40 | New Scientist | 28 November 2020
A
BOARD a small boat in Biscayne
Bay, Florida, Raynell Morris
(Squil-le-he-le) beats a steady
rhythm on a handheld drum. When she
shouts towards the shore, her voice cracks
with emotion. “Your people are here,”
she says. “We’ll bring you home.”
Morris’s call is directed at the Miami
Seaquarium where an animal she considers
her kin is kept in captivity. Sk’aliCh’elh-
tenaut – also known as Tokitae or Lolita – is
a Southern Resident orca. It is the last week
in September, and Morris has travelled 5500
kilometres from her home in Washington
state to mark the 50th anniversary of the
whale’s capture. Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s
incarceration remains an open wound for
Morris and the rest of the Lummi Nation, the
Native American people in whose territory
the whale was taken. Various groups have
been fighting for her release for decades.
Now, the Lummi are leading a new approach.
The latest bid to free Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut
centres on her cultural significance, striking
at the heart of questions about how to
recognise Indigenous rights and make
amends for historical harms. Morris and
another Lummi tribal elder, Ellie Kinley
(Tah-Mahs), intend to sue the Miami
Seaquarium to release Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut
under the Native American Graves Protection
and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), the federal
US law governing the return of objects of
cultural importance to Native Americans.
If they do, it would be the first time the
law has been applied to a living being.
Those involved believe it is the best hope
yet of getting Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut released.Features
Free Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut
Efforts to gain freedom for an orca held
in captivity for half a century have taken
an extraordinary twist, finds Elle Hunt
Southern Resident orcas are a single clan
of whales, consisting of three interrelated
matriarchal pods found in the Salish Sea,
off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. To
the Lummi, who have lived on the shore
alongside them for thousands of years, they
are sacred: they call them qwe’lhol’mechen,
“our relations under the water”. To scientists,
who have studied them intensely for a
decade, they are a trove of information
about orca social life and communication.
But the population is highly precarious
due to habitat degradation, noise pollution
and declining numbers of Chinook salmon,
which make up 85 per cent of their diet.
Last year, there were just 73 individuals –
with Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut making 74.
In 1970, she was one of seven calves taken
from their pod at Penn Cove in the Salish Sea
and transported across the US for display
in marine parks. Today, Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut
is the sole survivor. Her mother is believed
to be Ocean Sun, the 92-year-old matriarch
of one of the pods. For most of Sk’aliCh’elh-
tenaut’s life, home has been a small tank that
is as deep as she is long – 6 metres – which she“ In 1970, she was
one of seven
calves taken
from their pod
in the Salish Sea” MA
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