Colonize This, MOTHERFUCKERS! The Day the Orcas Fought Back

Ok, so maybe the headline is a little strong, but it’s how I reacted when I read that a group of orcas are attacking pleasure boats off the coast of Spain. “Yeah, baby!” I thought, “Get some! Show those rich bastards who’s the boss!”

My enthusiasm for the attacks comes from a deep sense of shared identity with the orcas. Coastal Indigenous people of the Northwest, Canada and Alaska like me feel we are related to them. Their images appear in our artwork, stories and songs, our dances, personal names and clan designations. It can be said we are all orca.

How It Went Down, I bet

The orca families off the coast of Spain endured the plague of humans for generations. The humans overfished the orca’s favorite food, tuna. And rich humans in yachts filled their waters with noisy boat engines and toxic fuel emissions.

Orcas breaching off the coast of Alaska. (Public domain photo by Robert Pittman)

Then the pandemic hit. Recreational boats disappeared from their waters. Demand for tuna fell and less fishing was done. The orca families loved it. At last the sea was theirs again. They could fish and feed their families and play and live the lives they were meant to live.

But then the boats started coming back. The clan leader, the Grandmother Orca, said, “Don’t worry. There’s just a few. It won’t be like before.”

A young warrior swam forward and said, “I say kill 'em all! We’re not letting them take over again!”

"No!" the Grandmother Orca said. "We wait." And the clan bowed to her.

They waited. More boats came. The orca families and clans held another meeting. “What are we going to do? We can’t fight those big tuna boats. It’s going to go back to the way it was soon and they’ll take all our food again.”

Then, the Grandmother Orca raised her head and looked at each of her family solemnly. “We attack. Not the tuna boats. We attack the yachts. That’s where the rich humans are, the ones causing everything. We attack them.”

The other orca warriors swam forward and together they all swam off singing a war song, searching for their enemies.

Well, it coulda been like that…

In 2002, My Aunt Judy, my mom’s twin, belonged to a Tlingit dance group. On June 11 of that year she and her group boarded the state ferry Evergreen on its trip from Seattle to Vashon Island and sang to a young orphaned killer whale.

The author’s Aunt Judy (Louise Hughes) her daughter Linda and her granddaughters Kayla and Michelle sing an ancient Tlingit orca song to Springer, an orphaned killer whale in the waters off Vashon Island. (Photo by Mike Urban, Seattle Post Intelligencer’

The orca’s official name was A73, a member of the ‘A’ pod of Northern Resident Killer Whales that normally swam off the coast of Vancouver Island. But somehow she had gotten separated from her family and took to hanging out near the Vashon Island ferry docks. She was given the nickname Springer.

She was only about a year and a half old, a toddler, and had lost a lot of weight. She would follow the ferries and sing and click to them, perhaps seeing them as friends who might help her.

A Tlingit man named Floyd Fulmer worked on one of the ferries and he heard Springer’s calls when the engines were quiet. Floyd was also a member of my Aunt’s Tlingit dance group and he told them about the whale’s attempts to communicate.

Wildlife experts had known about Springer’s presence for months. They knew she would die soon if not returned to her pod. They arranged to capture and transport her back up to Canadian waters.

The day before they captured her, my Aunt Judy and her Tlingit dance group, the Kuteeya Dancers, danced and sang to Springer from the deck of the ferry. My aunt, her daughter Linda and two of her grandchildren, Michelle and Kayla, wore fine regalia, handmade button blankets and wooden headpieces carved in the shape of an orca's dorsal fin.

The song they sang was an ancient one, sung by our clan ancestors to orcas they saw while out hunting. My aunt and the group sang the song to thank the child orca for coming to visit them, and also to say farewell. 

Springer was captured the next day and later reunited with her pod off the coast of Vancouver Island. By all accounts she was welcomed back, has thrived, and now has a calf of her own. Perhaps one day she will be the clan leader and will tell her grandchildren stories about her adventure among the humans and the Tlingit relatives who sang to her.

Go Orcas!

The orcas have had their water polluted, their food stolen, and their sea filled with noise. Many of their children were kidnapped and forced to perform for crowds of humans.

Two years ago a young orca mother pushed the lifeless body of her calf in front of her for weeks. The calf had died of malnutrition.

That mother, J35, also known as Tahlequah, recently had a new baby and experts are optimistic about its survival.

So go Spanish orcas! Chomp those rich people's rudders! Bonk 'em! Spin 'em around. I stand with you, my relatives!

Frank Hopper is a Tlingit freelance writer, born in Juneau, Alaska.