For the Lummi people, returning Miami’s captive orca to the Salish Sea is about saving family

The average female orca, like Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut, is about 20 feet long and weighs about 7,000 pounds. Yet at Miami Seaquarium, the widest part of her pool, at 80 feet, only lets her swim a few body lengths, and indeed she crosses its distance with two quick flicks of her flukes. With her family in the wild, she would swim more than a hundred miles per day or more. But this is only the most obvious limitation of her captivity.

Orcas in the wild are highly social animals, gregarious and playful, whose world revolves around their familial pods. They also are complex, large-brained creatures with sophisticated sensory capacities, such as echolocation. Holding one permanently in a plain concrete pool is akin to forcing a human to live permanently in a plain white cell.

During the first years of her life, Sk’aliCh’ech-tenaut was a typical Puget Sound “Southern Resident” orca: feeding on wild salmon, playing with her family, following her mother’s lead as her native “L” pod swam through its home waters.

In 1970, when she was probably three or four years old, she was among a large clan of nearly 100 orcas driven into a Whidbey Island cove by Sea World captors known as “orca cowboys” (a scene vividly captured in the documentary Blackfish). Five orcas drowned in the raid, their corpses slit open and weighted down with chains to hide the evidence. As the young orcas’ family members gathered in the waters outside the capture site and vocalized to the whales inside, the captors selected seven whales to sell to various marine parks around the world and proceeded to lasso them, wrestle them into slings, and lift them out. Miami Seaquarium bought the young whale they had first named Tokitae.

Over the years, her daily routine has varied somewhat, depending on trends within the marine-park industry. For the most part, she has a history of good relations with her human trainers, who for many years performed risky stunts both riding her around the pool as well as catapulting off her rostrum.

Those kinds of interactions came to a screeching halt in 2015, following the impact that the 2010 lethal attack by the male orca Tilikum on his trainer at SeaWorld Orlando—and the documentary Blackfish, which focused on the case as part of a larger argument against orca captivity—had on the industry. Federal labor regulators ordered trainers to cease those kinds of “wet work” interactions with captive orcas everywhere, including Miami. Now, Sk’ali/Tokitae’s daily routines mainly entail performing breaches and splashing the crowds with water, while a Seaquarium trainer explains to the crowd why her only real home is there with them.

She is now 55 years old. In the wild, females typically live between 50 and 60 years, sometimes as long as 90. L25 Ocean Sun, the L Pod orca frequently identified as her mother—based on photos and film taken at the time of the capture; Seaquarium has never permitted genetic testing of Tokitae—is still alive at the estimated age of 90, and is widely viewed as the grand matriarch of the Southern Residents.

Of the 130 or so wild whales that have been captured since 1961, only 13 remain alive today. Ska’li/Tokitae is the last remaining orca among those taken during the 11 years that Southern Residents were captured in Puget Sound. The practice ended with a lawsuit filed by the State of Washington against SeaWorld in 1975. That case was filed by the state’s attorney general after a particularly egregious capture involving explosives occurred within view of the state Capitol and was witnessed by several high-ranking state officials from a nearby boat. They demanded that SeaWorld cease capture operations within state waters; eventually, the case was settled out of court, with SeaWorld releasing the just-captured orcas from their sea pen and agreeing not to return.

Those 11 years of captures gave birth to what became a multibillion-dollar industry with captive-orca displays at marine parks like those at SeaWorld and Miami Seaquarium. One tally estimates that 58 whales were removed from the Southern Resident population, more than a third of the total. The population has never fully recovered; nearly a whole generation of reproduction was represented in the whales captured and killed. These wild orcas are the only officially endangered killer-whale population in the world, numbering just under 75 currently.

Ken Balcomb, a veteran cetologist and head of the San Juan Island, Washington-based Center for Whale Research, kicked off the effort to return “Lolita” to her native waters in the 1990s, along with his half-brother, Howard Garrett, whose Orca Network has been the chief organizational center for the campaign. At one time, Washington’s governor and lieutenant governor were involved in the “Free Lolita” campaign.

It largely went nowhere, even though there are weekly protests outside the Seaquarium by local animal-rights activists to this day. The facility’s then-owner, Arthur Hertz, refused to even hold discussions with the state’s delegation, which included envoys from the governor’s office and scientists, telling his confidants: “I don’t want these hippies stealing my whale.”

Garrett and the Orca Network continued to organize protests over the ensuing years in Miami, though they seemed to have little effect. The government’s decision in 2005 to list the Southern Residents as an endangered population briefly spurred hope for the campaign, particularly when the NOAA Fisheries opted in 2015 to list “Lolita” as part of that population and thus subject to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections.

However, the agency also recommended she remain in her Miami facility, for the time being, citing “many concerns that would need to be carefully addressed” regarding the return of a long-captive animal to the wild. “These concerns include disease transmission, the ability of released animals to adequately find food, difficulty in social integration, and that behavioral patterns developed in captivity could impact wild animals. Previous attempts to release captive killer whales and dolphins have often been unsuccessful, and some have ended tragically with the death of the released animal.”

The plan to “Bring Lolita Home” originally sounded a bit like a fantasy out of Free Willie, in which the killer whale simply escapes its barriers and rejoins its wild family; certainly, that’s how Miami Seaquarium has always depicted it, as do some pro-industry critics even today. But even in its earliest phases under Balcomb and Garrett, that was never the realistic plan; rather, they intended to place Tokitae in a sea pen somewhere in the Salish Sea where she could be cared for, and perhaps reunited with her L Pod family, if things worked out that way.

Over the years, that plan has shifted, especially as it’s become clear that Sk’ali/Tokitae could pose a threat to the Southern Residents by potentially infecting them with a disease she’s picked up in captivity, which remains the primary concern among NOAA Fisheries scientists. Now the plan is simply to retire her to a sea pen where she can enjoy more abundant room to roam and the natural waters of the Salish Sea while still being cared for permanently by humans.

This is where the Lummi Nation comes in. A Coast Salish tribe, their reservation is on the mainland south of Bellingham at the easternmost edge of the San Juan archipelago of the Salish Sea. In 2017, tribal elders held a ceremony to give her the name Ska’liCh’elh-tenaut (Sk’ali and Ch’elh indicate the area around Whidbey Island where she was captured, while “tenaut” identifies her as a female family member), and the council passed a resolution to return her to the Salish Sea.

In 2018, the Lummi People launched a cross-country awareness campaign by taking a totem pole depicting Sk’ali’s story and driving it from town to town across the United States en route to Miami. “We are on a journey to free a fellow being,” said Jewell Praying Wolf James, one of the pole’s carvers.

Once in Key Biscayne, they attempted to present it to Miami Seaquarium officials. They were utterly ignored. Instead, Seaquarium curator Robert Rose went on Canadian television and smeared them and their motives.

“Really they should be ashamed of themselves, they don’t care about Lolita, they don’t care about her best interests, they don’t really care whether she lives or dies,” he said. “For them, she’s nothing more than a vehicle by which they can promote their name, their political agenda, to obtain money, and to gain media attention. Shame on them.”

Rather than recoiling, Lummi organizers went to work on creating a realistic plan to achieve their goal of returning Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut to her home waters. Today, that plan is nearly complete, simply waiting for the right circumstances to reach fruition. That moment may finally be about to arrive.

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Naomi Rose says she would prefer to see any captive whale, particularly one like Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut, placed in a sanctuary where they could live out their lives with room to roam and in their natural environment. That option, however, may not be available to her, considering how badly Seaquarium’s mismanagement over the past year almost certainly has degraded her health. But she’s hopeful that APHIS will act with due speed.

“Given the urgency of her care situation and her age, and the fact that she’s an ESA animal, they may very well move faster than normal,” she told Daily Kos. “The urgency is very real.”

Rose warns that plans to return her to the Northwest face serious obstacles, especially if her health is delicate and the stress of a move might prove too much for a geriatric whale. Most of all, the federal government is likely to be the most formidable hurdle.

“I’ve been telling everybody who talks to me about this that it is my belief, and I have reasons for that belief, that the National Marine Fisheries Service would never give permission to send Toki back to the Southern Resident critical-habitat area,” Rose said. “They’re just not going to allow it under the ESA.”

The core problem, Rose said, is that she’s carrying a full load of pathogens: “She’s not a healthy animal. I know from people who were privy to her health records that she’s not doing well. She’s carrying pathogens that should be contagious. I mean, the water quality in her tank right now is crap, literally. The chemistry, the microbiology of her system is not promising. And anything like that, even a hint of that, [NMFS] would say ‘Not a chance, forget it.’”

The X factor is the reality that Sk’ali has proven she has phenomenal reserves of the will to live. “She’s so clearly tough as nails,” Rose said. “I mean, she’s just got a will of steel or something. So maybe she would handle the transport all the way back to Washington just fine. I have no idea. And neither does anybody else.”

Rose does see a scenario in which she could be returned to her home waters, however. “Now, if they could come up with some kind of onshore quarantine where she’s in a self-contained body of water, and is quarantined until she’s given a clean bill of health, that’s one thing,” she said. “Whether she could gut it out, I don’t know.”

The Lummi Nation believes it has a plan that may be able to clear all these hurdles. It’s been assembled by two experienced whale handlers, the husband-and-wife couple of Jeff Foster and Katy Laveck Foster of the Whale Sanctuary Project (WSP). whose original mission was to locate a space in the San Juan Islands where a large sanctuary for a number of whales could be established.

However, as they spent time in the region, they realized that because of the presence of the Southern Resident killer whale population and its fragile status, the Salish Sea wasn’t an appropriate place for such a facility. Instead, WSP has proceeded apace with creating such a sanctuary in Nova Scotia.

But when the Lummi Nation approached them about bringing their expertise aboard in finding a home for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut, they eagerly came aboard, and have been working out the details for the plan in the intervening years with the help of marine mammalogists and experts in pathogen spread. They’re still in the process of nailing down a site, but they say negotiations with landowners around the key sites are still ongoing.

“We think we have a real good case to bring her home, and we can do it very responsibly and safely,” said Foster, whose experience includes working with Keiko, the “Free Willy” orca, during the years he was being rehabilitated.

Foster said much of the plan remains under wraps because of the steadfast hostility from the marine-park industry, including Seaquarium, to any attempt to free captive killer whales, which in the past has included surreptitious sabotage.

“One thing that hasn’t changed is the attitude of these aquariums,” he said. “A lot of the aquariums out there that house these animals still justify keeping these highly intelligent animals when they know better.”

The Lummi Nation has published an outline of the plan, which has a detailed budget and is focused both on creating an adequate home facility—which the Lummi call Xwlemi Tokw—for the whale, as well as a program of care that would begin even before she would be transported. The planners acknowledge she might not even be able to make the trip and may have to remain in Florida because of her health.

But their hope is to guide her through the hurdles, with the eventual goal of getting her back to the Salish Sea, through a series of careful steps:

• A comprehensive evaluation of her physical and behavioral condition at the Miami Seaquarium by qualified experts.
• A closely monitored conditioning plan prior to transport.
• A detailed transport plan addressing each leg of the transport from Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s tank at the Miami Seaquarium to the Xwlemi Tokw.
• Protocols for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s on-site care once she has arrived at the Xwlemi Tokw. These protocols address her initial introduction to the habitat and the transitional phase of her acclimatization, as well as her long-term ongoing care including care considerations, medical care, ongoing monitoring, daily marine operations, and security of the Xwlemi Tokw.
• Emergency and risk management plans for each component of the plan.
• A comprehensive review of potential ecological risks and mitigation strategies.

Laveck Foster says the concern about the possibility she could spread disease to the SRKWs is their top priority. “We’ve been able to talk with both marine-mammal veterinarians and marine-mammal pathologists that have that kind of specific expertise, because that has been the predominant question,” she told Daily Kos. “We have to get that right, because it’s way too sensitive a population to let any kind of pathogen get near them. We don’t want any possibility the Southern Residents could be put at risk.”

Those experts, she said, have helped them develop a plan that includes multiple safeguards. “There are ways that we can mitigate for that prior to her coming here, and making sure that she doesn’t have any kind of transmissible pathogen,” Laveck Foster said. “There are a number of steps we can take at different stages of the plan. But we don’t support moving her here if she has a pathogen that’s uncontrolled and that’s transmissible. We also don’t know if she can survive the trip. So there’s all these checkpoints that she has to pass before we even bring her home.”

Rose is hopeful that the project can succeed, but also worries that federal regulators who could decide her fate will dig in their heels. “I still think that NMFS would come up with any sort of excuse not to allow it, because it just freaks them out to think that there could be something that could happen and that the Southern Residents are wiped out in a huge disease outbreak because they put Typhoid Mary in the middle of them,” she said.

Laveck believes that the involvement of the Lummi Nation in the effort could prove the critical factor in the latest campaign for getting Sk’ali/Tokitae out of her abysmal situation, in part because—Robert Rose’s racist smear notwithstanding—they cannot reasonably be accused by the owners of harboring a profit motive behind the effort, as previous campaigns have.

“It’s been so inspiring working with the Lummi elders on this plan, because their intentions are in the right place,” Laveck Foster said. “They’re not trying to prove a political point or advance a cause, they’re doing it for a family member. They really just want what’s best for her, and what’s best for her family, and they consider her family. This isn’t to put anybody’s name on anything or to raise money. Their position when it comes to raising funds is just to be in position to care for her for the rest of her life.”

She says she and Foster had a kind of awakening about the role of indigenous people in these battles over the environment and animal rights while observing the Lummi people’s attempts in August 2018 to help feed a starving J Pod calf, J50 Scarlet, with fish from their own catch of Chinook, the SRKWs’ preferred food. The effort failed and the young whale died.

At one point, federal officials ordered the Lummi People to shut down their efforts while still on the water. Laveck Foster said she observed a tribal elder turn to the federal agents, still holding a Chinook she was about to drop overboard, and retort: “You’re telling me I can’t feed my family that’s starving.”

“That altered the way were thinking about the orcas here,” Laveck said. “OK, this isn’t a resource that you’re managing. These whales are something you have to have a deep empathy for. You can’t just think of everything in these cold, scientific terms. You have to humanize this entire relationship.”

Their hope is that the Sk’aliCh’ech-tenaut project can provide a similar window of empathy for the public at large, especially for residents of the Pacific Northwest. “One of the things we’ve talked about is that maybe this project could cause a big shift for everybody, in the way that we think about these animals and our relationship to them,” she said.

Lummi tribal elder Raynell Morris explained this to Palm Beach Post reporter recently, relating the traditional tale of a boy who wants to live with the “qwe ‘lhol mechen.” He obtains the blessing of the tribe, but is told he must return when the elders tell him it is time.

“We don’t see any difference between if you are my cousin and a qwe ‘lhol mechen swims by,” she said. “They are our relatives. There is a kinship. There is a relationship and it is recognized.”

The Lummi People are still offended by what happened in 1970, when white men swooped in and kidnapped Sk’aliCh’ech-tenaut and a number of her relatives because the Lummi “were never told and were never consulted.” Now, they are saying, it is long past time to return her to them.

“She’s done,” Morris said. “Her spirit is crying to come home. Let her go. Let her come home.”