Open Endings: Recent Gray Whale Strandings and their Cultural Representations in the Pacific Northwest

Whale strandings and mass whale strandings have captured human imaginations for millennia. My focus is on the 1999-2000 eastern North Pacific gray whale ‘unusual mortality event’ (UME), when 651 whales were found stranded in Mexico, the USA and Canada. This event sheds light on the historical and contemporary impacts of nineteenth and early twentieth-century commercial whaling, its physical effects on the species, and the cultural representation of gray whales in lay communities. I reflect on the shifting status of these animals as they experienced near-extinction, relative population recovery, and ongoing vulnerability to anthropogenic activity. Whale strandings trigger different responses shaped by science and religion, extinction and conservation, and the intertwined histories of whaling and colonialism. I focus here on two gray whale deaths in the Pacific Northwest and their cultural ‘afterlives’ during the UME period. The first whale stranded on Whidbey Island, Puget Sound, and its skeleton was subsequently salvaged for educational purposes. The second was found entangled in fishing nets in Clayoquot Sound, Vancouver Island, whereupon it was harvested it for consumption according to the traditional whaling customs of the Ahousaht First Nations people in a powerful enactment of community revival. This thesis is interdisciplinary, reflecting the complexity of gray whales and their significance in diverse human cultures. Grounded in the blue humanities, the thesis draws on marine environmental history, animal studies and environmental sciences to show how gray whale deaths provide rich insights into the species and its ecosystem while revealing different human communities’ changing relationship to whales.