TOKITAE CHANGED US. HER STORIES, HER SONGS CHANGED US.
BY Sam Crespi #SHE Forever Becoming
By Sam Crespi, #SHE Always Becoming
We came to sit in ceremony. It was a warm windless day, at the park close to Penn Cove on Whidey Island. Several hundred people from local villages gathered to sing songs, chant words that spoke to mourning, the loss of our beloved whale, Tokitae.
Songs were sung to call in healing, and light. We shared whale stories. The tribal leader of the Lummi talked story, with broad sweeping motions of his arms. Stories about TOKITAE, his relative. A relative of the Lummi tribe, the female whale captured as a juvenile. Who’d lived and died in a small concrete pool after almot half a century of confinement with barely enough room to survive.
The ceremony was for Tokitae. The stories were about the dark day when hundreds of resident whales were captured and taken into captivity. Torn from their families and trucked to aquariums nation wide where they were taught to perform tricks for their human overmasters. Instead of swimming freely in the vast deep oceans, they swam in small concrete pools.
There were witnesses to Tokitae’s capture. The Lummi, her her tribe and other locals. The mournful sound that went up as the whales were loaded on the trucks would haunt locals for years.
