Transcript: KURT RUSSO on the People Under the Sea [ENCORE] /345
Ayana Young Hello For The Wild community. It is with a heavy heart that we share that Tokitae, a Southern Resident Orca held unjustly in captivity for 53 years, has passed away. To honor her memory, this week we are rebroadcasting our episode with Kurt Russo on the People Under the Sea, originally aired in October of 2018. This conversation explores the powerful memory held by Southern Resident orcas, the threats they face from vessel noise, chemical pollutants, and declining Chinook salmon population, the health of the Salish Sea, and the efforts of the Lummi Nation to return Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut (also known as Tokitae/Lolita), from where she was being held captive at Miami Seaquarium, to her natal waters in the Salish Sea. Tokitae’s life ended while in captivity, but we hope that her memory may serve to inspire the fight for right relationship and reciprocity with our more-than-human-kin.
Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Kurt Russo. Kurt has worked on environmental issues, land preservation, and treaty rights with the Lummi Nation for 40 years. He is a senior strategist for the Lummi Nation Sovereignty and Treaty Protection office, coordinating the Lummi Nations, Salish Sea campaign, and the Tokitae Repatriation Project. He is also the Executive Director of the Foundation for Indigenous Medicine and former director of the Native American Land Conservancy. He holds a BS and MS in Forestry and a Ph.D. in History.
Well, thank you so much, Kurt, for joining us today. And before I begin, I would just like to extend the deepest of gratitude from all of us at For The Wild for the passionate and moving work you are doing on behalf of the Southern Resident Orcas and in working to bring Tokitae back home to her natal waters and relatives who await her. Thank you. And it feels only right that we began our more than human theme month in honor of the mother orca, Tahlequah, who carried her dead calf on a tour of grief for more than 1000 miles over a 17-day period. And it's a profound reminder that we share our place and experience with other beings that bear memory, whose capacity for love and loss mirrors our own. And it also highlights the uncertainty of the Southern Residents' livelihood, and quite frankly, the livelihood of our planetary community if we continue to act with reckless abandon. And I see Tahlequah's act as a communicative plea to our humanity as an acute demonstration of the wisdom that these can possess. So could you begin by sharing with us what Lummi cosmology might make of this happening and what place orcas occupy within Lummi cosmology more broadly?
Kurt Russo Cosmology is one of those words that sort of sort of dropped back into your eyes if you know what I mean. I can tell you what I've been told about those questions. There was a time and there was a Lummi word for this in their cosmology, which is spelled E-l-h-n-e-x-w-t-e-x-w, and that refers to a time when all life forms were one and related. And that time is a time when the Qwe 'lhol mechen and the blackfish and the young ones, the humans, and others, all were one.
The Qwe 'lhol mechen is considered one of the people that live under the water. That's what the word means—Blackfish. Their cosmology, like I said, is a big word. So if you can imagine, because that's what it takes, right? Blackfish. Take out the image you have in your mind and imagine that people are actually Blackfish as much as Blackfish are people. It's all one family. And that's very unusual. It's very unique. And the same is true for salmon. The Salmon Woman speaks spoke to Lummis about their sacred obligation to the creation. I'm in a very emotional state right now you have to bear with me. Fact is that you're right. And this is what I've heard the chief of the Lummi, T'silixw is his name, say this.
Tahlequah was showing to the world what the ones that live above the water are doing. Look, look at my dead baby. Look. Look at my dying ocean. Look for 1000 miles in 17 days till I put her down and I won't eat all that time. The last surviving calf that was born to the J-Pod since 2015 is missing, a calf called Scarlet J-50. And we know from the rake marks on J-50's side that she was midwifed into birth by other members of the pod. Midwifed, pulled out of her mother by other killer whales to give life to little Scarlett, pulled out and midwived. These are the people that live under the water.
So, yes, has the Lummi cosmology goes back to the time that is known as the everywhen, everywhen, E-V-E-R-Y-W-H-E-N, and the beforetime and onetime. And that's the time we're speaking in now. The fact is, there are worlds within worlds and the Salish Sea is showing us that one world that we're living in is in a deep crisis. And the people that live above the water have to understand they don't own this place. Their presidents don't own it. Their Congress don't own it. They don't own it. They were gifted it. Until that's understood, we'll see more dead calves. So that's what I have to say to that.
Ayana Young Thank you for your emotional connection. It really expresses the grief and the pain around these beautiful beings these kin that are speaking to us. And I truly believe that. So the Lummi reverence for their Orca kin brings us to the story of Tokitae or Lolita, an orca who is currently capped at Miami Seaquarium in Florida. And I'm wondering if you could share with us this story, beginning with the traumatic capture of Tokitae back in 1970.
Kurt Russo We have a website which we talked to you about called Sacredsea.org. Sacredsea all runs together .org. And on that website is the work we're doing for the Salish Sea. And part of that work with the Salish Sea is the rescue and repatriation of Tokitae. So on that website is a button called Media Resources and on that button, Media Resources, are two videos. And one video is a trailer of a film we're doing about the return of Tokitae. It's in production and the other is the chief of the Lummi Nation speaking about Qwe 'lhol mechen. Tokitae, if you would see the original footage taken in Penn Cove in 1970, it's very hard to even recount but by the captive industry, they were herded in by dynamite and underwater explosions. They were herded into a cove. And they took whale after whale after whale after whale. Seven whales died. They drowned. Four young ones died, they were drowned and each of the drowned whales was their stomachs cut open with cement blocks put into sink them so they wouldn't be found. These are human beings that did this. If you see here the keening. Keening is the sound killer whales make when there are highly distressed. People that are in Penn Cove––they will tell you the haunting sounds of the screams of the killer whales of the matriarch spy hopping desperately to search for their family as they were taken onto ships and vanished. The keening is almost too much to bear.
Tokitae was taken out of the water that day. She was four years old. And these captains of the universe, of SeaWorld and others, who arrogate to themselves the right to take these beings captive, shipped her off to Miami. This is a whale that lives most of its water, its temperatures average about 50 degrees. She was taken to Miami at four years old. 17 other whales were shipped off that day to other sea circuses for people to be treated. Tricks for treats for the whales. educate their kids about killer whales right. She was placed in a concrete tank 80 feet long and 20 feet deep for 47 years. She's the only surviving wild orca in North America in captivity. She's the last one. They all died within 15 years.
There was a killer whale placed in the Seaquarium, Miami Seaquarium's tank, and if I sound angry is simply because I am. Another killer whale was placed in the tank with her. His name was Hugo, and Hugo committed suicide—smashed his head up against the side of the tank until he was dead. They disposed of his [inaudible] waste into a landfill. So she was left alone with two young porpoises, and she's been there ever since and the Lummi Nation had heard about this some years ago. But until recently, didn't really bring the full weight to bear to get her free and back to her family. Her mother is still alive. Her mother is now the matriarch of the L-Pod.
If you were to go outside Miami Seaquarium, and stand there in the middle of the night you will hear Tokitae singing. You will hear her voice. She has done that every night, the 47 years. So we have, and Jewell James my colleague and an inspiration as a master carver of totem poles, and he carves a totem pole in dedication to the reunion and returning rescue of Tokitae. So that totem pole is now in Gainesville, Florida at the University of Florida, where it's gonna be brought out on December 10 for exhibit along with an exhibit at the Salish Sea as part of our campaign we're working with to get her free, get her here, get her home, get her well, get her strong, and get her back to her mother. And we will do that and it'll be done within two years.
Miami Seaquarium doesn't take it seriously, but they will soon enough. They say she's worth $20 million. We're not going to pay anything to get her out of there. And the tribe was called to do this by, let's put it this way, it wasn't a phone call. They were told to get this done. So we're getting it done. She's with the L-Pod. J-, K-, and L-Pods make up the Southern Residents. Southern Resident killer whale populations spend a lot of their lives in Lummi waters, traditional waters. So we have a sanctuary ready for her to return to near Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands where her family tours by routinely. There will be a moment sometime in the next two- and a half years when Tokitae is going to be singing out her song and her mother is going to hear it. She can hear 10 miles away and they are going to reunite. And that's our job is to make that moment happen. And the Salish Sea, when that moment occurs, will never look the same again to anybody. That's the Tokitae campaign.
Ayana Young Wow, Kurt that's so raw and hearing the details of these captures is devastating but so necessary for us to hear. It's just insane to think in 1970 that over 40 orca calves were captured and sold. Eight adults were killed at the time. And like you were saying the pods were just completely frantic.
Kurt Russo Yeah.
Ayana Young So I just feel compelled to underscore just how dramatic the capture of these orcas was. Like you were saying, to this day, human residents of the area recall hearing the frantic keens of matriarch orcas as their children were torn from the sea by helicopters. Similarly, resident orcas avoid Penn Cove where their relatives were stolen and have done so for the past 50 years. An article written by Jay Julius, who you had mentioned the chairman of the Lummi Nation, Julius writes quote, "Just like Tokitae, members of the Lummi Nation have endured centuries of destructive policies––policies that separate our families, depleted our salmon runs, desecrated our sacred sites, and reduced our traditional fishing areas to a fraction of what they once were. These policies and willful disregard for our treaties have damaged the health of the Salish Sea and negatively impacted the wellbeing of our people," end quote. I'm curious about the connections between government policies that separate human families, as well as those that have done the same to the Southern Residents. How do these stories of separation tell one another? And how does Tokitae's abduction reflect the failure of policy to protect the sailor sea?
Kurt Russo Well, that's an important question. I think it has many different levels that you come in to try to answer that and I don't pretend to know most of the answers but one thing, it speaks to something clearly out of order in the way our society deals with lifeforms, even their own. There's something seriously wrong with all of this. It's not just normal. It's not just normal for a person to come into a community and steal children. But what's painfully normal is the ability for people to rationalize doing it. Every one that did these things, these government agents, or these agents of the sea circuit industry. They may be great brothers and mothers and but yet, they do these things. And they can explain it to them.
So you know, I was told once by a woman who counseled battered women, and I got to know her fairly well, she once told me there's only one thing most important, and that is how you explain yourself to yourself. Everything flows from that.
I actually met a gentleman who was involved in the captures in Penn Cove. When he was 15. He was part of the capture team. I said, How could you do that? And he said, Well, I was only 15. I said, Well, I was 15 once, I wouldn't have done that. It's complicated. But now he's involved in orca rescue. So it came back to haunt him. I think, I fear, and I hope that my fears are wrong, that there's something missing in the way we treat life, not just orcas, but each other. There's something missing in the day-to-day cruelty we see in the paper.
I had a dear friend who was very involved in Buddhism. She's very well-placed in that tradition. And she went through a seven-month silent retreat, seven months of silence. I said what was the hardest thing when you came out? She said the front page of a newspaper, violence after violence after violence. The front page stories of people being less than human to their world and each other, and I think killer whales and boarding schools draw a line that we need to pay attention to there—we're being, how can I put this—molded—by a system or a process or something, to do things unspeakably cruel to each other, and to perfectly innocent life ones that have done nothing to us but inhabit the same planet. There's something missing. There's a presence of an absence. And that's, I think, what connects what a human being can do to a sentient being that has the form of a killer whale, and now a human being can do that to a six-month-old native child carrying it in the arms of his mother and shipping it 2000 miles away.
You know, Jewell and I have worked around the world, and one thing we found ourselves in Brazil having an audience with a gentleman who was trying to stop the construction of a nuclear power plant that they're going to build on the coast between Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo and we thought, Well there's madness. So we're having an audience with this gentleman who was fighting it and he was asked, Are you an optimist? He laughed and he said, No, no, no, I'm not. I'm hopeful.
I am…I have been so distressed by this that I had to go see a therapist, and I said to her, J-50 and the residents…I could't stop crying. I know why, she said to me, Because you work every day with people with great empathy for their world, and it's true. Empathy is the ability to take on the impressions of the other, and I think that when the world saw that grieving mother it took on that mother's side song in a kind of mea culpa.
One can only hope that we find J-50 Little Scarlet alive. Seems unlikely. I was mentioning this to someone here in the tribe about how this morning the Residents, very unusual, were all traveling together. And the J-Pod was in the lead, tight formation, and the lead of the J-Pod was J-50's mother. It's called the ‘grief formation.’ The entire Resident population standing with a mother who probably just lost her four-year-old baby that wasn't in the formation and nobody knows where it is.
I need to say this though. It didn't have to turn out this way. J-50 could have been saved. But she died like more than likely she died of starvation. Her mother was trying to feed her. Her family shared their food with her, isn't that amazing but it wasn't nurturing her because we don't know why. Because they're living in a sick ocean. We here in the tribe participate in the governors of the State of Washington's Southern Resident Killer Whale Task Force. Yeah, well, it's not rocket science. What these killer whales need, they need food.
They need 580,000 pounds of Chinook a year to survive. They're not getting 1/10 of it. If he really cared about this, rather than a task force debate over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, all they've got to do was take down the Snake River dams. They can do that in two months. They don't even need congressional approval to do it. That's where the Chinook were decimated, for those dams. But no, instead of talking about slowing down ferries, or asking tribes to stop fishing in areas that they're entitled to? You know, it's madness. You know, one thing I mentioned to you, the four dams on the Lower Snake River on the Columbia have produced only two hours of electricity that's been needed in the last 10 years. Two hours. Why do we have those dams? 75% of all the chinook that try to get down that river are crushed in the dams. You know, it's kind of decision time. And I think people that love your show and I, we honor them, we honor them have to help us understand how we can turn this big ship of a way of life perched on the edge of the Salish Sea that is destroying it because that's what's going on. I mean, this is they say, when industry arrived, salmon go away. And when salmon goes away, killer whales die. Chinook is the only food Southern Residents will eat. They don't eat anything else. If there's no Chinook, there are no Southern Residents. It's a situation we simply have to understand we can win this, but not without an awful lot of leaning into the issue and sacrifice
Ayana Young I want to talk a little bit more about the issue of the Chinook salmon, basically the collapse of salmon fisheries in Washington, Oregon, California, British Columbia, and now Alaska. And I've been up in Alaska for the last two and a half months and have been doing interviews with people around salmon. Basically been on a listening tour and it's really devastating to hear in these last vestiges of intact ecosystems that people have been saying. "I don't know where the Kings are. We don't know where the Coho, they call them the Silvers, they're not coming back. We don't know where they're going, they're going out to sea. They're not coming back." And there's a lot of questions and a lot of confusion and just really not knowing why they're not coming home--the salmon. So I'd like to hear more from you about the Chinook specifically, and what's happening to the fisheries in Washington and near the Salish Sea. Why do you think although we could state some obvious pointers of why we think they're collapsing, I'd like to hear from you your point of view on their collapse. And, you know, what is their state in the area? And what are the things that people can do to support the return of the fisheries?
Kurt Russo Yeah, it's been known for three decades or more, what the basic problem is in terms of the 98% reduction of salmon runs between 1920 and 1990, 98%. And an awful lot of that, whether it's whatever part of your talking to Washington State, Pacific Northwest, a lot of this is habitat loss. Just, they've lost their hab—they can't even get to where they need to spawn, and when they get there, the spawning grounds are no longer viable. Habitat loss is a lot of it, not all of it, but a lot of it, a lot of it. And it's one of those things which—it is allowing window dressing to pass as a solution. For example, having buffer zones. I love that one. Buffer zones along the stream and above the buffer zone where you can do anything. It's laughable... Like I said my degree is in Forestry, we knew in Forestry in 1968, what you had to do to protect salmon. The science is not new, though, they always seem to need more of it. But science doesn't make its well way into politics. And it doesn't make its way into practices on the ground because it is not profitable. To do it responsibly. In the Nooksack Nation where I am now, it would take a century to get the habitat back. Habitat loss, and then you have contamination. I mean, the Salish Sea, especially in the southern portions, but really...
I'll give you an example, down in Seattle when the beginning of World War II and the Japanese are forcibly removed from their homes and sent to various camps, quote, unquote. There were a lot of strawberry farmers, Japanese strawberry farmers, that had truck farms in the Seattle area. Guess who owns their land now? Boeing. So Boeing moved in and took their land to build whatever they build. One of the places that they build military drones, some of the most important salmon estuary in southern Puget Sound, that they have completely destroyed. Habitat loss, contaminants––whether it comes from off the roads through the sewage system, out of boats and ships––it's just an endless stream of contamination. Everyone knows the salmon that the killer whales are eating are contaminated. That salmon that the seals are eating are contaminated. And why is it contaminated? Because we don't have state-of-the-art wastewater treatment systems throughout Puget Sound, we don't have them. It's aging infrastructure. I think overfishing is the least of our worries. Right now it's simply managing extinction and fighting over the last fish rather than addressing the problems. The tribes, to their credit and one of the great ironies of history I think, is trying to save financial capitalism from itself. And the endless pursuit of profit, short-term, the unconscionable socialization of cost that goes on and on. These are things that need to be addressed and I'm I am hopeful that the younger generation has not been so brainwashed by a system that is overtly unfair to everyone but a small percentage that they are woke to a situation that this is a nonsustainable system. If they want to have...
I'll mention something to you, I had dinner in California with some very interesting people sitting at my table in Paradise Cove down there near Malibu was a Navajo Medicine Man and his wife. My host, the director that's organized The Foundation Indigenous Medicine, and a young woman who has just started up her fifth startup, high-tech startup, her fifth. She's also an Olympian medalist, mother of two, I mean, you know, one of those people. And she creates virtual reality, and security software, security software for the White House and the NSA. She said two things I want to mention. And she said I can quote her this said, I can teach a nine-year-old to hack into our electoral system. A nine-year-old. One thing and the second thing, she says, I really prefer the virtual world over the real one. That terrifies me.
But really, I'm hopeful that through programs such as yours, and people such as you and your listeners, that we don't lose the real world to the virtual one, because the virtual one is how do I put this, it's not real. And as we compromise the real world, some people are going to escape into their headsets or their earphones. That would be a tragedy. And I really appreciate the work you do to keep people connected to the real one. The real one. Because that's the one we are actually birthed from. We didn't create it. We were created by it. And as I mentioned, in the Before Time, we were all one. And it wasn't one in a headset.
Ayana Young I couldn't agree more with you. It's just, I see a lot of people turning towards virtual reality and I was at a Best Buy a few months ago and it was really horrifying. I hadn't been into one of those stores for a really long time, and the first thing I saw was this poster of a woman with one of those headsets, you know, face masks on and I'm like, "Oh, my goodness, this is where we're going. We're going to look into a screen at a forest and ocean filled with orcas, but if we take that mask off, we'll see clear cuts and dead oceans because we are, in so many ways being distracted and lost by a world that isn't real." It's these, you know, if you take a picture, with a camera, you can create a frame that isn't what reality is, you can just, you know, take take a picture. But you know, if you actually turn 360, you'd see a very different, a very different view. And I think that these extinction crises and what happened with Tahlequah. It is these loud cries to wake up. And you know, thinking that there are only 76 Southern Residents left and 30 will less than 30 have the potential to breed. You know, some suggest that if immediate action isn't taken, the Southern Resident Orcas could become extinct within the next 15 years. So waking up is mandatory if we say we care about our kin. If we really say that we care, and we want to actually live up to that we need to do something and I, you know, we've been talking a little bit about the Snake River Dam.
And the issues of we haven't gone into this but the recreational and commercial vessel traffic, the noises that make underwater, how that can psychologically- and communicatively-affect the whales, the pollution. You had mentioned the pollution, the ongoing threats of future pipelines, Atlantic salmon fish farms in B.C. So of course, like, there are a lot of stressors, but we need to look at these stressors because if we don't look at them with honesty, we're never going to be able to do something about it.
And it's true. The population of whales has declined to its lowest levels in 30 years, has decreased 20% since the since the late 90s. So I just wanted to bring those things up and then back to mentioning Chinook—the fact that two-thirds of the Southern Residents' pregnancies have failed due to starvation. Additionally, the lack of food forces orcas to burn their body fat, which ends up releasing toxins like DDT and flame retardants into their system, further suppressing their reproductive health. So, you know, these are again, these are things that we really need to look at—the starvation—and one thing that I had read while getting ready for this interview is that since 2002, the EIS has designated dam breaching as the best solution to recover wild salmon on the Snake River. And they said that if it was breached, it would double or triple the survival rate of Chinook salmon. So I wanted to bring that up because, yeah, I kind of just mentioned a lot of really hard facts around the numbers of extinction and starvation, and all of the issues that are affecting salmon, which then in turn are affecting orcas. But then again, look, if we take out the Snake River Dam, that is something that we can do that would have massive positive consequences. So it's not that there aren't solutions, but getting to those solutions, really prioritizing those is where we need to go. And that's, I feel like what you were saying with the economic capitalist, technological, gosh, just delusion, to be able to get out of that so we can actually do the things that need to be done.
Kurt Russo It's a curious thing, you have a natural condition, salmon won't be in the Columbia River and the Snake River. Eastern Washington doesn't want to be wheat, it's a desert, so they create these dams to sustain an artificial way of life at the expense of a real one. I mean, if you look at the Palouse, the bioregion of the Palouse, it is the most compromised bioregion in North America, sort of what remains of what it once was.
I want to mention one thing, though, about the Chinook back a second to you folks listening Canada, or even in the Northwest are aware that just north of the border here is a very large coal terminal called Sawastan, very large, very polluting. Well, you mentioned ship noise. The idea they now have is to create another platform that will serve us ships, container ships. You ready for this? These ships, imagine a football field, now walk across four of them. That's how big the ships are. They want to have three of those going right over primary orca foraging habitat every two days, year round. And they say, this is an example of the of the disingenuous nature of EISes, Canadian government doesn't EIS commented back October 5, and in the I suppose, you know, there's many ships is only a 6% increase in the already existing vessel traffic and any way Southern Residents are highly compromised and won't make much difference. That's the mindset of people that are going to make a lot of money off these ships.
But we, you know, the people here I think it's really important that they understand there may come a time and may not be far off, when they're gonna have to put themselves on the line and their fists in the air and their feet on the ground and say, Enough. Stop. That's what it's gonna take. Yeah, I know voting is important, yeah right? Yes, but feet on the ground and fists in the air are also important. There would be no fishing rights for tribes in the Northwest if men and women hadn't gone to jail, breaking what was then the law to create a new and better one. And unless people are willing to stand the line, take off their earphones, take off their headsets, and rejoin the world, the real one, we're going to lose it.
I taught a class at the University of Washington, Forest Economics. And you know, you got a final everyone gets all bleary-eyed and they're up all night and they come in for the final and I said, Well, you all ready for your 2-hour final? So we put all the chairs in a circle and I said I want everyone to give me their definition of extinction. That's a big word, you know. You used that word a while ago and I think sometimes that word it's like skipping a stone across the human mind, they don't quite pause for a moment and think about that. Millions of years dedicated to the creation of a life form, because of someone wanting to make a short-term profit for a small number of people goes extinct? I really believe that tribes, probably more than anyone right now are the best chance we have. And I really encourage people to stand with tribes when they're standing up for their treaty rights because treaty rights protect everybody. Everybody. I think personally, even more than the Constitution does at this point. At least in this country.
So we're hopeful here. We've always been hopeful. And I want to if I can, before we started this, I wanted to mention this one verse written by Wendell Berry, Do you mind if I read it?
Ayana Young Please.
Kurt Russo Because we have these moments and we look for a place to resort to our souls and regain our spirits. It's a piece he wrote called, The Peace of Wild Things:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free
So, my prayers go to J50 and her mother, her family, the Salish Sea, and all our relations, and to your listeners that they keep their hope up even if their pessimism grows, stay hopeful because as one person once told me, You're an activist. You are not allowed to lose hope.
[Musical Break]
Ayana Young I think about how she wasn't the only orca ripped from her home as you had mentioned. In fact, throughout the 1960s and 70s, 1/3 of the Southern Residents were taken and sold to parks all over the world. Today she is the sole survivor of those calves who were taken from the Salish Sea. As orcas who live in captivity often live less than half of their traditional life expectancies. So I'm wondering what are the mental, physical, and emotional stresses of living in captivity without the companionship of other orcas? And why do you think she has survived when others have not? And could it be said that she has remained resilient by remembering her home and the songs of her pod?
Kurt Russo That's certainly true. There's a number of... I've asked that question of people that know a lot more than I do about her and about Blackfish. One answer that stayed with me is... and she's in a tank. She's in an open-air tank close to the water. She hears the ocean. She may think her family's not far away. That why she sings every night. I don't know if you saw that part of the video in which Dateline, tv show, what the Seaquarium with a recording of the Lpods songs and then went to the side of the tank and where the Seaquarium minders had stepped away for a while, they turned on the tape recorder. Practically nose to nose with the guy holding the tape recorder, over and over again, she heard her songs. She heard her pod. That was 1998. I believe she's never stopped singing her song.
I mentioned that I have worked with a man who was involved in the capture, he was also one of our first trainers. And he said, Tokitae, she's an unusual girl. She's very unusual. She is indeed. She is also high as a kite. She's on 14 different kinds of medications. She lives in a chlorinated pool in Miami, in the sun. So she's on a lot of medications. No one really knows her actual state of health. Be that amazed that she displays vigor. You see, when no one's around, she's racing around the pool. She still happens to be the killer whale. Well, I think because she really believes she's going home
I was at Seaquarium. We went there was one of the [inaudible.] They followed us. They knew who we were before we even got there. We're standing by the side of the tank and a Lummi tribal member, Councilman and very inspired leader, Fred Lane, was standing with his arms folded across his chest looking in the water down below. She was all the way on the other side of the pond there, the tank. She turns 180 degrees and swims right over to him and just hangs in the water. I'm going on there. It happened twice, two different visits. So when that was what happened the first time and Fred, he decided to compose his prayers. She went back to where she come from. So I walked around the side of the aquarium and I said to the people standing there, Can I say hi to her? And this one gentleman probably in his mid-40s goes, No. That I can't say hi to her? He said No, but you can say hi to me. And I said, Okay. Where is she from? And he gave me that look. And he said you know exactly where she's from. And then asked me to leave. He is the curator of her at the aquarium. That's her master. I'm sure he has a great family life. He's a wonderful man. I'm not saying he isn't. But I am saying what they're doing with her is beyond evil. She needs to come home and they know it. But I also need to say this. The women that work with her on a daily basis love her. There is no doubt in my mind. They love Tokitae. Management, not so much. Cash cow. But they really love that girl. You can see it. So she does have that connection. But it's also kind of the Stockholm Syndrome. She is a Blackfish. She needs a family. These women are her family.
When she comes back here, we're gonna fly her back, federal express in one big plane and she's going to land at Bellingham International Airport. She's going to be taken to the water, slowly taken out to the sanctuary in Orcas Island. She's going to have her handlers, her veterinarian. She's going to have everyone she needs to reassure her, she's okay. And then she's going to start going for walks out into the water and back again, out of the water and back again. She's gonna learn to feed herself again and avoid ships. And then that day will come when her mother's gonna go behind go, "I know that voice." That is a healing moment for the Lpod from a trauma that as you said they have never gone back to Penn Cove again. They were traumatized just like Native folks taken from family and put in boarding schools. They were traumatized. Her coming back to her family will be a healing for that pod, and they need it because likely they just lost another one.
Ayana Young I've just been on mute crying on the other end. Yeah, I do. I feel I definitely feel like speechless and I would just like to offer to you any way you feel like closing this conversation. If you'd like to call out to Tahlequah and Scarlet, you know, however you wish to close this conversation, please.
Kurt Russo Well, that's hard. That's really hard. You know, I had a dream about her. And though I don't remember all the images in the dream, I have the felt sense. The felt-memory sense of that is what I would send back out. And you know for what it's what am I mean... Is that everything is going to be fine. We're going to be alright. Things will work out. Because, like Scarlet, that fighter, that little fighter, we don't lose hope, Scarlet. We will never lose hope.
Ayana Young Well, I will keep my prayers and energy towards Scarlet and I, for those who will listen, I ask you to do the same, and Kurt, thank you so much for your love and dedication to the Salish Seam the Lummi Nation, and are more-than-human kin, the Blackfish. Thank you for spending this time with us today and we'll continue staying abreast of what is to come and take our actions from you all.
Kurt Russo Thank you and thank you to all listeners for listening.
Evan Tenenbaum Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music featured in this episode is by Monplaisir and Amoeba. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, José Alejandro Rivera, and Evan Tenenbaum.