Bios: Brenda Peterson is the author of River of Light, Becoming the Enemy and Duck and Cover, a NYT notable book of the year. She is the co-editor, with Linda Hogan, of the best-sellling anthology, Intimate Nature: The Bond between Women and Animals. Lives in Seattle.
Linda Hogan (Chikasaw) is a recipient of a NEA grant in fiction, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Lannan Fellowship. She has been short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics circle award, and won the American Book Award for Seeing Through the Sun. A prolific essayist on environmental issues, she lives in the mountains of Colorado.
xi (poem) -
FatThis is the land
where whales were mountains
pulled in by small boats,
where fat was rendered
out of darkness
by the light of itself,
where what fell through the slaughtering decks
was taken in by land
until it became a hill made of fat
and blood, a town built on it.
The whale is the thick house of yesterday
in red waters.
It is the curve of another fortune,
a greasy smell and cloud
of dark smoke
that hides our faces.
At night
in the town
where hungers
are asleep,
we sleep
on a bed of secret fat.
A whale passes.
From dark strands of water,
it calls
its children by name.
Light, Smoke, Water, Land.
where whales were mountains
pulled in by small boats,
where fat was rendered
out of darkness
by the light of itself,
where what fell through the slaughtering decks
was taken in by land
until it became a hill made of fat
and blood, a town built on it.
The whale is the thick house of yesterday
in red waters.
It is the curve of another fortune,
a greasy smell and cloud
of dark smoke
that hides our faces.
At night
in the town
where hungers
are asleep,
we sleep
on a bed of secret fat.
A whale passes.
From dark strands of water,
it calls
its children by name.
Light, Smoke, Water, Land.
-Linda Hogan
xiv "...these most-watched of all whales"
Orca Network's Whale Sightings Network
-interdependence of humans and whales / portrait of human / whale bond
xvi-May 1999 - Makah whale hunt -indig. nation returned to cultural whaling off US mainland for first time in 70 yrs - since that hunt, 14 tribes along West coast have stated intention to return to hunting gray whale
-non-indig peoples (Faroe islanders, Japanese /Russian/Norwegian traditonal village whalers) claimed cultural right to return to whaling
-1999-2000 spring migrations -record high die-off of gray whales - 278 known deaths in 1999 and 350 in 2000
-starving - necropsies revealing lower-than-normal levels of fats (possible shortage of crustaceans?)
-startling decline in birth rates from high 1430 in 1997 to alarming low of 200 in 2000 and 280 in 2001
-2002 - births in Baja lagoons 3x that of previous years
-marked drop in gray whale deaths in spring migrations of 2001-2002
xvii "Yet the great whales are larger than this. They are beyond our rights, our treaties, and our histories. They exist beyond our own needs, in a world of land and sea that we share, but that we have never truly fathomed and never owned."
