Mourning for Tokitae

Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Oregon State University

I glanced at my phone only moments after I’d been peering across Puget Sound in hopes of seeing a distant splash, that dreamlike flash of black and white and glimmering blubber that bellows “Orca!” from the depths of my brain. I’d been blessed with such a sighting a few weeks before, after my husky mix, Alder, cued me (nose in the air) that something very special was happening out there. Today there was no such indication, nor a dorsal flare. On this tragic August morning, there was only a headline pronouncing Tokitae was gone.

Maybe if I knew how to listen from deeper within, I would have heard Tokitae’s presumed mother, “Ocean Sun,” release her vaporous grief to the vast skies beneath which her calf had been stolen half a century ago, in a crime against nature so brutal that, as a friend put it to me upon learning of the abducted orca’s passing, “it makes me ashamed to be human.”

Or the sorrowful cries of the Lummi Nation, whose people toiled to bring Tokitae home to the geography they’ve shared since time immemorial, because

…she belongs to the Salish Sea, she belongs to our larger sense of family here. She belongs to herself: she has the inherent right to be home and to be free. Repatriating Tokitae is Lummi Nation's sacred duty.

Some think that one reason Lolita/Tokitae is such a survivor is because her tank is a stone’s throw from the ocean. She can hear the waves, and smell the ripe ocean life. She remembers where she came from. Tokitae still sings the L-pod clan song. Like a person—or a community—that’s seen hard times, she has survived because she knows who she is and she has hope.

—Lummi Nation press kit, 2018

Photo: Katy Schaffer

Photo: Katy Schaffer

Oh, I wish I could have told her how sorry I am that she suffered for naught in that ghastly pool, where she swam in circles for decades in search of her wild.

I wish I could have told her that I’ve always known who she was

that she’ll not been forgotten

that I still have hope for her kind, and, on my better days, my own.

Instead I stood there with Alder on that lonely beach, both of us silent, my tears turning to sand.