Environmental History of Indigenous Whaling

Indigenous history is environmental history. Both share an interest in relationships between people and places. With its focus on relationality and kinship, though, Indigenous approaches and analytical frameworks underpin new approaches to the history of whales and whaling, particularly in Pacific and North American historiography. Traditional studies of whaling have focused on the development and expansion of commercial whaling, offered economic histories of trade, and considered cross-cultural relations and impacts on Indigenous societies. New histories of whaling, often led by Indigenous scholars, have addressed a wider set of questions about human and nonhuman relations. In addition to stressing Indigenous presence in whaling, Indigenous scholars emphasize whale cultures and cosmologies because whales are ancestors, kin, and a gift from the sea. Whether subsistence whaling or industrial in scale, Indigenous peoples have been engaged in whaling on a continuous basis, and this ongoing connection is a core theme in the scholarship. Relations between extractive whaling, capitalism and imperialism, and Indigenous communities are an abiding theme in the scholarship, but new approaches informed by Indigenous studies and women’s history have emphasized the role of gender, labor, and mobility within the 19th-century whaling industry. Indigenous whaling includes a variety of practices, from making use of stranded whales to the whale hunt, and they encompass peoples from the Pacific, the Americas, and Asia. The literature on Indigenous whaling, though, is particularly strong in Pacific and North American history.