from the website:
The black snake represents pipelines that threaten the ecosystem that both the Orca and Salmon depend on for survival.
“The Scream, a 63″ tall exhibition of my craft, was conceived and carved while teaching at Pratt Fine Art in Seattle. It is a meditation on the colonial forces—fossil fuel projects, overfishing, climate change, and more—threatening our relatives under the sea, the killer whale. It is also a memorial to Tahlequah, the killer whale mother who swam with her dead calf balanced on her head for 17 days in the summer of 2018. That same summer, my family—my daughter Zia, my son Julian, and I paddled through the Salish Sea on the tribal canoe journey to Puyallup. Each paddle stroke and each cut, a prayer for our relations and our Earth.”
The morning we depart marks the fourth day that an orca, nicknamed Tahlequah, has made headlines for carrying the corpse of her dead calf with her in a so-called “tour of grief.” Tahlequah’s display of mourning—keeping her lifeless child afloat for thousands of miles, nudging the baby’s body forward with her head—serves as a morbid reminder of the grim outlook for the southern resident orca population: They number just 75 whales and have not seen a single successful birth in three years. Little surprise, then, that the Center for Whale Research estimates the population has a five-year window to reproduce, after which they will fade into memory.
Native people, particularly on Canoe Journey, follow Tahlequah’s story closely. Many Salish consider killer whales kin. The Lummi, whose homelands lie north of Seattle and who paddle their canoe not far ahead of ours, call the charismatic mammals qwe lhol mechen, which means “our relative under the water.”
The bond is spiritual, but it’s also one of shared suffering. Tahlequah’s calf died largely from social forces: fishermen netting her salmon, industry polluting her waters, and ships disrupting her hunting grounds. Indigenous peoples know these grievances—and the struggle to protect food and water from those who would pilfer without hesitation—all too well.
Many Native communities know Tahlequah’s grief. It was not so long ago that experts spoke of Indians the way they speak, today, of the southern resident orcas: as endangered, vanishing, the last of their kind. We Indigenous have returned from that catastrophic brink, but the specter of death and disappearance still haunts us. A survey of Native women in Seattle found that 94 percent, or 139 out of 148, were raped or coerced into sex at least once in their lifetime. There is a ghastly trend of Indigenous women and girls going missing and turning up murdered across the United States and Canada. At the end of 2017, Native Americans and Alaska Natives made up 1.8 percent of missing cases in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Crime Information Center database even though they represent just 0.8 percent of the overall population.
-Julian Brave NoiseCat “In the Salish Sea, Native American Communities Bond Over a Rigorous Canoe Voyage” Pacific Standard, 11 Oct 2018
