Book Review: Readings

A Whale Hunt

Scribner, 285 pp., $25

When it comes to god's creatures, whales occupy a unique place in the menagerie of the modern mind. These enormous, otherworldly animals generally awaken a sense of transformative mystery (as well as modesty) in their interactions with humankind. But if merely seeing a whale brings change, Robert Sullivan asks in this nonfiction account of a Native American effort to revive whale hunting off the coast of Washington State, what must the hunting of these great creatures do to the human soul? What if your culture's subsistence and spiritual survival depended on the outcome of just such a hunt? That is the case of the Makah Tribe who, in a widely publicized 1997 decision, were granted permission to hunt gray whales off the Olympic Peninsula, the rugged and rainy landmass that separates Seattle and the Puget Sound from the Pacific.

As a reporter based in Oregon at the time, Sullivan headed up the Pacific Coast to determine the crucial facts of the story. In turn, he found himself drawn inexorably to the drama unfolding on the Makah Reservation, and ultimately spent two years tracking the events leading up to and following the controversial hunt. A successful magazine writer and contributing editor at Vogue, the author uses the most effective tricks of his trade -- exquisite descriptions and compelling profiles -- to engage the reader in a story that stakes the heritage of the Makah against the modern political biases of animal-rights activists and others bent on protecting the whales.

With great interest, Sullivan follows the formation of the whaling crew and the tribal politics surrounding the selection of crewmembers. He watches as protesters and news crews arrive, and he later joins the Makah on the beach as they butcher the whale with the help of an Alaskan whaler (too many generations had passed for any of the Makah themselves to recall exactly how to prepare the creature). In a vaguely comic scene toward the end of the book, Sullivan tells of eating the whale:

I suppose it tasted like whale. I can think of no better place in this story to describe the particular taste sensations I experienced in minute detail, except that I can't. The eating of the whale was a kind of a hyperconscious experience. It was the most overexamined meal I ever had. I continued to chew ... the entire time all I could hear was a voice in my brain that was shouting, You're eating a whale!

This is one of the few places in the book where Sullivan's faculties as an observer fail him. Throughout the rest of the story, Sullivan adjusts his lens to reflect that Native American traditions do not easily lend themselves to the whale-hugging mythos of the modern environmental or animal-rights activists, but neither does he discount these viewpoints as frivolous. The resulting examination of whaling, ecology, history, and race manages to hang together like a pod of dolphins, inspiring small moments of amazement, introspection, and humor.