Date: Mon, 19 Jul 1999 08:21:30 -0800 From: "Michael A. Lewis" <ffmal-AT-aurora.alaska.edu> Subject: Re: Makah, whales and all that --------------D28E878FA4E54C66C7A392FD Sorry, comrades, I've been out of touch for a bit. I see my name being bandied about in association with Earth First! Better set the record straight... I started in monkeywrenching type goings-on in the 70s, before there was an Earth First! (c) of any stripe. A bunch of us got busted for pulling up survey stakes in Jackson Hole and that was the start of the original, the Real, Earth First! EF! was never an organization, just a loosely affiliated bunch of ne'er-do-wells dissatisfied with the status quo. The Earth First! Journal was the house organ that kept us informed of what others were doing, and where to go for the best wilderness beer parties. Earth First! fell apart in 1987 at the Round River Rendezvous on the North Rim. That's when the Twinklers showed up, hangers-on from the Rainbow Gathering who thought we should all be nice to one another and just get along. In 92, the EF! Journal coup d'etat stole the mouthpiece from the original movement, and the Twinklers and PC crowd took over. That was the first of the Woowoo nekked dances; the RRR has never been the same since. Dennis, you're right that the New Earth First! is not the same beast. The Animal Rightists and SS Apologists have taken it over and turned it into a club for hippie wannabes, guerilla theatre groupies and slob journalism flashers. They play into the hands of the federales, giving them the excuse they need to bring out the pepper spray, the plastic cuffs, the kinky black leather outfits. The New Earth First! makes a noisy distraction, while the corporate beast continues to chew away at What's Left. As to the Makah, Paul Watson and oppressive ecofascism: I signed on to the SISS petition because I was sick to hurling with Paul Watson's fascist diatribe, bringing out all the Aryan Nations leftovers from the Washington woods with all their Jack Metcalf followers. Watson has this self-proclaimed vision of saving the "buffalo of the sea" that he says he got on a vision quest at Pine Ridge during the Wounded Knee occupation. I've reminded Paul on a couple of occasions that I was there at Wounded Knee and I know from talking to Leonard Crow Dog that he left before the fourth door of a seven door sweat, so he didn't have much of a chance for his "vision quest." I also told Paul to fuck-off when he initially proposed to take on the Siberian Yupik whale hunters of St. Lawrence Island who have been hunting whales continuously for the past 2,000 years. I guess I 'm partly responsible for him taking on the Makah, where he could get good publicity from the Seattle/Portland megalopolis and all the enviro-weenies he could crowd into his rubber boaties. Watson's lies about "Inuit" names for the gray whale are just more of his racist vitriol spewed about to justify his own pogrom. Coastal Arctic peoples hunt gray whales as much as humpbacks. They kill the smaller ones because "they taste better,' but when you're out in a walrus-hide boat with a hand harpoon pointed at this huge beast rising from the waters, you don't take a lot of time to speciate the damned thing. Food is food, and mungtaq is mungtaq. (humpies do taste better, to my palate, but I'm no connoisseur. Give me a good walrus steak any day). My main objection to Watson and his ilk is their continuing oppression of a people who have suffered under Amerikkkan imperialist hegemony for the past 500 years. This insistence that the Makah must live like Paul Watson and the rest of the Homo vegetarianensis crowd is just the latest phase in half a millennium of ethnocide, cultural oppression and "assimilation," the polite term invented by the United $tate$ of Amerikkka for its overt policy of genocide visited on the indigenous peoples of North America. Here's an example, in true imperialist rhetoric, of Watson's justification, out of the mouth of his chief flack: "We note your concern for the "misfortune of the Makah people" that this situation has brought about, and that "we must correct this before it is too late and people are killed or hurt," but such is not within our power. The Makah were made fully aware of the response their actions would bring for several years before they killed a whale, and chose to spurn all pleas, compromises, and offers of assistance. Hence, their misfortune now is of their own making. Never could it be more truly said that a people brought their fate upon themselves." Sound familiar? Damn! I should have invited Watson up to St. Lawrence Island and put him out in a skiff with the hunters from Savoonga. They'd a made short work of his "buffalo of the sea" campaign. Michael A. Lewis Moose Mountain, Alaska --------------D28E878FA4E54C66C7A392FD
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