

  Makah people, we, we fished from

• 41:30Speaker 07

  California all the way up to the Bering Sea under,

• 41:33Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 41:34Speaker 07

  under our treaty, you know?

• 41:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Like people just take off.

• 41:38Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 41:39Steven Rinella?

  And go on sea, sea journeys, I'm imagining.

• 41:41Speaker 07

  Yeah. And, and now we're put in a box.

• 41:44Steven Rinella?

  I got you. But they never fixed the whaling box?

• 41:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's no whaling box right now.

• 41:49Steven Rinella?

  So when, when 99, when they made a whaling box, they didn't, it wasn't as big as the fishing box?

• 41:56Speaker 07

  No.

• 41:57Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 41:57Speaker 07

  And in our current permit,

• 41:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 42:00Speaker 07

  you know, we, we have an agreed upon area as well, which is essentially on the Pacific Ocean, you know, out. Outside of the Strait of Wanda Fuka and, and then, you know, there's a National Marine Sanctuary that's out there now. So there's areas of other marine mammals, you know, haul out areas for seals and sea lions and things like that, that we, you know, we agree to transit in a responsible manner while we're hunting, you know?

• 42:29Steven Rinella?

  You've agreed to stay out of the sanctuaries?

• 42:31Speaker 07

  Not, not out of the sanctuary.

• 42:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay, not out of it, I got you.

• 42:33Speaker 07

  No, no, the sanctuaries is, is within our waters.

• 42:37Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 42:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we, we fish and exercise our treaty in the sanctuary.

• 42:41Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 42:42Speaker 07

  And they're, they're, they've been a good partner and they support that.

• 42:45Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay.

• 42:46Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 42:46Steven Rinella?

  Um, the 99 hunt happens.

• 42:55Steven Rinella?

  It's now 2026.

• 42:58Steven Rinella?

  What, why was there not a 2000 hunt, a 2001 hunt, 2002 hunt? Like, what happened?

• 43:05Speaker 07

  There was.

• 43:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 43:06Speaker 07

  And, you know, Daniel can.

• 43:09Steven Rinella?

  Well, there was in what years?

• 43:10Speaker 07

  Maybe talk about those, those hunts. Um, but in, um, in 2002, you know, I believe there was a injunction put on our whaling.

• 43:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 43:20Speaker 07

  Um, the federal government was sued over their, uh, you know, how they put together the NEPA for our whale hunt and that they didn't, didn't do a thorough job and.

• 43:32Steven Rinella?

  That was, so that was in 2002 that they came in and said it, they, they blocked it or something?

• 43:39Speaker 07

  Correct, yeah.

• 43:39Steven Rinella?

  But did you got, did you guys have the desire to continue? Like, would you have continued? If that injunction hadn't happened, was the desire there that you'd do an annual whale hunt?

• 43:50Speaker 07

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 43:52Steven Rinella?

  Why did you pay attention to, I'm not criticizing, but like, when the injunction came, what was the decision to abide by it?

• 44:02Speaker 07

  Rule of law, you know?

• 44:03Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 44:03Speaker 07

  It's, it's a, you know, I think we, you know, our, our leadership and our Makah people, you know, believe in that, you know, we have our own laws that we pass as well.

• 44:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 44:16Speaker 07

  Around those and things.

• 44:17Steven Rinella?

  I got you, yeah.

• 44:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, things that we agreed to. And, and so, um, it's, I don't know, that whole, that's, I, I can get into that more if you want, but I mean, there, there's really a lot to say around, around that.

• 44:32Steven Rinella?

  You mean around internal debates about how do we negotiate and engage with the government? Yeah, we, I mean, we don't need to spend tons of time on it, but you've, you've exercised where you've generally been, I mean, I know this, but

• 44:47Steven Rinella?

  you, you, you've generally been trying to work within the constraints of the regulatory bodies in the federal government.

• 44:56Speaker 07

  Right.

• 44:57Steven Rinella?

  And, and haven't stepped outside of that. Like, haven't gone, vigilante wouldn't be the right word, but haven't gone your own way on it.

• 45:05Speaker 07

  Well, yeah, we, we did have a, we had a group of Macaws that got frustrated with the process.

• 45:11Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 45:11Speaker 07

  At one point, yeah. Um, but, you know, so in 2002, you know, I think there was an injunction.

• 45:20Speaker 07

  And court case, Anderson versus Evans court case that, that took place and, um, you know, that basically, that case basically decided that the Marine Mammal Protection Act applies to the Makah tribe.

• 45:35Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 45:36Speaker 07

  Which we, to this day, we disagree with that. You know, we, we think, we don't think that's the correct ruling, but we're stuck with it.

• 45:43Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 45:45Speaker 07

  Um, and so, under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, it requires you to get a waiver to, to take a marine mammal.

• 45:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 45:54Speaker 07

  In our case, whaling. And, and then after a waiver, the government has to issue a permit. So in 2004, we submitted doc, documents to, to start that application process for a waiver under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. And we've been in that process ever since.

• 46:12Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 46:13Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 46:13Steven Rinella?

  Got it. In the meantime, have gray whales stayed off the, uh, were, were gray whales delisted and stayed off the list?

• 46:23Speaker 07

  Yes, yes.

• 46:24Steven Rinella?

  So no one's put them back on the endangered species list?

• 46:26Speaker 07

  No.

• 46:28Steven Rinella?

  Can, can you guys explain to me, I wasn't even aware of this till Nate told me.

• 46:34Steven Rinella?

  You guys get gray whales from ship strikes?

• 46:41Steven Rinella?

  Like, you'll be, you'll take, you, is this true? That you'll take possession of gray whales that are, that are killed and from, from getting hit by boats or tangled in nets or something like that?

• 46:50Speaker 07

  Yes, yes. We, we have, um.

• 46:53Steven Rinella?

  How does that play out?

• 46:54Speaker 07

  We have a process with National Marine Fisheries to, um,

• 46:59Speaker 07

  you know, to obtain those for our use. You know, we basically submit a request for this incidental take, you know, because of whatever that mortality event was, whether it's a ship strike or some entanglement or.

• 47:11Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:12Speaker 07

  And, um, and then we have our own marine mammal biologist that, that works with the tribe as well. So when that happens, you know, we decide if we want to utilize that whale.

• 47:23Steven Rinella?

  Uh-huh.

• 47:24Speaker 07

  And, you know, and then we tow it to our shores and, you know, we check the health of it, see how fresh it is.

• 47:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 47:30Speaker 07

  You know, is it, is it, is it something that's, that's fresh enough? Is the whale healthy? You know, is it something that we can, you know, harvest the blubber and the meat for, for consumption?

• 47:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 47:40Speaker 07

  Or, um, you know, or do we, you know, just butcher it up and utilize some of the other parts, whether it's the bones, the vertebrae, you know, the baleen, you know, that, that.

• 47:52Steven Rinella?

  Okay. And is it your job to go fetch it?

• 47:55Speaker 07

  Yes. Not mine specifically, but.

• 47:58Steven Rinella?

  But, but yeah.

• 47:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, but the Makah people, right?

• 48:00Steven Rinella?

  So, so how does, how does, because this has to happen fast, right? So how does it come to you? Like, you know, say a cruise ship hits a whale, right? Bam, they hit a whale. It's crippled, it's dying. Like, the phone rings? Like, like, how, how does this play out?

• 48:16Speaker 07

  That, just like that, it does.

• 48:18Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay, the phone, someone calls.

• 48:19Speaker 07

  Someone calls, you know, people know.

• 48:22Steven Rinella?

  Uh-huh.

• 48:22Speaker 07

  That Macaws are whalers in that area. And, um, you know, there's a whole reporting system for those sort of things. So when those reports happen, you know, sometimes that call comes from a federal government official, say, hey, we got this report.

• 48:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 48:37Speaker 07

  There's this whale located off a Tatu Sh Island or wherever. And, and, you know, so we go check it out.

• 48:44Steven Rinella?

  Got it. You send your own boats out and your own agency guys or whatever out and check it out?

• 48:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 48:50Steven Rinella?

  You know what I saw a long time ago?

• 48:54Steven Rinella?

  Have you ever heard of, you know, Cook Inlet and Turnigan Arm?

• 48:57Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 48:58Steven Rinella?

  In Alaska? So we were way up Turnigan Arm going salmon fishing. And that thing gets flooded on these huge tide swings and bluegus come in there. When the salmon are running, bluegus come up into this long, I don't know, it's like a, like a, like a arm, like a fjord kind of thing.

• 49:19Steven Rinella?

  And it's, at low tide, it's a mud flat for the most part. Now, high tide, it's enough water for a bluegus whale.

• 49:28Steven Rinella?

  We're way up in that arm, 20 miles up in that arm, because it was 20 mile river. And there's these bluegus in there and we're talking about, me and my brother, talking about how do they get out of there? We're like, they must have a channel or something that we can't see. And we just go about our business fishing.

• 49:50Steven Rinella?

  Well, the next day in the newspaper is those whales that we were commenting on, like, wondering how they're going to get out of that little pool they're in are dead. And it was. And I, I don't know what tribe did it, but they, I mean, they rushed out there and got them all butchered and hauled out of there. Like, quick, you know? And I always remember being kind of impressed by that, like, what a haul that was, you know? But just utilize them all when you think they normally lay there and rot.

• 50:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, we've, we try to utilize everything on, on that whale. And when those unfortunate things happen.

• 50:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 50:27Speaker 07

  You know, we don't want those things to go to waste if we, we can get them in time.

• 50:32Steven Rinella?

  How is it divided up? Like, something like that happens? I mean, it's a huge haul of food. Let, let's say you get one, it's like Uber, like mega fresh, or you kill one and it's real fresh. Did you, in, in your view, does every Makah have a right to some of it? Anyone that wants it has a right to it? Or does it play out differently?

• 50:51Speaker 07

  I think eventually, yeah, we, we'd like to be that. I mean, there's, um, harpooner usually has, you know, can, can get what he wants.

• 51:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 51:01Speaker 07

  But, yeah, it gets divided amongst, uh, the, uh, crew and then that goes to their families, so.

• 51:08Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 51:08Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 51:09Steven Rinella?

  What's the most coveted part?

• 51:11Speaker 07

  Um, there's parts that we do ceremonies with, um, that's the most coveted, yeah.

• 51:16Steven Rinella?

  I got you. But what, what about just for regular, everyday consumption? What part is the best?

• 51:20Speaker 07

  My favorite's the skin and blubber. I, I absolutely love that.

• 51:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 51:24Speaker 07

  Tastes, tastes like the ocean.

• 51:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we, I've had some of that.

• 51:26Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 51:27Steven Rinella?

  I've had some of that from bowheads and it's, it's amazing.

• 51:29Speaker 07

  It's, yeah, it's, that's, you can't beat that in my book.

• 51:32Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 51:32Speaker 07

  These guys might have.

• 51:33Steven Rinella?

  That's one thing you can imagine, like,

• 51:37Steven Rinella?

  picture like sushi restaurants, like high-end sushi restaurants and stuff where people want to try interesting things. That item, when they, you know, like, cut it with, it's like, almost like that french fry shape with a little bit of skin on it.

• 51:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 51:49Steven Rinella?

  Dude, that item would be the most popular thing in the world.

• 51:51Speaker 07

  Oh, for sure.

• 51:52Steven Rinella?

  If people got turned on to that, it was amazing. We ate some right here.

• 51:56Speaker 07

  Oh, nice.

• 51:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, it's good stuff.

• 51:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, what about the meat? The actual meat?

• 52:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, I like the meat too. I mean.

• 52:03Steven Rinella?

  What's it like?

• 52:06Speaker 07

  Porpoise?

• 52:09Steven Rinella?

  Tastes like porpoise?

• 52:10Speaker 07

  Yeah. No, seal, I mean, it's, it's got its own taste, uh.

• 52:15Steven Rinella?

  But I mean, like, put it like, with, with stuff that I'd be familiar with. Or, or can't you even draw a comparison to it?

• 52:19Speaker 07

  I can't draw a comparison.

• 52:20Steven Rinella?

  I got you. It's just, it's just different.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  It's like ocean elk.

• 52:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  Ocean elk. It's super, it's super lean. The meat itself is super lean. It's super, there's a lot of blood in it.

• 52:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  But.

• 52:30Steven Rinella?

  Dark?

• 52:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's real dark. You, you can throw it on a smoker, you can fry it up like a steak. You can do, you could braise it. I mean, there's.

• 52:38Steven Rinella?

  What, what parts?

• 52:41Steven Rinella?

  Like I'm, I just imagine it's not like flaying the fish like, like you're, you're. What would be like, how do you describe the parts of it? You know, like, let's say you're doing elk, you'd be okay, we got the back straps.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:53Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean? You got your grind pile, you got your ribs, you know what I mean? Like when you're doing a whale, is it that there's parts that are good for this, parts that are good for that?

• 53:01Speaker 02

  I mean, I think you separate naturally separate into blubber. You have your blubber and skin and then you have your meat. And so you kind of think of it as like, um, if you've seen some of the pictures from 99 or some of the other things where they're butchering in sections.

• 53:15Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  And you get a, you know, you take the section and, and you kind of have this big blob of meat that has a ton of blubber, it's a ton of meat. And, you know, it's enough for, you know, plenty of your family, if you were to cook it up for six, eight, 10 people and.

• 53:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And are our guys freezing it? Like freezing it up?

• 53:33Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, especially with the, the last kind of ship strike whales that were healthy. They were divided up and, and passed around the community and people froze the blubber, people froze some of the meat. And then obviously everybody took advantage of tasting it, eating it right away, rendering the oil, smoking some of the meat. And it's cool because you see it, you know, shared around the community and, and it's just a, it's, it's really cool.

• 53:59Steven Rinella?

  Tell me a way, tell me a couple of ways one might fix the meat, like cook the meat.

• 54:03Speaker 02

  Jerky.

• 54:04Steven Rinella?

  Oh, whale jerky is.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. Jerky, that was the best jerky I've ever had. Um.

• 54:09Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 54:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, uh, guy that used to be on the whaling commission, God rest his soul, Gary Ray, he, he made whale jerky. And it, it was really, it was the best jerky I ever had.

• 54:22Steven Rinella?

  Huh. Just sliced it thin, dried it, air dried it?

• 54:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, or smoked it. I mean, yeah. He, he had a, you know, traditional smokehouse and he smoked it up in there.

• 54:35Steven Rinella?

  Hung those strips in there?

• 54:36Speaker 02

  He's like, here, he gave me some, I tried it and I was like, oh, like I didn't want to put it down, yeah. But he also makes the best salmon, candied salmon.

• 54:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Also, he knows what's up with making the dry product.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  He was, he was like, he was really good at all that stuff.

• 54:50Steven Rinella?

  Is there any such thing? Like, do you guys, uh?

• 54:56Steven Rinella?

  Do you guys grind, do you guys make grind meat from deer and elk and stuff?

• 55:01Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:01Steven Rinella?

  Would anybody ever grind up whale meat?

• 55:05Speaker 02

  I don't think anybody's thought of it.

• 55:06Steven Rinella?

  To make like a whale burger? It would be like that kind of meat?

• 55:09Speaker 02

  It's interesting too, because of the, you know how, um, you know, you have your, your elk tally, you have your elk, elk fat, binds really well.

• 55:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  Um, keep your grinder cold, you grind your meat, add your fat, it stays really well. I imagine whale blubber.

• 55:25Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  Would melt.

• 55:27Steven Rinella?

  Be an oily mess.

• 55:28Speaker 02

  Such a lower temperature.

• 55:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  And so I, I mean, I imagine your patty would kind of fall apart.

• 55:33Steven Rinella?

  No, I can imagine that.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  Cause if, if everybody was to get like distributed from a whale, you'd get about seven pounds of meat. And then about one point, just about two pounds of blubber. So.

• 55:46Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you mean if you're, if your whole tribe, all the tribal memberships shared a whale, it'd be seven pounds apiece. That divides it out pretty good.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  911, what's your emergency? Please help us, they're everywhere. We think they're murder hornets.

• 56:05Speaker 05

  911 Nashville returns.

• 56:07Speaker 03

  It's a homicide detective down here. Three bodies on the ground.

• 56:10Speaker 05

  With emergencies of biblical proportions.

• 56:13Speaker 03

  Oh, since swarms upon you and upon your people. That's one of the plagues for Bible. And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville.

• 56:20Speaker 05

  Brian Phillippe, 911 Nashville, all new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu.

• 56:26Speaker 04

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 56:56Speaker 05

  Breathe in and reset with Lincoln Rejuvenate. An available multi-sensory feature in the 2027 Lincoln Navigator SUV. Experience the luxurious massage, visuals, and scents to help you relax in the driver's seat. It's your time for a reset. Visit lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln Rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park, when the vehicle is off, or if any doors open. Do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. Lincoln and Navigator are trademarks of Ford or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

• 57:28Steven Rinella?

  How is that oil?

• 57:31Steven Rinella?

  Is it stored as a liquid or a solid or how's it stored?

• 57:35Speaker 02

  Usually stored as a liquid. So usually it's rendered real slow.

• 57:38Steven Rinella?

  Uh-huh.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  Rendered down sometimes. Some people, especially with seal, they'll smoke, like cold smoke or they'll smoke it first, but they'll render it down into oil.

• 57:46Steven Rinella?

  Smoke the oil?

• 57:47Speaker 02

  Smoke the, yeah, like.

• 57:48Steven Rinella?

  Oh, the blubber.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  The blubber and then you get a smoky oil.

• 57:51Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 57:52Speaker 02

  But it, you generally, now people render that oil down into a, like a mason jar, like the salmon that's out there.

• 58:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  And you can keep it like that for.

• 58:04Speaker 07

  It's a bit like.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  Ever.

• 58:05Speaker 07

  Honey and cinnamon that, that don't really go bad.

• 58:08Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 58:09Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 58:09Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 58:10Speaker 07

  You could freeze it, you can freeze the whale oil.

• 58:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 58:12Speaker 07

  Um.

• 58:14Steven Rinella?

  I, I spent some time with

• 58:18Steven Rinella?

  some chupac Eskimo guys and they would have seal oil.

• 58:22Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:23Steven Rinella?

  And I remember we would dip fish in it, just like, we were eating frozen, raw frozen fish. Like little chunks of like actually frozen fish dipped in the seal oil. And when you taste it, man, it would be like the real peppery, like I can't even describe it. It was like peppery like olive oil. Do you know what I mean? Like a, like a, not a burn, but you know what I'm saying? There's like a pepper to it. Yeah, bold. What, what, what, how do you describe that whale oil? Is it mild? Is it like, kind of grabs you when you taste it?

• 58:57Speaker 02

  Depends on who it is. I mean, it's pretty normal, like it's pretty mild for us.

• 59:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  Kind of, everyone's kind of used to it.

• 59:05Steven Rinella?

  But if you handed it to some kid, like, uh, I don't know, like some kid that never had any kind of that stuff, would that kid be like, oh, that's good? Or the kid be like, man, that is wild taste?

• 59:15Speaker 02

  This probably tastes like, um, like omegas.

• 59:19Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  Like your fish oil.

• 59:20Steven Rinella?

  So, okay, so it's got like, it's got that.

• 59:22Speaker 02

  Little bit of.

• 59:23Steven Rinella?

  It's got that fish oil taste to it. And how do you, how are you using it? You're dipping meat in it?

• 59:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you could use it a ton of different ways. I'm sure there's still ways to expand to that, that palette now that, you know. Once we get back into the mix, but I mean, generally, like you said, dipping fish or even bread or different things with, with your dinner.

• 59:43Steven Rinella?

  Do you ever oil a pan with it?

• 59:46Speaker 02

  I haven't, but I mean, you.

• 59:48Steven Rinella?

  There's no reason you couldn't.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  I don't know, I don't know what the smoke temp is, to be honest.

• 59:52Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I got you.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  Cause it's rendered really low temperature.

• 59:55Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  It's super low temperature or you'll burn it.

• 59:58Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  So you'll get a real like dark amber, like you'll see first timers making, uh, like rendering whale oil and it's like real dark. And then you kind of get the, the older folks who are like.

• 1:00:10Steven Rinella?

  Oh, they know how to keep it clean and clear. So it's like whiskey colored or something.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  Well, so like generally it's like, uh, like light olive oil, even lighter than that.

• 1:00:18Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that right?

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  Pretty clear.

• 1:00:19Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  It's not, I mean, it's not.

• 1:00:21Steven Rinella?

  I'm the one picturing it being like honey.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  No, it's not like water, but the, like, the smoked seal oil, kind of a little closer to like an olive oil color.

• 1:00:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  But generally it's like the clearer, the better. It's like you did a good job rendering it if it's nice and clear.

• 1:00:36Steven Rinella?

  Is there a, um?

• 1:00:40Steven Rinella?

  Does your commu- does your community have, uh, is, is there a communal area where, where stuff gets done or do people? Would it be that hundreds of people would go home and all render oil on their own? Or do you have a big spot where you just render all the oil collectively and then hand it out?

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Well, generally when the whale gets, you know, gets pulled up, right? You know, drop of elk, it's there, it's in that spot. But we pull up the whale and it kind of gets distributed there and that's where the time is, you know, everybody's hustling to make sure it's taking care of business. And then, you know, wherever you take that, your portion, you know, probably similar to an elk, you go home and.

• 1:01:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  Clean it up, make sure it's nice and good. And then you take your section of the part and then you plan to do your oil.

• 1:01:27Steven Rinella?

  Got it. And that, that's, that's your own business in your own area. Like it's cut up in a, in a way where people that want some get some. But then if you got your chunk of meat, you go home and deal with your chunk of meat.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  I got you. But not to say there can't be, you know, I'm, I'm sure like those are some of the things that, that are really kind of frustrating to notice. Is you see other tribes and other places have these communal ceremonies of like, they're celebrating, um, the, uh, teaching their like kids how to process these different animals. And for us to not even, let alone not only be not able to whale, but not able to even engage in those ceremonies to physically show our younger kids how to do this kind of stuff, you know? And so the tribe's doing really well at, you know, hey, the, the process of making paddles never died, never will.

• 1:02:16Speaker 02

  Processes of, you know, making harpoons, like we have our cultural and research center that has an incredible, um, display of, of all of the, of all the technology for whaling and all of those, you know, there's folks who are well detailed in, in, you know, making your harpoons and, and teaching your kids to and, and family how to do those things, but for us to not be able to kind of, you know, it's kind of like that box that you're in. You think about being able to have those kinds of ceremonies where like, hey, Makah coming together like Makades. But for just us to teach generations how to do this process and to get better at it.

• 1:02:54Steven Rinella?

  How to handle the stuff, yeah. You, you mentioned porpoise, you guys is, you guys hunt seal and porpoise?

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01Steven Rinella?

  And that, that's, that's less like, that's just kind of, that's, that's less like regulatory stuff involved in that?

• 1:03:10Speaker 07

  There's regulations around that. There's, it's incidental take permits that we, um, get issued. You know, we work with, uh, um, National Marine Fishery Service again, and our marine mammal biologists, you know, if we do any, any type of incidental take.

• 1:03:27Steven Rinella?

  What does incidental take mean?

• 1:03:29Speaker 07

  Gets caught up in fishing gear through our marine fishing activities.

• 1:03:32Steven Rinella?

  So that would be how you'd wind up with one?

• 1:03:34Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:03:34Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 1:03:35Speaker 07

  Yeah. And then we, there's a reporting system that we have to report that.

• 1:03:40Steven Rinella?

  How, how, if, if you have, if you have a porpoise, what is that porpoise good for? Would, would you use it exactly how you use a whale?

• 1:03:48Speaker 07

  Pretty similar.

• 1:03:49Steven Rinella?

  Blubber, skin, meat.

• 1:03:51Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 1:03:51Steven Rinella?

  Oil.

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  They actually do have back straps, so. I've heard it's very good.

• 1:03:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, same.

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  Very good tasting.

• 1:03:58Steven Rinella?

  You've heard that?

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  I've heard that.

• 1:04:00Steven Rinella?

  But you haven't tried it?

• 1:04:04Steven Rinella?

  But.

• 1:04:04Speaker 07

  It's good, Steve.

• 1:04:05Steven Rinella?

  It is. Word is, word is, this can be good.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  Word is, it's great.

• 1:04:08Steven Rinella?

  All right. So I want to get into time. I want to get back to this timeline more and try to get like where the where the situation stands right now. So the injunction goes in two thousand, two thousand one. What was it?

• 1:04:22Speaker 07

  Two thousand two.

• 1:04:23Steven Rinella?

  Two thousand two, two thousand two, the federal government and all its forms, NOAA, US, fit, whatever, all the agencies. It it comes down. We don't need to get into the details, but basically it comes down. Hey, there's an injunction. The Makah, you're done whaling. Two thousand two. But now you're you're talking about whaling again, like you're getting ready to go. You you want to get everything squared away to go. What? What happened this time around?

• 1:04:53Speaker 07

  So. In two thousand four, we made an application for a waiver to uh um to go whaling under the Re Mammal Protection Act. And

• 1:05:08Speaker 07

  there is no process for it. So we had to work with the government to develop that process as we went.

• 1:05:14Steven Rinella?

  Oh, like you had to ask them, let's say a fellow wanted a waiver, what would the waiver need to look like?

• 1:05:19Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:05:19Steven Rinella?

  And you got a legal team. I mean, you got lawyers.

• 1:05:21Speaker 07

  We do.

• 1:05:22Steven Rinella?

  Like, just got lawyers getting paid to do this kind of stuff.

• 1:05:24Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:05:25Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 1:05:26Speaker 07

  Yes, we do. Yeah, and and so we've been in that process, um, you know, since two thousand four, since we first put in that notice. We've had to reboot it a few times.

• 1:05:38Steven Rinella?

  So are they just, do they just kind of slow walk you like?

• 1:05:40Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:05:41Steven Rinella?

  They stall it?

• 1:05:43Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:05:45Steven Rinella?

  But I mean, for years.

• 1:05:46Speaker 07

  For years. Yeah, there's um. You know, you're you're looking at, you know, a lot of the um both scientific and the biological

• 1:05:56Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:56Speaker 07

  um information, you know, with with the whale population and

• 1:06:02Speaker 07

  and so in the uh um you know, in that process, the government, you know, like anybody can sue the federal government, right?

• 1:06:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:11Speaker 07

  So that's their real concern. It's like they don't want to get sued and lose. So they're so the slow walking is so that they're thorough on their end.

• 1:06:21Steven Rinella?

  No, I understand.

• 1:06:21Speaker 07

  And and.

• 1:06:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's that's an area.

• 1:06:24Speaker 07

  And it can withstand a challenge in court.

• 1:06:27Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 1:06:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, so that's

• 1:06:28Steven Rinella?

  So that's

• 1:06:29Speaker 07

  that's part of the part of why it's been delayed so long. We we think it's unreasonable.

• 1:06:34Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:34Speaker 07

  Um, you know, and now uh we went uh we were finally issued a waiver um in two thousand eighteen, I believe. Is that the right year?

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  Twenty twenty four, the waiver for the June.

• 1:06:47Speaker 07

  The waiver or we applied for the waiver in eighteen, maybe it was.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  We had the

• 1:06:54Speaker 07

  What was that?

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  We had the twenty four hundred page environmental impact statement.

• 1:06:57Speaker 07

  That's what came out. Yeah, so, yeah. Anyway, that

• 1:07:00Steven Rinella?

  You guys generated a twenty four hundred page environmental impact statement?

• 1:07:04Speaker 07

  No.

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  NOAA.

• 1:07:05Speaker 07

  NOAA did.

• 1:07:05Steven Rinella?

  NOAA did.

• 1:07:06Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:07:06Steven Rinella?

  An environmental impact statement about what would happen if you got a whale?

• 1:07:12Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:07:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  So once that was done, then we would be able to apply for the waiver, granted the waiver, and then goes to the permit system.

• 1:07:22Speaker 07

  Oh, that

• 1:07:22Steven Rinella?

  Here's where I'm a little bit, here's where I'm a little bit confused. But go ahead, but I'll tell you what's confusing me.

• 1:07:26Speaker 07

  Okay, so there's a ALJ administrative law judge hearing on on this and and you know, we had to basically go through this court process, bring in tell the government how we're going to do the hunt, how we're going to manage it.

• 1:07:43Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:43Speaker 07

  And bring in our cultural experts and all those, you know, Daniel testified in that. And and the judge recommended that we be granted the waiver.

• 1:07:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:07:54Speaker 07

  That's what I was I was trying to get at earlier. And in that timeline, and then, you know, we're finally granted that waiver in in two thousand twenty four. And then in March of two thousand twenty five, we applied for a permit, you know, we're we're granted the waiver. Now you got to get a permit.

• 1:08:14Steven Rinella?

  For for how many whales?

• 1:08:15Speaker 07

  So it's for um

• 1:08:19Speaker 07

  twenty, up to twenty five whales over a ten year period.

• 1:08:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:08:23Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Steven Rinella?

  So, okay, that's what I was confused about.

• 1:08:25Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:08:26Steven Rinella?

  Is I was like, like, if you look at just the pop population demographics of whales, which I don't understand well, but I gather these are long lived low fecundity creatures, but there are thousands of them. So in my mind, I'm like, how could any serious person

• 1:08:44Steven Rinella?

  argue that harvesting a whale a year

• 1:08:50Steven Rinella?

  is gonna have a population level impact?

• 1:08:53Speaker 07

  No.

• 1:08:54Steven Rinella?

  When you factor in that you have this mortality happening from cruise ships, you have mortality happening from entanglements, you have mortality happening from strandings. And then someone would say, but if you get one, that's gonna

• 1:09:09Steven Rinella?

  that's gonna tank the gray whale population.

• 1:09:12Speaker 07

  Now, we agree with you one hundred percent.

• 1:09:15Steven Rinella?

  That's what seems like a hard, that seems like such a weird, it's like they're they're dying all over the place. We're talking about, oh, whale, but I guess if you're looking at two point five whales a year. If you had said one whale a year, would it have been a different conversation or would it have been all the same BS?

• 1:09:32Speaker 07

  It probably would have been all the same BS.

• 1:09:33Steven Rinella?

  It wouldn't have changed anything.

• 1:09:34Speaker 07

  I don't think it would have changed anything, you know, I think I think our our opponents, our adversaries on this, you know.

• 1:09:40Steven Rinella?

  They're absolutists.

• 1:09:41Speaker 07

  They're absolutists and and so

• 1:09:42Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 1:09:43Speaker 07

  We're um the way we we propose to to do the hunt is um you know, the most we could, most whales we could take in any any year under this waiver is two.

• 1:09:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:09:57Speaker 07

  You know, because you can't take a half a whale, right?

• 1:09:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:59Speaker 07

  So and it's only one per hunt season. So there there's the hunt season that we're applying for is a um summer fall hunt. Starts July first, goes through October thirty first.

• 1:10:14Steven Rinella?

  So you got like an opening day and everything?

• 1:10:15Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:10:17Steven Rinella?

  You guys, you guys like white people, you got like opening days?

• 1:10:21Speaker 07

  And and if uh you know, if we harvest a whale

• 1:10:26Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:10:26Speaker 07

  then that's done, that permit for that period is done.

• 1:10:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:30Speaker 07

  And we have to wait um for, we can't go the very next year in that hunt period. We got to wait till the following year.

• 1:10:40Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:10:40Speaker 07

  To to to go. We we can also apply for a permit for a separate hunt season, which is a winter, spring, goes from December to through May.

• 1:10:50Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 1:10:51Speaker 07

  And and we could harvest a whale during that as well. But once we harvest that whale, then that that hunt period's done.

• 1:11:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:00Speaker 07

  So there's, we wouldn't get more than two a year under under how it's structured right now. And right now, we're not proposing to go in that uh in that winter, spring hunt, you know, it's it's more dangerous. The whales are farther offshore. Um, so it's it's more ideal to go in the summer, summer fall hunt period.

• 1:11:20Steven Rinella?

  What kind of ground are these gray whales covering? Like, like, what's their northern range and southern range? Because when they come by you, they're coming through, right?

• 1:11:29Speaker 07

  Right, yeah, they're they're coming through the eastern North Pacifics that we're targeting.

• 1:11:32Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:11:33Speaker 07

  Um, you know, they're they go from Baja California to the Sakhaline Islands, uh, you know, way up.

• 1:11:38Steven Rinella?

  I don't know Sakhaline.

• 1:11:39Speaker 07

  Uh, it's way up in the, you know, the Bering Strait, Russia.

• 1:11:42Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:11:43Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah, it's

• 1:11:45Steven Rinella?

  Got you.

• 1:11:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's her, that's her feeding range.

• 1:11:48Steven Rinella?

  So these seasons is you're, it's um it's it's different swings of a migration.

• 1:11:56Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:11:56Steven Rinella?

  Like, one, I'm just assuming, like, one is that they're sort of generally moving south and one they're generally moving north?

• 1:12:04Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 1:12:05Steven Rinella?

  I got you. And that summer season, they're generally moving north?

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  Right now, they're moving south to go down to the Baja to have their calves and, you know, breeding.

• 1:12:14Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  Then they make

• 1:12:15Steven Rinella?

  Now they are.

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so right now they're going past us, they're feeding and, you know, slowly making their way down there. And they have their calves. And then the the male whales start making it up and the females make it up after them with their calves slowly.

• 1:12:31Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Oh, when when you, um, if you imagine the ideal whale, is it a male or female?

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  Male.

• 1:12:37Steven Rinella?

  Can you tell?

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  There is a way. Um, you wanna, you wanna explain how you you tell how a female is and a male?

• 1:12:47Steven Rinella?

  Go ahead.

• 1:12:48Speaker 02

  So um you have to stick your arm in them and if it goes a certain direction, that's a male or a female.

• 1:12:57Steven Rinella?

  But, yeah, but that's dead checking them.

• 1:12:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00Steven Rinella?

  That's, you can't live check them.

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  It's a little harder.

• 1:13:02Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay. So there's not like, it wouldn't be that, um.

• 1:13:06Speaker 02

  We have an observer that, like a specialist, um, a marine specialist that identifies if it's a male or a female for us.

• 1:13:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  Before we strike it, because we can't strike a female, we have to go after males.

• 1:13:19Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay, that's okay.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:21Steven Rinella?

  So it would be out of the question to kill a female with a calf?

• 1:13:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26Steven Rinella?

  That's correct. That's not gonna happen.

• 1:13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not gonna happen.

• 1:13:28Steven Rinella?

  Got it. And you're targeting males?

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

  And whether we get get it or not, those same whales.

• 1:13:37Steven Rinella?

  We have the the shared quota, basically. So if we don't get them, it goes into their quota, those two whales that we're not getting for that tribe. Okay. Yeah. Cuck, cuck, truh? Where, where are they located?

• 1:13:51Speaker 07

  Chakotkin, the Chakotkins, they're Russians.

• 1:13:55Steven Rinella?

  Hold on, your quota goes to the Russians?

• 1:13:57Speaker 07

  Okay, yeah, there's.

• 1:13:59Steven Rinella?

  Seriously?

• 1:14:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, during the, uh, and when I was explaining, we, we first agreed to be part of this international process.

• 1:14:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:08Speaker 07

  Federal government wanted us to do that. We said, okay. And so we went and did it.

• 1:14:14Speaker 07

  There's a, there's a whaling quota, you know, given globally to whaling, whaling nations and that right through this process. Well,

• 1:14:24Speaker 07

  there's an already established quota for, for these gray whales, the eastern North Pacific's that was mainly being taken by the Chakotkins.

• 1:14:30Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:14:31Speaker 07

  And up in Russia. And so when we first started, um, working to get our international quota, what we were asking for, the Chakotkins, um, you know, we were able to build relationships with them and they, they supported us and, and they were willing to give up part of their quota. So that we.

• 1:14:50Steven Rinella?

  Was that right?

• 1:14:51Speaker 07

  So that we can continue our whaling. So it's an agreement that.

• 1:14:54Steven Rinella?

  So did you have to send some ambassadors up to meet with these guys?

• 1:14:58Speaker 07

  Yes, yes.

• 1:14:59Steven Rinella?

  And, and talk this out?

• 1:15:01Speaker 07

  And, and talk it out and, and, uh, spend time with them during their whaling activities and.

• 1:15:05Steven Rinella?

  Huh?

• 1:15:06Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:15:07Steven Rinella?

  And you guys were generally well received by them?

• 1:15:09Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:15:14Steven Rinella?

  Do they have the same arguments with the Russian government? Not, all right, okay. Do they have the same level in negotiating with the Russian? Like, what are their treaties like?

• 1:15:22Speaker 07

  I'm, I'm unsure. Yeah.

• 1:15:24Steven Rinella?

  I, I want, I wonder if they have all the layers of government or if they just do their own thing or what that's like dealing with the Russian government?

• 1:15:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, but I, I haven't been there myself. Um, it's pretty remote, more remote than we are. So, so I imagine they don't have to deal with them quite as much.

• 1:15:40Steven Rinella?

  Not as much. Yeah, yeah. Um,

• 1:15:45Steven Rinella?

  we keep getting into the timeline, leaving the timeline, but we're like, what are you waiting on right now? You're not going to whale this summer, or you might?

• 1:15:54Speaker 07

  Well, it's, it's still possible.

• 1:15:56Steven Rinella?

  This summer?

• 1:15:57Speaker 07

  It's still possible. Yeah, it's still possible. You know, we're, we're at the end of, coming up on the end of July, you know, what there's, the whales are still present, you know, that's, that's kind of the factor, you know, the whale's got to be there, but when, when they decide to leave, you know, then, then they're gone.

• 1:16:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:12Speaker 07

  Um, but we're, we're waiting on the Secretary of Commerce to, um, to sign the permit.

• 1:16:20Steven Rinella?

  You're waiting on Howard Lutnick?

• 1:16:22Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 1:16:23Steven Rinella?

  To sign the permit?

• 1:16:24Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:16:26Steven Rinella?

  That's so, really? He's got to sign it?

• 1:16:28Speaker 07

  He does, or he's got to delegate someone to sign it.

• 1:16:32Steven Rinella?

  And what, what, what's his, what's his thinking?

• 1:16:35Speaker 07

  We don't know. We haven't been able to talk to him directly on this issue. We've requested it. We've requested government to government consultation on this, which, you know, normally those are honored by the federal government. Um.

• 1:16:48Steven Rinella?

  But these guys don't want to hear you out?

• 1:16:50Speaker 07

  Not.

• 1:16:51Steven Rinella?

  Or is it too early to say?

• 1:16:51Speaker 07

  Not Howard himself yet, um, but his, uh.

• 1:16:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, his deputies.

• 1:16:55Speaker 07

  His, his deputies, we've talked with them. They're super supportive. They've, they've been great.

• 1:16:59Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I got you. All right. So there's no resistance there?

• 1:17:02Speaker 07

  No, we don't. And, and so it's, it's a little puzzling for us, frustrating for sure, but.

• 1:17:06Steven Rinella?

  Like, you mean, like, they're receptive, they're, they're receptive, they're not dismissive, but then there's not the signature yet?

• 1:17:12Speaker 07

  Right, right. And I would say it's even more than receptive. I'd say they're supportive.

• 1:17:17Steven Rinella?

  Supportive?

• 1:17:18Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:17:19Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So let's say, I mean, is it, is there a possibility that tomorrow, someone emails you over, uh, like a, like, how does it happen? Like, one day someone signs it and then there it is?

• 1:17:35Speaker 07

  Yes. So, so we have a, a pending permit.

• 1:17:39Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:17:40Speaker 07

  Application. I've, I've actually signed my part of it already for 2025 and 2027.

• 1:17:49Steven Rinella?

  Was it a docu-sign?

• 1:17:50Speaker 07

  No.

• 1:17:51Steven Rinella?

  Was it digital?

• 1:17:51Speaker 07

  No, it wasn't.

• 1:17:52Steven Rinella?

  A paper document?

• 1:17:53Speaker 07

  It was a paper document, yeah. And, and we, we've, well, our understanding last year was that we were, we were both going to sign this.

• 1:18:05Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:18:06Speaker 07

  And it would be effective August 1st of 2025.

• 1:18:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:18:10Speaker 07

  Uh, and we're preparing for that moment. We're working with, uh, with our media teams and, you know, going to be prepared for any, whether it's pushback or, you know, people will want to tell the story, right? You know, it's, it's going to get some coverage. And, yeah, so we were, I mean, we were just weeks away, two weeks away from what we thought, you know, being issued our first permit.

• 1:18:36Steven Rinella?

  Last year?

• 1:18:37Speaker 07

  Last year. And, and then nothing happened. And, and we, yeah, it, it just went radio silence.

• 1:18:46Steven Rinella?

  And that's under the Trump administration?

• 1:18:49Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's what's real puzzling about. I mean, you know, these, these types of things, something, you know,

• 1:18:56Speaker 07

  you know, hunting and outdoor type stuff and, you know, those things, uh, seem right up this administration's alley, right? You know, they seem to be supportive.

• 1:19:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like stripping regulations.

• 1:19:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, less regulation, those sort of things. So, yeah, we, we're not sure what, what's going on, but.

• 1:19:12Steven Rinella?

  This, you, you might want to not even answer this and I would probably, I wouldn't, but I'll ask anyway.

• 1:19:19Steven Rinella?

  Just because of what you just said, is it possible to say something like this? Is it possible to say that, that, that, who's better friends to the Mekka, like generally, Republicans or Democrats? Or is that not a possible, you can't answer it?

• 1:19:32Speaker 07

  No, I've, I've answered that question, uh, a number of times and, and, uh, I think both of them have their, they have their points of.

• 1:19:41Steven Rinella?

  That's what I think.

• 1:19:42Speaker 07

  They have their points of, of where the friendship ends or starts, right? Um, you know, in, in general, you know, and this is a pure generality is that, you know, Democrats will support our treaty right up into the point it, it starts conflicting with, um, labor and jobs.

• 1:20:02Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:20:04Speaker 07

  You know, Republicans, they'll support our treaty right up into the point it starts affecting industry.

• 1:20:09Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:20:11Steven Rinella?

  So like the age, like the age old conflicts, you just like find your own Indian way into the age old conflicts.

• 1:20:18Speaker 07

  But, but here's the thing.

• 1:20:19Steven Rinella?

  Between Democrats and Republicans, yeah.

• 1:20:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, here's the thing is that, that, uh, you know, our treaty rights should be nonpartisan.

• 1:20:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, if it was a well-written treaty, you'd think that it would be.

• 1:20:31Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:20:31Steven Rinella?

  That it would be debatable.

• 1:20:33Speaker 07

  So.

• 1:20:34Steven Rinella?

  But I mean, as you know, I mean, documents don't always anticipate every development.

• 1:20:40Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:20:41Steven Rinella?

  But what's funny about, not what's funny, what's interesting about treaty, like, we look at the US Constitution, right? So the founding fathers didn't come in and be like, they didn't make a big passage about AI, right? So then you got to get down the road and you, and you got to say, well, how would they have looked at this issue? Based on what we know about how they looked at other issues, how might they look at like an AI issue? Okay? But, but what, what's, and, and you know it way better than me, but if you look at tribal treaties,

• 1:21:08Steven Rinella?

  it, it literally contemplates hunting, fishing, landmarks, things that, that they're really clear about.

• 1:21:19Speaker 07

  I agree, yes.

• 1:21:20Steven Rinella?

  I mean, it's like, you can't get any more clear. Like, you guys are cool to go hunting and fishing here, right? So it's not like, you're not contemplating AI, you're contemplating like a very concrete, specific activity. So that people find so many things to debate about it is, you know, I understand the complexities, but it's, it's just, it, it's different because it's not abstract. It's like your fa, your, your, your fathers argued this out.

• 1:21:47Speaker 07

  They did, yeah.

• 1:21:48Steven Rinella?

  And brought up like, hey, we need, we eat, this is what we eat, we need to be able to go get our food. Here's the deal, you know? And now you're in this situation where you're like arguing about it, which I understand is complicated, especially something like whales.

• 1:22:03Speaker 07

  Well, we're not even arguing right now.

• 1:22:05Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:22:05Speaker 07

  We're just waiting.

• 1:22:07Steven Rinella?

  Wait.

• 1:22:07Speaker 07

  Just waiting.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  911, what's your emergency?

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  Please help us, they're everywhere. We think they're murder warnings.

• 1:22:18Speaker 05

  911 Nashville returns. It's a homicide detective down here.

• 1:22:22Speaker 03

  Three bodies on the ground.

• 1:22:24Speaker 05

  With emergencies of biblical proportions.

• 1:22:26Speaker 03

  Hell, since swarms upon you and upon your people. That's one of the plagues of the Bible. And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville.

• 1:22:33Speaker 05

  Brian Philippi joins 911 Nashville. All new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu. Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat with Flex. Draws transparent pricing and control over repayment get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by ondeck or Celtic Bank. Ondeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. Breathe in and reset with Lincoln rejuvenate. An available multi sensory feature in the 2027 Lincoln Navigator SUV.

• 1:23:18Speaker 05

  Experience the luxurious massage visuals and sense to help you relax in the driver's seat. It's your time for a reset. Visit Lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park. When the vehicle is off or if any doors open, do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. Lincoln and Navigator trademarks of Ford or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

• 1:23:41Steven Rinella?

  If if you all of a sudden get the permit, you also get the signature. Do you got a team? You know, you don't call it. Do you got a crew? Is there a crew ready to roll? They got the gear straight? They got the plan put together?

• 1:23:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, we have. I mean, we got some additional training that will have to be done. You know, because, you know, to be able to go tomorrow, you know, that, you know, if we get the permit signed tomorrow, there isn't a team that's going to launch tomorrow.

• 1:24:09Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:24:09Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:24:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. How do you get to be?

• 1:24:13Steven Rinella?

  Who selects the crew?

• 1:24:15Speaker 07

  Our whaling commission.

• 1:24:16Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so you can't just freelance it.

• 1:24:18Speaker 07

  No.

• 1:24:19Steven Rinella?

  Two dudes can't just be like, hell, I'm going like that wouldn't fly.

• 1:24:23Speaker 07

  No, it doesn't. Yeah, no.

• 1:24:25Steven Rinella?

  It has the it goes through the tribe, the whaling commission.

• 1:24:29Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:24:30Steven Rinella?

  Got it. And how do you apply to be like, if you want to be on crew, what do you got to do?

• 1:24:37Steven Rinella?

  Who's on the crew?

• 1:24:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the way the the whaling commission handles that kind of stuff is essentially the, you know, you're interested in being a captain.

• 1:24:48Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:24:49Speaker 02

  You're responsible for the crew. So the captain is the one who will apply for the permit. And the council, the tribal council's ultimate authority that signs the permit for the the crew. So if you're going to be a captain, you, you know, you gather your crew, you do everything you need to do. Say, you know, like you're doing for a hunt for whatever. You're going to pick your guys and this is what we're going to do. This is the plan, train up, whatever. But the captains, you know, selects his crew, make sure they they got everything going. And he's going to be the one to take the crew out and to actually do the do the hunt.

• 1:25:24Steven Rinella?

  So that captain goes to the commission?

• 1:25:28Steven Rinella?

  And gets the okay. What if you had eight captains?

• 1:25:32Speaker 02

  Well, so the the commission will select the captains, the captains will select their crew.

• 1:25:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:25:37Speaker 02

  And the the commission will make a recommendation to the council of of, you know, who should gather the permit based on who's, you know, who's ready there. There might be one captain that's ready. There might be eight. And we've even talked about doing things like, you know, having multiple crews and and, you know, not, your first hunt's not always successful. Can be, but it's not always. And so we've talked about having different crews hunting at different times.

• 1:26:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:04Speaker 02

  That requires a a couple of different technicalities. You know, tribal hunt observers, hunting both communication to make sure you're not doubling up. But there's a lot of of different ways that we've discussed internally on how to handle and on how to handle, you know, multiple crews, multiple captains and.

• 1:26:24Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:26:25Speaker 02

  And even having the positions of the whalers just kind of trained up in multiple positions so that, you know, people get sick or people get hurt or you can swap around and you can move and so.

• 1:26:37Steven Rinella?

  What would be the attributes of a captain? He's coming out of what? Is he? Is he? Is he probably a commercial fisherman? Is he probably a fisherman?

• 1:26:47Speaker 02

  I mean, I'll hand that one over to Daniel, but I I imagine he's got to be well versed in the sea and.

• 1:26:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah, well versed in the sea, knowing the history, actually knowing the whales. Okay. Personally, spending time, you know, on the water, you know, observing whales. Knowing positions in the canoe, how to make the harpoons, paddles, all that. Okay. All those things, so. Got it. So they got to be invested in it. That'd be invested in it, yes. And have a reasonable claim to why they should be doing it. Yes, for sure. Got it. So if someone comes up with like a crackpot idea, they're going to get we they're going to get weeded out. Get weeded out for sure. Yeah. How how big is the commission?

• 1:27:28Speaker 07

  Twenty.

• 1:27:28Speaker 02

  About 24.

• 1:27:29Steven Rinella?

  Oh, no kidding. Are they all tribal?

• 1:27:31Speaker 02

  They're all either heads or descendants of like traditional heads of families. And so that's that's what I wanted to get into a little bit. It's like traditionally you're brought up as a whaler, captain or leader because it's central to the, like you said, the society of the tribe. And so it's like, it's not, hey, we're going to go shoot an elk or go grab our permit. But like, it's a lifestyle.

• 1:27:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:27:53Speaker 02

  Right? The the training, the mindset, even just who you are as a person. If you're going to be a captain, you're you're already set apart.

• 1:28:00Steven Rinella?

  I understand.

• 1:28:00Speaker 02

  And you're you're brought up in a way like you're a leader, you're, you know, take care of your family. You know, like you said, spent time in the ocean, spent time in the sea. You know whales, breathing patterns, fluke, fluke prints, like you kind of know.

• 1:28:13Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  You know, you're going to be.

• 1:28:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but they've been prepared for this their whole life. Is there a clan system with the Makah? Do you got? Are you guys from different clans?

• 1:28:25Speaker 02

  So the tribe has five traditional villages.

• 1:28:27Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:28:28Speaker 02

  And the five traditional villages are kind of what make up the reservation now. So we have Ozette, we have Suyas, we have Waach, Dia and Bahida. So those are the five villages that kind of make up the tribe now. But as far as clans go, everybody kind of, you know where you come from, you know, what family you come from, what village you come from.

• 1:28:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:28:51Speaker 02

  And you kind of.

• 1:28:51Steven Rinella?

  So people might have sort of, it's like a step down from Makah would be that you'd associate by village.

• 1:28:57Speaker 02

  And family, village and family.

• 1:28:59Steven Rinella?

  Village and family.

• 1:29:00Speaker 02

  You kind of tie your family, you know where your village. Everybody knows who comes from what village for the most part. And that's just part of how the oral history has continued to transpire is everybody understands whose family, who comes from who, and that kind of gets into our our potlatch system of.

• 1:29:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And all and in the whaling commission, the different, there'd be representation from all the villages.

• 1:29:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, and multiple, multiple families from.

• 1:29:26Steven Rinella?

  Multiple people from all villages and they come together.

• 1:29:29Speaker 07

  It's a heads of it's a heads of family type structure.

• 1:29:32Steven Rinella?

  Heads of family?

• 1:29:32Speaker 07

  Heads of family rather than clan. It's we, that's how we associate. Each village would have

• 1:29:40Speaker 07

  so many heads of family that would be part of that village's governance of of their village. And and, you know, there are different number of seats per village and that was up to the village to decide how many.

• 1:29:53Steven Rinella?

  I got it.

• 1:29:54Speaker 07

  How many seats they wanted Phil to as heads of family.

• 1:29:57Steven Rinella?

  On these whaling decisions and captain selection and and when to when to push on it and try to do it and when or not. Is it, um, is it contentious or do you guys usually hit a consensus?

• 1:30:13Speaker 07

  We don't disagree on anything, Steve.

• 1:30:14Steven Rinella?

  No, never.

• 1:30:16Speaker 07

  No, it's, it it can get contentious.

• 1:30:19Steven Rinella?

  There can be, yeah.

• 1:30:20Speaker 07

  Certainly.

• 1:30:21Steven Rinella?

  Does it? Do you settle it? Do you settle by vote or do you hash it out until there's a consensus?

• 1:30:29Speaker 07

  Well, I think there's attempt to reach consensus, but you know, at the end there is a voting mechanism.

• 1:30:35Steven Rinella?

  Okay, yeah. So just any any sort of issue would be eventually might be resolved by a vote?

• 1:30:40Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:30:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I got you.

• 1:30:44Steven Rinella?

  What will happen? Let's say in two years, so you'd got this relationship with the Commerce Department under Howard Lutnick right now.

• 1:30:53Steven Rinella?

  Let's say in two years, it's a new administration. At that point, are you like, oh, my God, now we got to start all the way over again? Or is it? Is there a chance that it would be smooth?

• 1:31:05Speaker 07

  Well, it there definitely be the concern that we got to reboot the waiver process.

• 1:31:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:13Speaker 07

  You know, that that would, you know, that would be concerning, but or the permitting process, sorry. You know, we've already been granted the waiver.

• 1:31:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:21Speaker 07

  You know, that can't be walked back, but, you know, we need a permit.

• 1:31:27Speaker 07

  So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know what administration change would do. We've been through a lot of them.

• 1:31:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:35Steven Rinella?

  Who was president when Stevens was the negotiating all those treaties?

• 1:31:39Speaker 07

  Oh, Buchanan, was it?

• 1:31:41Steven Rinella?

  You've been through a few administrations.

• 1:31:45Steven Rinella?

  Hey, here's what here's what I wanted to ask. Oh, sorry, Lupe.

• 1:31:52Steven Rinella?

  We've been having a lot of conversations, you know, we eat a lot of fish and game. And some of the guys work here fish a lot. And we've been having all these conversations about like PFAS chemicals and fish, health warnings and fish. If you had to rate, like, you know, in our in our world, it would be that,

• 1:32:15Steven Rinella?

  you know, like tuna, that's a questionable fish for heavy metals contamination. Our own state has now advisories about PFAS chemicals and and freshwater fish here. Is a

• 1:32:36Steven Rinella?

  how how much you see in this stuff and whale and whale fat? Because I mean, they're like a mega accumulator, you know, just for listeners to understand what I mean is is picture that.

• 1:32:49Steven Rinella?

  Picture that there's a fish that a small fish that eats plankton. He's not accumulating a bunch of heavy metals. But let's say there's a fish that eats fish that eats fish. So every fish he eats, he's absorbing all the things that not just that they ate, but that what they ate ate, right? And you get to be where you have these certain fish that are loaded because they're accumulated, they're just eating fish. They ate fish. So as a whale, um,

• 1:33:21Steven Rinella?

  is a whale like a bio accumulator of environmental toxins? There, there's not much data on it. I mean, what I.

• 1:33:32Speaker 02

  What I have found was they they have done some studies on some whales that whether they were. You know, ship strikes or beach themselves. And I believe they detected, you know, levels in the blubber. They didn't find it. I think there was like. Maybe twenty whales, but a lot of them were inconclusive and they they didn't find any in the liver, it sounded like. And then like the red meat, there wasn't as much, but I mean. You know, you could see the tribes that have have been eating whale for all these years and, you know, it is medicine. And I mean. The even the government is getting back to like food is medicine, you know.

• 1:34:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:14Speaker 02

  Turn the triangle upside down. Now red meat's at the top. And um. You know, it it normalizes glucose metabolism, you know, whale meat. It's been shown to do that. You can see that in the. And the tribes that are still eating it, you know, on a daily basis and it's it's their main fat source, you know. And uh, you can see in those where the health related diseases are not as. Large as, you know, say like a coastal tribe or like a lot of the. The tribes, you know, that that got hit with like, you know, the commodities, you remember, you know.

• 1:34:50Steven Rinella?

  No, no, no.

• 1:34:51Speaker 02

  So commodities, you know, was a.

• 1:34:53Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, the food commodity.

• 1:34:56Speaker 02

  Western, like western foods, you know, introduced into our diet. Once we laid down our harpoons, you know, twelve years before anybody else started to. You know, knowing we were gonna get back to it, but still, you know, traditionally eating all of our our foods and. Which even there's, we had elders that were, you know, they were probably around when we. Had our last couple hunts in the twenties and they lived to be in their hundreds.

• 1:35:24Steven Rinella?

  Oh. They were enjoying good, long lives. On that diet.

• 1:35:29Speaker 02

  He could speak more on that as well, but you know, the uh.

• 1:35:34Speaker 02

  I think it's like with the the gray whale on the few of the villages up there. Cause it, they get about, I think they're, they have sixteen thousand people that they get whale distributed to and they get about. I think it's a hundred and seven pounds of of gray whale meat.

• 1:35:56Speaker 02

  Twenty-six percent of them, I think it was, they said it was their main food, like their main fatty food.

• 1:36:01Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that right?

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, and so even us reintroducing.

• 1:36:06Steven Rinella?

  Wow, there's like people whose main, like that's their main.

• 1:36:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:09Steven Rinella?

  A a main meat would be whale meat.

• 1:36:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, and even for us, you know, introducing it back into our diet, which been missing since the twenties. Since we stopped and you can, you can see the, you know, diabetes and whatever else, you know, the health related diseases. They're pretty rampant and, you know, and then even with those. You know, those microplastics and everything in the food that.

• 1:36:37Speaker 02

  I believe it is something that will need to be studied more once, you know, we're. Where if we're whaling on a regular basis, I'm sure it's something we're gonna be able to study. See if it, if it is higher because they are eating fish, eating fish, eating fish.

• 1:36:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but then you got the question too of of like.

• 1:36:56Steven Rinella?

  Relative to like, let's say they do have some chemical contamination. It's like relative to what? Then you gotta ask yourself, I don't know, is the other stuff that everybody's eating so great? There's, you know, there's a lot of focus on wild fish. You know, I'm like, oh, are they checking everything? Like, have you gone to the grocery store and checked all that stuff? Like, is wild fish really worse than all the junk that's in the grocery store?

• 1:37:18Speaker 02

  It's definitely better than farm fish.

• 1:37:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's like it winds up being like this totally relative thing, but there's all this focus on contaminations and fish. I'm like, I'd have to see the data on all the junk that normal people.

• 1:37:28Speaker 03

  Well, now it's getting into lab grown. Lab grown meat. I don't think.

• 1:37:33Steven Rinella?

  No one's making lab grown whale meat.

• 1:37:34Speaker 03

  Don't quote me. I don't think our our test who did on the mercury for gray whales are, I don't think it was much.

• 1:37:43Steven Rinella?

  That'd be interesting if they're kind of low. Yeah, cause one thing they're not doing is they're not eating, um, they're not eating big fish.

• 1:37:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:37:50Steven Rinella?

  Like tuna, big tuna, small tuna. Do you mean they're they're eating by like tuna, eating bio accumulators and a lot of times. The a tuna's eating a fish that's eating a fish that eats fish. So it's just different, but you can picture with a whale eating a lot of short-lived plankton feeders, that maybe they don't get loaded up.

• 1:38:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, and if you eat like, say you eat whale meat and blubber. And then cut out all the processed stuff, is the whale meat with chemicals and toxins better than a diet of processed food?

• 1:38:27Steven Rinella?

  With chemicals.

• 1:38:27Speaker 03

  With chemicals and toxins.

• 1:38:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Do you got, let me ask you a question. This is just on on the behalf of non non-natives. You know, a thing we always argue about, man, is whether it's okay to call you guys Indians or not. Give me your take on this. Like, like, like, just for the listeners sake.

• 1:38:49Steven Rinella?

  Like a dude, like here's a dude like me, a dude like me and I say. You guys are Indians. Like, just for people out there who want to do the right thing, but they get confused. What does that mean to you?

• 1:39:00Speaker 07

  Steve Saquiditch.

• 1:39:02Steven Rinella?

  Quidic joke.

• 1:39:06Steven Rinella?

  So is it offensive or not offensive?

• 1:39:09Speaker 07

  We're we're not too uptight about that. Most, most of our people, you know, it's for us, we say, yeah, you can call us Indians. Our treaty, it's the Indians of Cape Lattery and they're.

• 1:39:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but you might not like that treaty.

• 1:39:24Steven Rinella?

  It's like an honest thing. There's not a month goes by, I'm not, I'm not kidding you. There's not a month goes by. That I don't have a conversation with someone. About.

• 1:39:37Steven Rinella?

  The appropriateness.

• 1:39:39Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 1:39:39Steven Rinella?

  Of. Native, like Native American, First Nations, Native Alaskan, you know, I mean, like, like.

• 1:39:48Steven Rinella?

  The appropriateness of it. And maybe it's offensive that I'm even asking, but I'm gonna ask anyway, cause there's people, there's like people that wanna do, that there's people that wanna be respectful. But there's a lot of mixed. Signals and feelings. I remember asking, you heard, I said Chupac Eskimo. I asked the Chupac Eskimo, I said, man, you know, a lot of people like in our culture. A lot of people say that they shouldn't say that. And he goes, if I'm not an Eskimo, I don't know what I am. Cause he goes, I'm a Chupac Eskimo. I don't know what they told you back home, but that's what I am.

• 1:40:19Speaker 07

  No, and that, you know, that's how we are. Any English word is the wrong word.

• 1:40:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:24Speaker 07

  So I, that's, that's my take on it. It's like, you know, you.

• 1:40:29Speaker 07

  You tried to say quiditch, that's what we call ourselves.

• 1:40:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:32Speaker 07

  You know, but. Any English word is the wrong word, but I don't stress about.

• 1:40:39Steven Rinella?

  But there's some you learn to live with and learn learn not to live with.

• 1:40:44Speaker 07

  It's more in them. You know, to me, it's it's more, how are you saying it? Right? You know, it's how are you saying it? How are you using it? How are you saying it?

• 1:40:52Steven Rinella?

  That's, that's what I would imagine. That's what I, that's how I kind of have imagined it.

• 1:40:56Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:40:57Steven Rinella?

  Is is is in that way, but I, but maybe am I, am I right to say that the best thing? I I can't say your word, but if I just said, he's Makah.

• 1:41:09Speaker 07

  That's fine.

• 1:41:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you're not like, well, I'm not, that's what someone else called me. That's that's respect. That that shows respect if I say that. It doesn't show a lack of respect.

• 1:41:21Speaker 07

  Correct. It doesn't show a lack of respect.

• 1:41:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, if and if I say Native American, that's cool.

• 1:41:27Speaker 07

  That's cool too.

• 1:41:28Steven Rinella?

  Alright, alright.

• 1:41:30Speaker 02

  You know, like a good example, the the Washington Redskins.

• 1:41:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:34Speaker 02

  It wasn't the, wasn't the family of the chief of the head that they used on their helmet for that Redskins that got rid of it. It was, yeah. Those are their groups.

• 1:41:43Steven Rinella?

  What do you mean?

• 1:41:44Speaker 02

  Like it wasn't, so that that picture was actually from a chief in that area.

• 1:41:50Steven Rinella?

  They didn't have a problem with.

• 1:41:52Speaker 02

  They didn't, no, yeah.

• 1:41:54Steven Rinella?

  Huh. There's probably a hundred stories like that. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:01Speaker 07

  Our high school mascot is the Red Devils.

• 1:42:04Steven Rinella?

  Your high school mascot? Still now?

• 1:42:07Speaker 07

  Still now, yeah.

• 1:42:08Steven Rinella?

  Do you, do you find that that's a problem?

• 1:42:12Speaker 07

  No.

• 1:42:13Steven Rinella?

  No, that's interesting.

• 1:42:16Steven Rinella?

  But there's gotta be a lot of it. A lot of it's like you said, who, where it's coming from.

• 1:42:21Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:42:21Steven Rinella?

  You know? Who's saying it, where it's coming from?

• 1:42:27Speaker 07

  I would like to see a mascot that

• 1:42:29Steven Rinella?

  The Whalers.

• 1:42:30Speaker 07

  With their own name.

• 1:42:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, with your own name, yeah.

• 1:42:33Speaker 07

  You know, in our language.

• 1:42:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:34Speaker 07

  There's, there's, there's a, there's a tribe near us that, that did that. And, uh, but finding one that's easy to say in, in Kwehtitjat language is, is tough. You know, that so there's a school mascot, Chitwens.

• 1:42:49Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:42:50Speaker 07

  You know, it's a tribal.

• 1:42:52Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:42:52Speaker 07

  Tribal community and you know, that just means bear.

• 1:42:55Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:42:56Speaker 07

  It's like easy to say, anybody can say it and, and it's a great mascot.

• 1:43:00Steven Rinella?

  Can, can, can any of you guys give me a sense of what your language sounds like? Just, I mean, just say something, whatever. I don't know, anything that.

• 1:43:06Speaker 03

  Just that guy.

• 1:43:07Speaker 07

  Ubatuasa, Skwibatos, um, Zawdukshex, uh, Ushabats, um, Sechwaw.

• 1:43:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:43:19Speaker 07

  Here, talk about whaling, the whales.

• 1:43:20Steven Rinella?

  Talking about the whales.

• 1:43:21Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:43:22Steven Rinella?

  I got it.

• 1:43:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, it's kind of a, um, Ukuklaskwa, that's a bless is my name. Iachatswatch, Iachtikswatch.

• 1:43:30Steven Rinella?

  God, it's a good sounding language, dude.

• 1:43:31Speaker 07

  So, yeah.

• 1:43:32Steven Rinella?

  That's a good sounding language, man. I like that.

• 1:43:34Speaker 07

  It's a, yeah, very cool. And then we share our language families in Canada. So, New John, uh, is where we come from. Whaling societies all along the Canadian, uh, west coast, Vancouver Island. So that's where we come from.

• 1:43:46Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So, um, if I, if like you go up, you got like, um,

• 1:43:54Steven Rinella?

  um, the Haida, Simshian, would those have been, would there have been cultural similarities?

• 1:44:01Speaker 07

  Uh.

• 1:44:03Steven Rinella?

  Or just very different?

• 1:44:04Speaker 07

  They're pretty different. Yeah. We, uh, yeah. So we're just, just south of Haida. We had, um, yeah, I guess our northern, northern end, Prince Rupert, we had ties in with them.

• 1:44:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:44:15Speaker 07

  But Haida Guaia kinda.

• 1:44:16Steven Rinella?

  Got, that's a different.

• 1:44:17Speaker 07

  We, uh, different people. Yeah.

• 1:44:19Steven Rinella?

  Different people, yeah. If you guys get this thing signed, this paper signed,

• 1:44:26Steven Rinella?

  would you ever, would you consider photocopying me a photocopy that, sending me that?

• 1:44:32Steven Rinella?

  The permit?

• 1:44:33Speaker 07

  The permit?

• 1:44:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, with like, uh, all like a permit. I just want to frame it, hang it in the studio.

• 1:44:38Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:44:38Steven Rinella?

  Like a photocopy of your signed permit.

• 1:44:40Speaker 07

  I'm sure you, yeah, we.

• 1:44:42Steven Rinella?

  Or like your whale tag.

• 1:44:43Speaker 07

  No.

• 1:44:43Steven Rinella?

  A photocopy of your whale tag.

• 1:44:45Speaker 07

  Yeah. We could do that.

• 1:44:48Steven Rinella?

  Just some kind of, I'd like to have, I'd just like to see a document.

• 1:44:51Speaker 07

  For you.

• 1:44:52Steven Rinella?

  I'd like to see it. No, I want just, I want a photocopy from you guys. I don't want, I don't want to have to go through the, yeah, just a document that's sort of like, is like what, what a whale permit looks like.

• 1:45:03Speaker 07

  All right.

• 1:45:04Steven Rinella?

  I'd like to see a whale permit. Does it, they probably don't have like the little date things you notch out and stuff on them.

• 1:45:09Speaker 07

  No.

• 1:45:10Steven Rinella?

  No, I'd like to see one. Man, I wish you guys, I don't know, man. Not, I don't know. I hope you guys permit comes in.

• 1:45:17Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 1:45:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I hope your permit comes in. It's just like, to me, it feels, to me, it feels like

• 1:45:26Steven Rinella?

  there's not a situation where, there's not a situation one where sort of the general commercial fishing fleet is going to reengage in whaling. And there's going to be like a resource battle about it. You know what I mean? You guys got a claim to it. It's not a thing that's going to get overblown. There's a limited number of, there's a limited number of groups that, that have it be that's part of their tradition. It's such a small harvest. It just seems like it's, it's doing, it seems like it's doing enormous good. It's doing enormous good for your community. And it's not doing any harm to other, it's not doing any harm to other communities.

• 1:46:10Steven Rinella?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 1:46:11Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, we, we agree.

• 1:46:13Steven Rinella?

  It's just like, it's like, it's kind of like a, it's, it's not, you know, you say like a win-win. It's, or win, it's like a win, nothing. Like it doesn't mean, like, it doesn't impact my life. Right? It's, it's not, I just feel like it's not my business. I feel like it's like, if it does you guys good and you want to do it, it's not going to tank the gray whale population if you guys are getting a whale every year.

• 1:46:37Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:46:38Steven Rinella?

  It's like, it's, it's, it's, it just doesn't feel like my business.

• 1:46:43Speaker 03

  Well, I think it's, I think it's important to mention also that it's, it's ceremonial in subsistence. It's not for the tribe's pleasure. It's not for, um, anything other than it's who we are as a people.

• 1:46:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:57Speaker 03

  And getting back to that. And it's not about going out to do it just because we can. It's, it's central to the tribe.

• 1:47:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:06Speaker 03

  So that's the importance. So when it comes to respect, as far as, you know, names and what to call everybody, like as far as respect goes, like I would like to see people understand and get to know who the tribes are. Like you want to know Makah, go learn about Makah.

• 1:47:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:22Speaker 03

  Um, you know, Joshua Reed, um, Dr. Josh Reed has a really great book called The Sea is My Country.

• 1:47:28Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:47:28Speaker 03

  Did extensive research, not only at Makah, but, um, across other tribes too, to get their perspective of Makah.

• 1:47:34Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:47:35Speaker 03

  And it's, it's incredible.

• 1:47:36Steven Rinella?

  Sea is my country?

• 1:47:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so.

• 1:47:38Steven Rinella?

  I haven't even heard of that one, man.

• 1:47:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's incredible. And so we'll, we'll get you a copy, but it's, it's good. So if, I mean.

• 1:47:44Steven Rinella?

  And that, that book, that book resonates with your understanding of stuff.

• 1:47:49Speaker 07

  Yes, yes.

• 1:47:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Cause sometimes you'll read books that come from observers.

• 1:47:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:56Steven Rinella?

  But then the people being observed are like that.

• 1:48:01Steven Rinella?

  Like that's not how we understand it to be.

• 1:48:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, Josh was a great partner. Um, we really came in on behalf of the tribe and, and really put together a really accurate.

• 1:48:11Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:48:12Speaker 03

  You know, was able to tell the story the way it happened.

• 1:48:17Steven Rinella?

  You know, it's pretty funny is there's this, there's this French dude named Jacques Cartier. And he goes over to the, he lands over in, on the Canadian coast, north of Maine, goes up the Saint Lawrence River in the fif, late 1500s. And he meets these, he meets the, these people called the Stataconans. They're like a Saint Lawrence Iro, Iroquois. Iroquois. And, um, he's like, he's got this passage in his journal where he's like, here's what's up with their religion.

• 1:48:48Steven Rinella?

  You read it, you're like, man, I just don't think they would describe their religion that way.

• 1:48:56Speaker 03

  That's funny.

• 1:48:56Steven Rinella?

  He's like, they think this, this, and this. And that's it. Uh, you know, it'd be like if someone, it'd be like, it's as bad as if someone said, hey, I went, uh, you know, I went to America, there's Christians, they think that when God gets mad, he floods their planet. That's about, you know, that's about the main bit.

• 1:49:17Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 1:49:19Steven Rinella?

  He's like, so there's that explained.

• 1:49:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's a, there's a story in, in that book that Josh did.

• 1:49:29Speaker 07

  That really, you know, puts it in perspective, what the ocean meant to us and, and means to us today.

• 1:49:37Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:49:37Speaker 07

  But Captain Mears, when he was, you know, doing his, uh, exploring and, and trading, came into our area and, you know, met with, you know, our head chief, I guess, and, um, to get safe passage through that area.

• 1:49:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:49:54Speaker 07

  Cause he was, he was meeting with other tribes coming down Vancouver Island from the north to the south. And they was like, you're going to be entering Makah waters and, you know, they're, you want to make sure you get their permission. So he

• 1:50:09Speaker 07

  had a meeting and was trying to get, get permission and, you know, trade, trading some things to, you know, there's like an exchange of, exchange of goods there to get that safe passage. Well, he tried to lowball us, right? He didn't want to pay what he paid other tribes.

• 1:50:25Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:50:26Speaker 07

  For safe passage. And, and we knew it. And so we didn't let him pass. And he was looking for furs, you know, that was part of his, he's trying to gather up furs in the Northwest and, and so, you know, our, our, uh,

• 1:50:43Speaker 07

  people stayed out on, you know, in their canoes and basically kept his ship from transiting the Strait of Wanda Fuka, entering the Strait of Wanda Fuka

• 1:50:54Speaker 07

  for several weeks.

• 1:50:55Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:50:56Speaker 07

  And then, and while that was being done, we sent another contingency to go up the Strait of Wanda Fuka and Puget Sound and, and buy up all the furs. And then we let them pass.

• 1:51:09Speaker 07

  And the price, and the price went up when he had to come back and deal with us, right? So.

• 1:51:14Steven Rinella?

  There's another, I don't want, I don't know why Cartier is on my mind, but there's nothing like that with Cartier, this Cartier dude is he kept, he gets to the mouth of Saint Lawrence and he builds this giant cross.

• 1:51:25Steven Rinella?

  And, um, they write like God save the king or something on there and they, they pray there and the local, the local Indians come up and they're like, what's going on with the cross? You know, and he explains to them like, everything you see, everything you see is our land. And he punts on it and he tells them, no, this is just showing people where to cut in. It's a, it's a navigational marker.

• 1:51:53Steven Rinella?

  And that's how he explains it in his journal. He's like, no, no, you got me all wrong.

• 1:51:56Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:51:57Steven Rinella?

  It just shows you where to turn left.

• 1:52:01Steven Rinella?

  Cause he didn't want to get into it with them.

• 1:52:04Steven Rinella?

  Well, man, I appreciate you guys coming out. It means a lot that you'd come out and talk about all this.

• 1:52:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think we, we, uh, we're happy to, you know, get that education out there, you know, we, we, we have a part of our culture and, and, and part of who we are is, we're not able to realize that right now.

• 1:52:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:22Speaker 07

  And, and you know, there's, we want to be whole, you know?

• 1:52:26Steven Rinella?

  Understood.

• 1:52:27Speaker 07

  We want to carry on what we

• 1:52:31Speaker 07

  asked for in our treaty.

• 1:52:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:32Speaker 07

  Yeah. And it's, and it's important.

• 1:52:34Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:52:34Speaker 07

  It changes, whaling changes lives

• 1:52:37Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:52:38Speaker 07

  in our community.

• 1:52:41Speaker 07

  For the better. It makes our community better.

• 1:52:43Steven Rinella?

  I can tell it's true. I can tell it's true. Well, the guys, thank you all for doing this. Appreciate it. And thank you for the gift.

• 1:52:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:52:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:50Speaker 07

  You bet.

• 1:52:51Steven Rinella?

  These guys brought me some sockeye salmon, jarred up. It's beautiful.

• 1:52:55Speaker 07

  Makah gold.

• 1:52:56Steven Rinella?

  Makah gold.

• 1:52:58Speaker 03

  You don't have to share.

• 1:53:01Steven Rinella?

  You know, that's, I'm glad you brought that up because I might've felt conflicted later. I might've wanted to slip and fill a Nate jar here, man.

• 1:53:08Speaker 03

  No, I don't, thanks a lot.

• 1:53:09Steven Rinella?

  Not doing it. All right. Thanks, guys.

• 1:53:12Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 1:53:12Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:53:40Speaker 05

  Now more than ever, basketball teams are embracing advanced analytics. Nothing's more popular right now than coming up with a fancy new stat that helps teams gain an edge on the court. And this season, Bet365 is embracing a fancy concept of its own. Bet $10, get $200. Here's how it works. When new users sign up with Bet365 and place their first $10 bet, they'll get $200 in bonus bets. Fine, maybe it's not that advanced, but an offer this good doesn't have to be. Bet365, where winning is everything. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or 1-800-MYRESET. Must be 21+ and present in a state where Bet365 operates. Please gamble responsibly. Restrictions and TNCs apply. Void where prohibited. Download the app today.

• 1:54:21Speaker 04

  Someone once said, "Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth."

• 1:54:25Speaker 05

  I did. Mike Tyson.

• 1:54:27Speaker 04

  Oh, well, Mike Tyson and Boost are here to tell you that your mobile plan is punching you in the mouth with prices that can knock you out.

• 1:54:34Speaker 05

  That's a low blow.

• 1:54:36Speaker 04

  Totally. But you can do something about it.

• 1:54:38Speaker 05

  You have to punch back.

• 1:54:40Speaker 04

  No, Mike, you gotta switch to Boost. With a plan that's $25 a month, forever.

• 1:54:45Speaker 05

  Oh, that's a great plan. Maybe you can do both. Boost Mobile, what's your plan?

• 1:54:51Speaker 00

  Okay, laundry stinks, literally. I mean, you could just keep buying new underwear. Not that I've ever done that. Or maybe sort your clothes into piles based on how re-wearable or filthy they are. Or just use Arm & Hammer Deep Clean. It's made for real-life stinks and stains. So even if you don't do laundry the "right way," Deep Clean will knock it out. I mean, it is from the number-one liquid detergent brand that tackles more loads than any other. Come clean with Arm & Hammer Deep Clean. Number one claim based on total wash loads sold. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.