Most of the people protesting this point also come from a place of racism, seeing how Lummi Nation is pushing the hardest & has a solid plan for Tokitae.
The orca are our family, no matter how settlers wanna slice it. Tokitae is another prime example of how we have had everything stripped away from us: Our land, our culture, our languages, our families & children especially. She never should have been stolen from us in the first place.
But to act as though a park that took her away from us has more legal rights over her than the very people who have cared for these animals since well before settlers came to this country is laudable. But, yknow, to take the words of well-known racist orcinus-ocean:
This is the White Ideal. White is Right, because what she has now is “so much better” than what Lummi Nation hopes to supply her with that could return her to her home that she was wrongfully taken away from. Of course settlers will believe that taking something from the ‘savage wild’ & bringing it somewhere civilized like a New York apartment is much better than where she was before.
But again, it’s all a perfect illustration of how perfectly colonized this mindset is.
A New York apartment is the best example of where she lives too: Cramped, crowded, isolated, polluted. Ripped away from anything & everything she has ever known, fed an unnatural diet of dead & iced over fish, forcefully ripped away from the very culture that makes her what she is.
& returning her to the place of her core, to her spiritual liberation, is the best thing we can do.
Because you’re absolutely; if she died tomorrow, then it would be another day of mourning in the community. Another day of “Well, she lived the best life she could” & lying to themselves. Another animal who is forgotten within the month like Valentin, like Unna, like Kyara, Kasatka, Kayla.
Another grave issue is that procap circles are quick to silence any conversation about rehab or release for her because “Keiko.” No scientific hypothesis has ever been proven with one example, but Keiko’s death (after a year in the wild, after learning how to successfully hunt for himself & traveling from Iceland all the way to Norway on his own) is enough for procaps to throw in the towel. Not because they care about the animals, but because they care more about themselves & their own greediness– another colonized mindset.
Why send her all the way away to Washington with her people when we can pay a sale price of $25 at the gate to watch her waste away in a pool that is too small & does’t even offer her any shade?
Nevermind the hundreds of orca that have died in human care either, those are all special cases. We did the best we could! Look at Corky! She’s managed to make it to 50 yrs old, so we must be doing something right! But by the same mindset they use for Rehab-Release, one death should have been enough.
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