Make Whale Kin by Celebrating Whale Babies!

Anne Greenwood

University of California, Berkeley

Introduction

Births and deaths in the Southern Resident Killer Whale (SRKW) population are newsworthy events for many of us who reside on or near the shores of the Salish Sea. [1] Also called orcas, the species’ presence influences the tourist industry, marine traffic, fishery restrictions, and other environmental legislation as imposed by settler governance. [2] Although whale vocalizations have been analyzed in scientific settings to build human understanding of patterns of social grouping and behaviors, my interest veers away from building technical facility with orca sounds. Instead, in this paper, I move to examine the human responses and reactions to orcas that foster connections between people and to foreground moments of human joy in order to think through how I might develop a sense of kinship with the SRKWs who live nearby. In what follows, I reframe a field recording of the SRKW pod known as “J pod,” which I made from the shore of Galiano Island shortly after the birth of the calf currently known as J59, in relation to anthropologist Donna Haraway’s work on multispecies kinship in her 2016 monograph Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. [3] For Haraway, positioning ourselves “with” other beings is a valid strategy for surviving the Anthropocene. Accordingly, instead of interpreting my own and other humans’ presence as irreparable flaws on the recording, I hear them as evidence of attempting to enact Haraway’s slogan: “Make Kin Not Babies” (2016). I suggest that listening for human-to-human connectivity and pleasure in witnessing other species’ survival in these recordings functions as a strategy for making kin across species, especially in light of the attention focused on the SRKW’s reproduction and states of relatedness. [4] As I will explain, sonic information from field recordings and hydrophones informs human understanding of SRKWs. I listen to human delight as a point of connection with the whales, and frame the pleasure of the encounter in relation to new orca life.

SRKW are differentiated from transient, or Bigg’s, orcas in the Salish Sea area by their food consumption and sonic behavior. SRKW are an ecotype of exclusively fish-eating orca who travel in groups known as “pods,” which can be further divided into descent groups known as “matrilines,” who live in the Salish Sea. [5] John K.B. Ford’s (1984) research into whale behavior has found that pods have repertoires of sounds including clicks, whistles, and pulsed calls. Of these types, pulsed calls are the “most abundant and characteristic” and remain stable over decades, as shown through the comparison of audio recordings of the sounds of captive and wild SRKWs (1984, 13). Ford suggests that pods can therefore be grouped into larger structures called “clans” that correspond to shared “call traditions” (Ibid.). Within the Salish Sea region, J, K, and L pods each have their own dialect and can be grouped into J-clan, which shares a repertoire of vocalizations (Ford, Ellis, and Balcomb 2000). As even this brief overview shows, this type of specialist listening has yielded important information about SRKWs’ lifeways. However, whales make sound for other whales to listen to, and do so within an environment entirely different from our terrestrial listening environment. I suggest that, while ample scholarship addresses sounds produced by SRKWs, developing an attunement towards the sounds made about SRKWs can assist in the making of human-whale kinship.

Humans and Southern Resident Killer Whales

Human behaviors have contributed to the SRKW’s population decline from over 200 before the twentieth century to 72 presently, as the Georgia Strait Alliance outlines in their brief history of the population (Georgia Strait Alliance n.d.). Because this group relies on Chinook salmon as their food source, declining salmon stocks have led to a decrease in the whale population. Rising water temperatures, droughts and floods, and landslides have reduced salmon stock; overfishing has also had lasting negative effects. The live capture of orcas throughout the 1960s and 1970s interrupted usual patterns of reproduction (Georgia Strait Alliance n.d.). [6] The frequencies and amplitude of marine traffic interferes with the orcas’ echolocation and vocalizations (Holt et al. 2009). [7] Orcas are also vulnerable to toxic chemicals, which lead to reproductive problems. When whales experience starvation, the effects of toxins compound as the chemicals that have been sequestered in their fat stores are released into their bloodstream, resulting in further strain on their already vulnerable bodies (Mongillo et al. 2016).

As damaging as some of our settler-colonial human behavior might be, informal and formal practices demonstrate humans’ fascination with SRKW. In addition to face-to-face conversations people might have about spotting whales, my co-residents on Galiano Island post sighting opportunities to public and private Facebook groups. On the ferry, whale sightings are announced by the crew and garner a sizable positive reaction as passengers move to the windows or out on deck to try and catch a glimpse. The B.C. Cetacean Sightings Network and the Southern Gulf Islands Whale Spotting Network constitute formalized, citizen-science efforts to record whale encounters. [8] The Saturna Island Marine Research and Education Society and Orcasound are two organizations that share sonic content, including livestreams of hydrophones and catalogs of recorded whale calls. What makes my intervention different then, is its orientation towards audible expressions of this human fascination and the idea that such an outlook could function as one of Haraway’s kin-making strategies between people and whales around the Salish Sea.

Whale Kinship

Kinship, not simply reproduction, surfaces as the throughline between whale behavior and human-whale encounters. For Haraway, who writes about an expanded sense of kin that reaches beyond species distinctions, kinship boils down to feeling a sense of responsibility towards another being (Haraway 2016). It is this type of kinship that she holds up as a strategy for moving through the Anthropocene. My thinking borrows from Marshall Sahlins’ formulation of kinship as being constituted through individuals’ involvement or presence in each others’ lives—an idea he distills to a “mutuality of being” (2014). In terms of whale behavior, the SRKWs who live in the Salish Sea spend their lives in co-presence with other members of their pod. The legislative changes that have been enacted—lowered fishing limits and restrictions on boat traffic, for example—reflect humans’ recognition of their involvement in whales’ lives that points towards the nuance of kinship Haraway emphasizes. In what follows, I briefly turn to two examples of what Juno Salazar Parreñas terms “decolonial care,” in which it is necessary to put oneself at risk in order to care for another (Parreñas 2018). First, through J pod’s support during the whale Tahlequah’s grieving process, I seek to demonstrate that animals can put themselves at risk in order to care for one another. The Lummi Nation, spanning the northernmost coast of Puget Sound, spanning from Washington state into Southern British Columbia, feed whales in a way that illustrates another form of “decolonial care,” one that is at odds with settler and scientific models. The risks involved in the Lummi people’s caregiving constitutes my second example of “decolonial care.” I arrive at a working definition of kinship that refers to a relationship between beings that comes about as a result of involvement in each other’s lives. By engaging in acts of care, beings strengthen kinship with each other.

Tahlequah’s and her pod’s actions after her newborn calf’s death in 2018, as documented by the Center for Whale Research, CBC, the Seattle Times, and the Washington Post, exemplify this kinship-as-care model I’m engaging. As the articles report, on July 24, 2018, Tahlehquah’s calf Tali died shortly after birth. Rather than letting her baby’s body sink, Tahlequah carried Tali. When she dropped the body, she’d dive to bring it back up. Tahlequah continued her effort, keeping Tali afloat and with her for the next 17 days. After one week, the effort of grieving was taking a toll on Tahlequah’s body and observers noticed she was losing weight. Other members of her pod cared for her by taking turns carrying Tali. The pod wasn’t seen for a few days in early August, but when they were seen again on August 8, they were still carrying Tali. The next day, August 9, Tahlequah released Tali’s body. Care here is oriented around the pod as a unit of kinship: members of J pod validated Tahlequah’s grief and carried Tali, caring for her by giving her a chance to restore her strength by hunting and eating. J pod’s use of co-presence and support through sustenance bears a striking resemblance to some human ways of grieving. More specifically, the whales’ behavior reminds me of food’s centrality in my own experiences of gatherings before and after funerals that revolve around sharing food.

The Lummi Nation recognizes these whales as kin and engages in caregiving practices. They perform naming ceremonies of the J17/Princess Angeline matriline, whose members include Tahlequah and J59, thereby affirming presence in one another’s lives (Pailthorp 2019). Their kinship bond is further recognized and celebrated through feeding ceremonies during which live salmon are released for the orcas and dead salmon left for human ancestors. When whales are in need, due to sickness or starvation, the Lummi will feed them (Morris 2019). By putting themselves so close to whales, people accept a degree of risk. For example, a whale’s unpredictable movement could swamp a small boat. The low year-round temperature of the water intensifies the risk for people who may end up overboard, as there is a real risk of hypothermia in the cold Pacific water. The Lummi’s feeding practices run counter to settler governments’ list of accepted conservation practices, but the Lummi perspective grounds this practice within their own reciprocal obligations of kinship (Ibid.). Donna Haraway might say that the enactment of care in this case is a way of being “with” the orcas, while Marshall Sahlins might characterize the human-whale relationship as a “mutuality of being.” To me, J pod’s care of Tahlehquah and the Lummi people’s care of Southern Resident Killer Whales show how whales and humans are not just present in each other’s lives, but implicated as kin.

Recording Whale Kinship

My own experience and encounters with SRKW are shaped by my position as a settler Canadian on Galiano Island. When travel to my field site of Myanmar for dissertation research was no longer an option due to the 2021 military coup, I opted to live at the boat-access-only property my grandparents owned on the island. [9] The small A-frame cabin perches on a terrace above a small cove. It faces south, towards Ben Mohr Rock and the entrance to Ganges Harbor on Saltspring Island. The majority of our human neighbors are only there for stretches in the summer or on occasional weekends. In the absence of human company, animal presence—the mink who use our trails as a shortcut down to the beach, the heron who fishes in the cove at low tide, and the raven who croaks when you get to the top of the switchbacks—is reassuring instead of threatening. The recordings I made follow a period of increased whale activity and socializing with neighbors in late spring 2022, when I spent more time with friends living nearby. Their property, which runs along a ridge with a steep drop down to the ocean, is an ideal vantage point for looking for whales. A wide-angle view runs east to Active Pass, south over Enterprise Reef, and west along Trincomali Channel. The cliffs make a pocket around a little cove that amplifies seal grunts and humpback whale exhalations.

My neighbor texted me, “whales headed your way,” and I started keeping an eye out. I sat there, phone in hand, waiting for them to swim the roughly 500 meters from where G saw them to the cove in front of me. A tall dorsal fin cut through, leading the way, before I could start recording. The footage is everything you’d expect from an excitable person equipped with an outdated iPhone—not only is it grainy, but I zoom out in a way that disorients the viewer. But in watching the recording back, I can identify what I was so excited about.

For about 5 seconds, just after the halfway point in the video, a cluster of four whales moves through. At the 46 second mark, a large dorsal fin is visible. Two seconds later, we see a smaller whale nose up to the surface. A third whale, about the same size as the first, surfaces at 49 seconds and all three are visible. At 51 seconds a fourth whale comes into view. Once they dive back down, I lose my cool; I shout to my husband that there are “tons of whales!” First, seeing the whales close was out of the ordinary in my experience and in family lore. Second was the possibility that the smaller fin, seen at 48 seconds, belonged to J59, the newest member of the pod. Since I can’t identify individual SRKWs, I sent my low-quality footage to people who can. Although the quality wasn’t good enough to name each whale, they confirmed that this was J pod based on my location and where the pod was spotted later that day.

In light of that finding, when I watch the video back, my audible excitement doesn’t make me cringe as much. Likewise, the sound of my breath in the audio recording I made outside on the deck poses less of a problem. Along the same vein, the camera shutter sound and someone else’s vocal enthusiasm shift from marring a recording of whales breathing into reminders of connectivity and presence in each other’s lives. Objectivity is cast off in favor of recognizing kin.

My examples illustrate the second, more polarizing half of Haraway’s slogan as she explains in an extended footnote (2016, 209). These excited sounds—my gasp, calling out to someone, concentrated breathing—make sense in the context of celebrating new life, a key part of what Haraway lobbies for instead of producing human offspring. “[Making] kin not babies” means establishing new reproductive norms while unlearning and working against the neo-imperial, neoliberal, misogynistic, and racist beliefs and commitments that prevent people from considering this prospect. In order to celebrate low birth rates and to opt out of reproduction, Haraway writes, it is necessary to be aware that histories of genocide and displacement, the fear of immigration, and sterilization abuse are rooted in a myth of racial purity and white supremacy. Haraway urges her readers to seek out and implement examples of “non-natalist kinnovations” that are happening in queer, decolonial, and Indigenous worlds and suggests her own innovations (Ibid.). What if we expanded adoption practices for and by the elderly, as Haraway suggests, or, what if each baby had three parents committed to them for life (Ibid.)? What if we took our celebrations of new orca life seriously? Her suggestions and possible courses of action are just that: despite the imperative tone, Haraway doesn’t offer a a step-by-step guide to making and maintaining interspecies alliances. I understand this not as a gap to be filled, but as a source of opportunity. Rather than prescribing a one-size-fits-all approach to making kin, Haraway leaves room for us to decide what strategies best suit different situations.

Conclusion: Listening as Making Kin

Admittedly, my work here doesn’t present an easy-to-follow methodology for others to use. Rather, I present my experience of repeated listening over time, as framed by a theoretical model (Haraway’s notion of celebrating non-human birth) in order to generate scholarly conversation. Based on my experience, I would posit that, first, listening to human reactions in experiences with SRKW emphasizes our shared environment and amplifies an extant sense of relationality. Second, thinking more broadly, while other work uses sound to identify individual whales and codify whale behavior, listening in the Anthropocene requires listening for and to human presence and activity.

What actions might bolster the celebration of new orca life? I can take celebrating new orca life seriously in the moment, and for a longer duration by trying out new habits. In doing so, I create new moments of multispecies recognition. For example, taking the time to learn whales’ fin shapes and markings in order to identify them would allow me to recognize them in the same way that I can recognize my neighbors’ faces. I can move through their habitat more gently, whether by choosing not to consume Chinook salmon, their primary food source, or by opting to kayak more than I use a motorboat to reduce noise pollution. Maybe whale birthdays could be marked on my calendar as a reminder of their steady co-presence. In doing so, I expand from an act of listening into other ways of being with whales, retaining my attunement towards them regardless of their audibility.

Notes:

References

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