MovieMaker
In Resident Orca, Indigenous Women Fight to Save a Whale They Consider Family
The Lhaq’temish people of the Pacific Northwest, also known as the Lummi Nation, don’t think of orcas as animals. As we learn in Resident Orca, the hypnotic documentary now playing at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, they think of the whales as family, and call them Qwe ‘lhol mechen.
“They wear orca regalia and live under the waves. But they’re our relations from the very beginning,” the film’s lead protagonist, tribal elder Squil-le-he-le Raynell Morris, says near the beginning of Resident Orca.
So she was deeply troubled when she learned that a whale taken from the Salish Sea off the coast of Washington in 1970 had ended up across the country at an amusement attraction called the Miami Seaquarium. The whale, who the tribe call Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut, was one of dozens of orcas pulled from the region in the 1960s and ’70s to entertain humans with tricks.
Resident Orca chronicles Morris’ campaign — with unlikely allies including the owner of the Indianapolis Colts football team — to free the whale and bring her home to the Salish Sea.
The film makes very clear, very early on, that the stakes are high: A whale named Hugo, captured with Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut decades ago, died after ramming his head into the side of his pool, his only hope of escape. Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut saw it.
But Resident Orca isn’t just about captive whales, tragic as their circumstances are. In an emotional interview a few hours before the sold-out SFiFF screening of the film, Morris detailed the central metaphor of the film: The whales are like so many other Indigenous targets of colonialism, taken from their homelands, separated from their families, and removed from their culture, all in the name of capitalism masquerading as education.
“Our late chief Tsi’li’xw told of why we consider Qwe ‘lhol mechen our relatives that live under the waves,” Morris told MovieMaker. “Because they were people once too, the winged, the finned, the two-legged, the four-legged. He said, ‘You have to respect them all, because they’re all our relatives.’ And he said it’s just like what they did to our children, with the Indian residential boarding schools, with the churches and the government taking by force the children, separating them from families, from their homes, from their traditional foods, from their language.
“And that’s exactly what they did to Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut. They stripped her of everything, and they demanded that she convert to their way, not speak her language, not eating her foods: ‘If you want to get fed, you’re going to jump higher.'”
The Lummi also share another connection with the whales: Salmon. The tribe long relied on it for fishing, and it is the local orcas’ sole source of food. But dams have reduced the salmon population, and the Lummi are struggling alongside the whales. The orcas are endangered not only because of the food shortage, but because an entire generation was taken from the waters and shipped off, in the 1960s and ’70s, to perform.
Why were orca shows so amusing, in the days before documentaries like Blackfish called attention to the plight of trapped marine mammals?
“It was man versus nature,” Resident Orca co-director Sarah Sharkey Pearce told MovieMaker. “We were bringing the wonder of nature within our fishbowl, within our reach and under the guise of education, when actually we were dominating, right?”
The Miami Seaquarium was taken over by The Dolphin Company, which vowed better treatment of animals and had nothing to do with Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s capture. As depicted in the documentary, Morris sees the company’s takeover as a chance to finally win the orca’s freedom.
Pearce and Resident Orca co-director Simon Schneider took the authorship of the saga so seriously that they gave Morris the right to veto anything she didn’t like in the documentary. And they took care to center the story on her and another Lummi woman, Tah-Mahs Ellie Kinley, even when some very colorful characters — including aforementioned Colts owner, Jim Irsay — enter the narrative.
Both Lummi women are credited as executive producers on the film, alongside James Costa (whose recent credits include Homegrown and Hidden Letters) and Lynne Kirby (whose recent credits include Thick Skin and Unmasking Jihadi John: Anatomy of a Terrorist.)
We talked with Squil-le-he-le Raynell Morris and Sarah Sharkey Pearce about treating animals as revenue streams, the importance of names, and the stunning fact that Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s mother, from whom she was separated more than half a century ago, is believed to be still alive.
MovieMaker: How did you first hear of Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s situation?
Squil-le-he-le Raynell Morris: We didn’t know for decades. It came from the Orca Network. People there had been campaigning for decades, and couldn’t get anywhere. And so they brought it to one of our councilmen, and he brought it to our department. I was leading the Sovereignty Treaty Protection Office for the Lummi Nation, and he brought it to us. We did the research and said, ‘That’s our relative. We did not have consultation or give consent for them to take her, and we want her back.’
MovieMaker: Did these whale shows take off in the 1970s because after the success of Disneyland and other theme parks, people saw whales as a way to “improve” on those attractions?
Squil-le-he-le Raynell Morris: Often, animals didn’t have value unless they could raise revenues. She was a corporate asset, and that’s why, when they were doing these roundups, they only took the young, the babies, because they could be sold and transported easily. They were easy to train because it was food-driven training.
MovieMaker: The Miami Seaquarium gave Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut the name Lolita, though she was also eventually given the nickname Toki. How did you decide to use her tribal name in the film, and how did she get the other names?
Squil-le-he-le Raynell Morris: When the Miami Seaquarium vet was in Seattle and checking out the babies after that 1970 capture and he picked Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut, he thought he was doing a good thing with an Indigenous name and called her Tokitae. And then when they got back to Miami and they were making her and Hugo perform, they decided that was too difficult. People didn’t connect, so they renamed her Lolita. That was her showgirl name.
And our Chief Tsi’li’xw would say this is so wrong. Your cultural name is your identity and your linkage to your descendants. And so we went out to the islands with the chief and named her whole family.
And so I had to be patient with the outside people that were uncomfortable about saying Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut, and felt more comfortable with Toki, and those kinds of names, and some still call her Lolita. But I was told and guided: Don’t worry about it. You always call her by her traditional name, and at some point the whole world will call her by it.
Sarah Sharkey Pearce: Because so much of the story is about Raynell calling her home, I think the name is critical.
MovieMaker: What lesson can we draw from keeping whales in captivity and keeping animals in captivity in general? Do you think there’s a lesson not just in marine parks, but in zoos?
Squil-le-he-le Raynell Morris: Absolutely, I think one thing that I correlated to her captivity was the sheltering in place with Covid. After about 90 days of shelter in place, people were freaking out. There wasn’t food, there wasn’t toilet paper, they couldn’t see their friends, they couldn’t see their family. And the trauma was from 90 days? Think about 50some years. We have a tiny glimpse of what she endured.
But I think the other big part is to look at the Indigenous knowledge on how we relate to the air, to the water, to the land, to the trees, to the animals or not animals, our relations. Everything in our cosmology is affected. When you break one strand, it affects the whole. They broke a strand when they stole her.
And we have to find a better way with technology. We’re not saying, “End education in the zoos and in the aquariums.” But use technology to do that, not real beings.
Sarah Sharkey Pearce: I think one of the things that you say that’s so powerful — Ellie says it as well — is that our fates are the same. What happens to them happens to us. And I feel that so much in the story. She holds up this mirror for us to show us how barbaric we were and how barbaric we continue to be in some ways, and I think the struggle to release her, the struggle to free her, just shows us that there’s actually real urgency now.
MovieMaker: Did anyone make the argument at any point that it would be more dangerous to move her from the the Miami Seaquarium than to leave her there?
Squil-le-he-le Raynell Morris: Yeah, the captive industry did. Previous trainers. One of the trainers said, “Oh, we should build another tank for her and keep her there.” How is that better?
Sarah Sharkey Pearce: They move orca all the time. The argument about that has to do with just sort of status-quo thinking.
MovieMaker: The drone photography in this film is so excellent, and contributes so much — especially in allowing you to see inside Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s tank. When did you realize how important it would be?
Sarah Sharkey Pearce: It was almost like we started checking in on her. Simon would say, “I think I’m gonna go film Toki this morning.” And I’d be like, OK, you go.
MovieMaker: Where do you go from here?
Squil-le-he-le Raynell Morris: Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s mother is 95 and still alive, still the matriarch of the pod. The pod just had a new calf, just a couple of weeks old. They’re orange when they’re born, and they’re little. And so everybody was so elated that there was a new calf, and everybody was so hopeful. But within a couple of weeks, the baby was emaciated. The baby was with another pod member, not her mom, and there still hasn’t been a sighting of the mom or the calf.
So they’re not pronouncing the calf as deceased, but it’s really a call to action that their family is going to go extinct. They’re on the endangered species list. The salmon are on the endangered species list.
MovieMaker: Can you talk about some of your takeaways from the experience of making Resident Orca?
Sarah Sharkey Pearce: I do think we need to get comfortable as white people with that sense of culpability. We are implicated. We do need to do something differently.
Squil-le-he-le Raynell Morris: And I think the other thing that I personally learned, and our people learned, is collaboration and trust with non-Indigenous filmmakers to make sure you have that voice, you have that impact, that you’re a partner and your voice is heard.
Sarah Sharkey Pearce: It wasn’t a promise I made. It was a contract that said that Raynell had final edit. She could veto. And so that compromises this traditional Western sense of journalistic integrity and authorship. But I think we have to challenge authorship to tell more complete stories, and sharing that power with her allowed something really miraculous to happen in the film.
I think it was essential in this case, especially coming to this as a white filmmaker. I’m a queer person, and I understand power and privilege and have been processing that stuff since I was younger. But I’ve never partnered with an Indigenous person to make a film before. I’m not from, you know, I’m not Lhaq’temish. The whales are new to me. I haven’t lived alongside them for 10,000 years. I think that our difference created a very powerful — something.
Squil-le-he-le Raynell Morris:: Family.
Resident Orca is now on the festival circuit and plays the Planet in Focus festival in Toronto this weekend, followed by the Red Nation Film Festival in Los Angeles in November.
By Tim Molloy
