A Whale Hunt: How a Native American Village Did What No One Thought It Could

by Robert Sullivan

Book Overview

The critically acclaimed New York Times Notable Book about a Native American tribe's quest to regain the lost art of whale hunting, from the author of The Meadowlands.

For centuries the hunting of the whale was what defined the Makah, a Native American tribe in Neah Bay, but when commercial whaling drove the gray whale to near extinction in the 1920s, the Makah voluntarily discontinued their tradition and hung up their...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684864347
• ISBN13: 9780684864341
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Romantic Abstraction vs Native Reality

I couldn't put this book down. It is simply the most honest book I have read about a modern Indian community. I am a white woman and I have been married into a Northwest Native fishing family for fifteen years. Sullivan doesn't romanticize the Indian people in his story but he obviously respects them. He sees their shortcomings but he does not judge them. Sullivan understands that no outsider can ever really know what treaty rights mean to Native Americans. Yet Sullivan takes the reader to the reservation and allows us to experience these tribal people as they live through a profound moment in their history. Every detail in this book rang true, even the fact that Mr. Watson, an anti-whaling protest leader, would claim to be adopted by the Oglala. I have run into many white people who believe that they know more about traditional Indian spirituality than actual Indians. The Makahs in this story don't fit anyones preconcieved ideas of how Indian people should act, feel, speak or pray. This book is about a complex and ambiguous reality. Without preaching, it shows how much we still can learn from Indian communities. I bought a number of copies to give to my friends.

Vividly Facinating and Incredibly Insightful

Having lived in Washington and seriously followed the Makah Tribe and their trials and tribulations, I was facinated by Mr. Sullivan's insight. He is right on and extremely vivid in his descriptions and insights. I found myself taking the trips with him and totally enjoying every minute of his journey.

Hunting: From the swamp to the sea

Sullivan's first book, The Meadowlands was a masterpiece. What I enjoyed most were his chats with and observations of people. Now, we have his latest effort (though his prose style seems effortless) and it is chuck full of people...people you get to know very well as you read this page turner. We can hope that Sullivan's next adventure introduces us to more interesting folks. It will be difficult for him, however, to sustain the drama that envelops A Whale Hunt. BC, Tucson AZ

Fishing with Wayne and Donnie

Despite a bad cold and a fever and the World Series, I couldn't stop reading A Whale Hunt. Like the books I enjoy most, I found this work to be a great adventure, which I was luckily enough to be a part of. And though it is a beautifully researched piece, the book was fun and touching and didn't treat the entire event as some somber anthropology lesson with the noble savages. I greatly look forward to Robert Sullivan's next book.

a serious page-turner

What a riveting story this book tells. It's about a tribe of American Indians in the Pacific Northwest who are trying to make a comeback against great odds, trying to reconnect with an ancestral tradition that none of them has witnessed, and doing so amid a swirl of eco-controversy. I got so wrapped up in the lives of the people the author depicts, and the breathtaking land- and seascapes in which the drama unfolds, that it was only after I finished the book that I paused to reflect what a virtuoso prose stylist Robert Sullivan is. He uses a variety of rhetorical approaches to bring out the full complexity of the situation he's describing. This book is both fun and profound, if that makes sense: wistful, weird, quintessentially American.