Introduction

When I was around 6 years old, I would go to the library each week with my mom. Before we would select what books I wanted to take home to read, I would go into the video room on my own. I would scan the shelves for images of whales or dolphins looking for a National Geographic VHS tape I hadn't seen yet. It was on one of these tapes that I watched Killer Whales off the coast of Patagonia, Argentina hunt seals using a regional technique of beaching themselves. They would slide their massive bodies onto the sand, grab a baby seal between their massive jaws and retreat back into the water. I was horrified and in awe. At the end of the hunt, a juvenile killer whale thrust himself onto the beach, inches away from a helpless baby seal; it rolled forward towards the whale's mouth, but the orca closed his jaw, shoved the baby seal further up the beach with his rostrum and slid backward into the water. He spared the seal and the hunt was over. "Is this compassion?" the narrator asked in the video, Yes! my 6-year-old brain replied, "it is impossible to know," he concluded.

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I am not the first, nor the last, person to marvel at the immense, complex and intelligent creatures that occupy our planet's oceans. However, my views of whales and other animals are largely shaped by a euro-centric view of animal hierarchy; where humans are at the top and all others fall below. Indigenous folklore about or including whales shows a perspective that is more similar to an interconnected web of subsistence, ancestry and spiritualism. Within the pages of this website you'll find stories from the arctic, Alaska, Canada and the northeastern United States that center on the material and verbal folklore of whales among indigenous peoples.

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- Paris

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