A Whale Hunt: How a Native-American Village Did What No One Thought It Could

Rating:
Summary: The Makah and the Whale
Review: Having lived in Washington and seriously followed the Makah Tribe and their trials and tribulations, I was facinated by Mr. Sullivan's insight. He is right on and extremely vivid in his descriptions and insights. I found myself taking the trips with him and totally enjoying every minute of his journey.

Rating:
Summary: Romantic Abstraction vs Native Reality
Review: I couldn't put this book down. It is simply the most honest book I have read about a modern Indian community. I am a white woman and I have been married into a Northwest Native fishing family for fifteen years. Sullivan doesn't romanticize the Indian people in his story but he obviously respects them. He sees their shortcomings but he does not judge them. Sullivan understands that no outsider can ever really know what treaty rights mean to Native Americans. Yet Sullivan takes the reader to the reservation and allows us to experience these tribal people as they live through a profound moment in their history. Every detail in this book rang true, even the fact that Mr. Watson, an anti-whaling protest leader, would claim to be adopted by the Oglala. I have run into many white people who believe that they know more about traditional Indian spirituality than actual Indians. The Makahs in this story don't fit anyones preconcieved ideas of how Indian people should act, feel, speak or pray. This book is about a complex and ambiguous reality. Without preaching, it shows how much we still can learn from Indian communities. I bought a number of copies to give to my friends.

Rating:
Summary: Badly researched in the part I know about!
Review: I do not know the Makah. I have never lived with them or been along on their hunt so I can not comment on the veracity of that portion of this book. It seems true but then I found such a totally sloppy bit of "research" on the part of the author that it puts the entire book in doubt for me.
The author accepts Paul Watson the racist "captain" of Sea Shepherd on his word when each of his various stories could have been so easily checked out and found to be what they are - lies. In 1973 I was the first Medic into Wounded Knee. I created the clinic and became the chief Medic. Watson claims to have been a Medic at the Knee and to have done many brave and heroic acts. He claims to have had a vision in the Inipi (Sweat Lodge) and to have been given a name by the Wicasa Wakan (medicine men) Crowdog and Black Elk. He bases his credential for opposing the Makah on this vision. Mr. Sullivan believes him. Mr. Sullivan gets an "F" for not doing his homework.
Watson was not a medic at Wounded Knee '73. On several occasions I have personally posed some basic questions about the clinic to Watson, he could not answer any of them. From his lack of knowledge about the layout of the village as it was during the siege and the fact that not one WK'73 veteran can remember him (Last time we had a get together I asked about it in a group of over one hundred WK'73 Vets!) I doubt thay he was there at all. Crowdog and Black Elk both say they do not know him. Both Wicasa Wakan say they did not conduct naming ceremony for him. Both deny any such "vision" occuring or that they interprettted any vision. Rocky Madrid doesn't know him even though Watson claims to have saved his life under fire.
The list goes on and each bit is easily researched. Mr. Sullivan did not bother doing research, instead he relied on Watson's word. Very very sloppy.

Having lived on reservations I will say tha the parts about the Makah ring true, but, knowing this much of the book to be fiction put the whole book into doubt for me.

Rating:
Summary: A Response from one of the players
Review: I found A Whale Hunt to be an interesting read. It is apparent that the author's sympathies lie with the whalers and that is okay. I do think that he was fair in his portrayal of myself and the other whale defenders and I have no complaint here. My complaint is with the innaccuracies of names and events as documented in the book. There did not seem to be much effort at fact checking. The book states that the two ships that I had at Neah Bay were the "Edward Abbey" and the "Sirenian". The vessel he called the "Edward Abbey" was my ship "Sea Shepherd." The "Edward Abbey" was the previous name for the "Sirenian". Mr. Sullivan spent considerable time with the whaling crew but did not spend any time with my crew and did not board the "Sea Shepherd". Mr. Sullivan writes that my ship "Sirenian" was at Neah Bay when the National Guard was there in 1998. He said that Sea Shepherd flew a banner over the Makah Days event at that time. In fact we were not there at Makah Days in 1998 nor were any other protesters. The event he is referring to was at Makah Days of 1997. The National Guard attended Makah Days in 1998. Mr. Sullivan refers to my maternal Grandfather as Grandfather Watson. His name was Otto Larsen. He states that he was my mother's father so he should have known the surname would not have been Watson. He refers to Costa Rica as Coast Rica. There were many other mistakes that a little fact checking could have prevented. Mr. Sullivan seems to be saying that the cruel slaughter of the young whale was justified because one man, whose behaviour had been shady was redeemed in his community. He did not mention that Wayne Johnson said, "If nothing else, we pissed off the white man." The Makah did not kill that whale. The whale was taken because of the power and support of the U.S.government in supporting the whale hunt. The author does not mention the millions of dollars spent by the U.S.government to kill this whale. I found the story interesting but it was a shoddy bit of journalism and Mr. Sullivan is a journalist. Mr. Sullivan has a responsibilty to history to get his facts right. He did not.

Report by Captain Paul Watson Sea Shepherd International

Rating:
Summary: A Great Memento
Review: I read this book completely ignoring the footnotes that continually compares the parallels to the book Mobey Dick. I was literally in the middle of some of the events leading up to and following the whale hunt, and to see someone capture it and write about it so visually was terrific. There are a few minor errors [Paul Parker was not a part of the crew, and Kleckoh means "Thankyou"], but overall Robert Sullivan conveys a people geographically isolated, rising above the family and tribal bickerings, protesters, personal battles and ocean to bring us a whale we waited more than 75 years for. Even knowing how the book ended I couldn't put it down until it was finished!

Rating:
Summary: Hunt for an editor
Review: In "A Whale Hunt", by Robert Sullivan, the main focus is on the effort -- and eventual success -- of the Makah tribe from Washington State in resurrecting their cultural heritage by hunting whales. The story should be compelling, and Sullivan makes a valiant attempt to share the story from the viewpoint of the tribe. The problem is that Sullivan apparently decided that it would be too expensive to invest in a proper editor, or that the editors at Simom and Schuster had better things to do than edit this book. That leaves the reader with the incomprehensibly difficult task of trying to sort out the grammatical errors. To wit: Page 22, "He is compact and bespectacled, and he was wearing khakis and a polo shirt." The change of tense in this sentence would have been picked up by even the most junior editor. Even worse: Page 28, "Harriette talked of being in the Army and about a dream she had that involved a horse, which, to her, had something to do with Christianity being forced on the Indian people, and which became a poem." It was impossible for me to continue to read this book after trying to sort out the meaning of this sentence. I will save you all the trouble of plodding through this awful book. A group of native Americans overcomes the objections of the "save the whale" environmental whackos, and in the process manages to recapture some of the heritage that was taken from them by European invaders.

Rating:
Summary: Hunt for an editor
Review: In "A Whale Hunt", by Robert Sullivan, the main focus is on the effort -- and eventual success -- of the Makah tribe from Washington State in resurrecting their cultural heritage by hunting whales. The story should be compelling, and Sullivan makes a valiant attempt to share the story from the viewpoint of the tribe. The problem is that Sullivan apparently decided that it would be too expensive to invest in a proper editor, or that the editors at Simom and Schuster had better things to do than edit this book. That leaves the reader with the incomprehensibly difficult task of trying to sort out the grammatical errors. To wit: Page 22, "He is compact and bespectacled, and he was wearing khakis and a polo shirt." The change of tense in this sentence would have been picked up by even the most junior editor. Even worse: Page 28, "Harriette talked of being in the Army and about a dream she had that involved a horse, which, to her, had something to do with Christianity being forced on the Indian people, and which became a poem." It was impossible for me to continue to read this book after trying to sort out the meaning of this sentence. I will save you all the trouble of plodding through this awful book. A group of native Americans overcomes the objections of the "save the whale" environmental whackos, and in the process manages to recapture some of the heritage that was taken from them by European invaders.

Rating:
Summary: Inspiring, fascinating
Review: This is an inspiring, funny, interesting, quirky, and quietly heroic story, very well told. Even without the climactic, unifying event, it would be a fascinating study of a community and its people.

I think the reviewer Doc Rosen, below, is wrong when he says that Sullivan accepted the "lies" of Paul Watson, the anti-whale-hunt captain of the Sea Shepherd. It seemed to me that Sullivan's portrayal of Watson as a bombastic fraud was quite effective, although never explicit, and that he merely passed along, skeptically, what Watson told him, and then left it to the reader to accept or reject.

I, for one, did not believe Watson for a minute, and I am grateful to Rosen for the confirmation.

I can do no better than to second Karen Rudolph's review, below. I only wish Sullivan could have provided portraits of more of the people involved (e.g., more crew members).

Rating:
Summary: The Makah and the Whale
Review: This is an interesting book, and Sullivan does his best to present pro-hunt and anti-hunt views objectively (though I agree his sympathies lie with the Makah, as mine did).

However, the book needed a stronger editor:

1. The book is a bit rambling, as if it were written largely verbatim from notes or a journal, and he couldn't bear not to use any of them; we just don't need to know the minutia like the fact that Sullivan put his daughter's car seat in the trunk in order to give two people a ride (his daughter, his car, the car seat, etc., play *no part* in the story's narrative - this is just filler).

2. In addition to the errors mentioned in Capt. Watson's review, there are numerous others (e.g., Navajos live largely in Arizona, not New Mexico). Someone trained as a journalist knows how to research facts and thus should be more careful with them; these errors make the reader doubt the veracity of Sullivan's account.

3. A few of the Moby Dick/Melville footnotes are interesting, but mostly they are annoying. As with distracting minutia, Sullivan seems to feel that he spent all that time reading Moby Dick and then Melville biographies, so he'd better put them in the book. He reaches so far to include Melville tidbits that it becomes quite comical: Sullivan mentions one of the crew is going bowling - BAM, footnote, Melville once worked at a bowling alley!!!; Sullivan went on an outing on April Fool's Day - BAM, footnote, Melville wondered if life was a joke!!! Sullivan feels these are cosmic coincidences joining the Makah whalers and the famous novelist of whaling. Unfortunately he undercuts this side story by seeing coincidences in things as common as breathing.

All that said, it's still not a bad book. It's just frustrating, because with some deft editing and reorganizing the book could have been outstanding.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent memoir of some guy I never heard of
Review: This is one of those books that I do not quite know how to rate. The book is a first person account of a outsider observing the Makah Indian hunt for a gray whale off the Olympic peninsula in Northwestern Washington state.

The book is the greatest memoir I have ever read. The book gets a little wordy, but the writing is full of vivid details. I think the author provides thoughtful insight into the whale hunt through numerous conversations and interactions with local Makah Indians. I do agree with a previous reviewer that the author's viewpoint did seem slightly biased toward the Makah, but not enough to ruin the book. Some previous reviewers commented on the accuracy of the book. To be honest, I do not know enough about the topic to note whether the author's story is inaccurate or not.

I purchased the book as I wanted to find out more about the Makah whale hunt, as I did not realize the significance of the hunt to the Northwest Indians at the time it happened. Judging by the title of the book and the previous reviews, this did not seem like a bad choice. However, while the book is an excellent memoir, in the end it is a memoir of some journalist I have never heard of. I admire the author's dedication to the story as he followed it for well over a year while other reporters only seemed to appear when they though something will happen. In the end, I really did not care if the author slept in a tent or a plywood shack and I really did not find the type of car he rented to be especially relevant. While I am sure the trip to see the gray whales in the Baja Peninsula in Mexico was a moving experience, I really did not feel it fit into the overall storyline of the book. Also, I personally found the whole Moby Dick parallel to be incredibly irritating.

The book is an excellent read, though it does get wordy at times and some of the subjects do not seem to have much relevance to the storyline. The author had a lot of interaction with the Makah Indians who were on the whaling crew. For this reason, I would recommend the book to anyone who is interested in the Makah gray whale hunt. I would also recommend the book for anyone who is interested in the modern life of Northwest coastal Indians or who are bored and just looking for some decent non-fiction to read.