84 Replies to ““Beached B.C. whale given traditional native funeral””

  1. But, but… won’t the non-Christians get upset that a cross was used to indicate the burial site? 🙂

  4. She felt it was being dishonoured?
    How exactly do you dishonour a sea going version of raccoon road kill?

  5. “a 10-metre log and two smaller ones to rest atop the grave like a cross, “
    I hope the Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, etc. whales aren’t insulted by this blatant display of white western racist hegemonistic cultural imperialism!

  9. Someone feels a sensitivity towards this animal. They clean up a carcass that might otherwise rot and preserve the bones for future scientific inquiry. A nice person did a nice thing.
    And there is Kate inviting her followers to mock it.

  10. “They clean up a carcass that might otherwise rot and preserve the bones for future scientific inquiry.”
    There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but this “traditional burial” and talk of desecration is ridiculous.

  11. batman…oh please…They hardly cleaned up a carcass, they are planning on letting it rot then dig it up again. The native community on the west coast make up these “traditions” all the time. Yet if you were to try to respectfully dig up and move native remains that are found in the course of an excavation, oh no so sorry they must be left alone and we will now take over the land you thought you had legally purchased. In Nanaimo at least 2 instances I have heard of brought a halt to a housing project. The last thing you want is to discover bones during excavation.

  12. btw, it will be interesting to see how much the reserve sells these bones for in a couple years.

  13. “””Damm, all thius time, I thought this story was about Lizzy May swiming..”””
    Damm,Lizzy May swiming? now they will never get the smell off the Fish….

  14. I’m sorry, batman, but the right way to preserve the bones for scientific research would be to turn the whole carcass over to the university and let them deflesh it properly so the skeleton can be maintained properly.
    As it stands, the university won’t get it for years, and I’d be willing to bet natural predation and soil activity will render the skeleton unusable by then. Whale blubber stinks, and most carnivores find it very tasty – if they didn’t sink the carcass twenty feet down it’ll get dug up, eaten and scattered.

  15. Someone “feels a sensitivity” for pointing out how stupid a newspaper article is.
    And there is an anonymous troll inviting her followers to mock Kate.

  16. I don’ t know or care if this is a genuine tradition or not. It’s their land and their money. They have a right to do as they please.
    This post is a testament to Kate’s childishness. She’s constantly inciting mockery of anything with which she disagrees like a 12-year-old mocking something they don’t understand.

  17. “It’s their land and their money.”
    huh?
    “the whale’s body was towed from the rocky shoreline in East Sooke park to the Beecher Bay First Nation, about four kilometres away.”

  18. I’m afraid I don’t see the inconsistency ChrisinMB. Beecher Bay First Nation is their land, where the body is buried. Unless someone owned the carcass then I don’t know what you’re suggesting.

  19. Actually, it’s not their money. They had to convince a number of private individuals to donate their time and equipment to this exercise in foolishness.
    Plus, the DFP co-ordinator and parks staff had to take time away from doing their real taxpayer-funded jobs to supervise the transfer.
    I see no indication from the linked articles that the native activists spent a dime of their own money at all, as opposed to convincing other people to devote their resources to the coastal equivalent of a funeral for a dead raccoon beside the 401.
    Hey, if they want to do it, fine. But it’s still a silly waste of time and resources, and so yes I’m going to mock it.
    (ChrisinMB has a point – East Sooke Park is federal land, not native. If a whale skeleton is so valuable, who decided that the band got to have it to dispose of as they saw fit?)

  20. batman might be right … I do enjoy mocking idiots … especially if they “understand” this meaningless nonsense.

  22. The Times Communist will parrot any Green, FN, or PC “story”. What’s entertaining is the beatings they seem to be getting from readers in their comments.
    The mentality that swallows the ongoing FN revisionism is the worst kind of pandering and guilt-ridden racism.

  23. Or they could have done something really radical, like allow nature to take its course and have the whale be the carrion that it was.
    Can’t be letting those eagles, crows, seagulls etc etc be feeding on it. Nope, just not done!

  24. batman…the natural putrification process that the whale was undergoing can itself be considered to be pretty undignified. Perhaps they should have embalmed it like Lenin and put it in an elaborate and solemn mausoleum?

  26. Shame on all of you who have mocked this meaningful ceremony. I have heard that FN bands along the coast have done this for years, burying dead whales. I believe that some of the earliest cave paintings found in BC showed such ceremonies: faint images from 4000 years ago showing a dead whale, a tugboat, and an excavator digging the hole.

  27. Doowleb: Yes. But “troll” on SDA means “anyone who is willing to say anything that doesn’t comport with our worldview.”
    The fringe right loves free speech, so long as they can use it to attack childishly attack anyone and anything they don’t like. Tell them to grow up and everybody loses their minds!

  28. “The Times Communist will parrot any Green, FN, or PC “story”. What’s entertaining is the beatings they seem to be getting from readers in their comments.”
    Problem is John,thet have all ready brought in extra commissars to start deleting!!Oh right.That’s batman’s idea of free speach.
    Must have been a slow weekend at the Rez,or cigs sales where way down.

  29. “Must have been a slow weekend at the Rez,or cigs sales where way down.”
    Negative stereotyping doesn’t help anyone. Maybe you can re-read what you said and think about whether you would have said it if you were thinking calmly and clearly.

  30. “Maybe you can re-read what you said and think about whether you would have said it if you were thinking calmly and clearly.”
    You’re a grade-school teacher, aren’t you, batty?
    Do you know what “doesn’t help anyone”? Making up pretend-o mystical funeral traditions for whale carcasses you found on the beach.

  31. Give it a couple of months and they should give it real big hug, that is to show it some respect.

  32. I like the way the folks in Oregon honor dead whales. Note, a 1/2 ton of TNT used on a dead whale do NOT make a good combination. Great video

  33. Thunderbird killed the whale by making him chase shadows in the water until he starved to death.
    When the Raven saw the whale carcass on the rocks his head filled with mischief. “I wonder if I can find someone stupid enough to bury it” he mused. He needed to find someone who was doing nothing and whose head was empty. Raven spotted Sharon Cooper …

  36. KS blatantly stereotypes and here come Kate to point out that while free speech is promoted that kind of thing is discouraged . . .
    Oh wait.

  39. batty…I said my comment wholly cognizant of what it meant.Don’t try your white man guilt trip on me.I’ve lived on rez’s and worked with Indians.99.9% will do nything but an honest days work to get money.And for that I blame the stupid,vote whoring politicos and the Indian Act,and useful idiots like you who try to pass YOUR low self esteem and personel loathing off on me.Won’t work.

  40. Back in the day when common sense was more common, creatures were left on the shore to rot. The upside was to create names for the region. Just up the road from Sooke is Metchosin. From Wiki-
    “The name Metchosin is the anglicised version of the native “Smets-Schosen”, which means “place of stinking fish”. Local legend maintains that many years prior to the Europeans’ arrival, an orca beached and died, and that everywhere that could smell it rotting became part of Metchosin.”

  42. Set a reminder in a few years to contact the University and see how that whale skeleton thing is going…check to see how Caledonia is going, I bet it’ll be exactly the same as now.

  43. Is that like everywhere that can smell the BC government is part of Victoria?

  44. The urban myths about natives being good environmentalists is not borne out by facts … but facts get in the way …
    ” Broughton believes the Bay Area harbored a prehistoric native population of 50,000 to 150,000 before Europeans arrived in the 1500s. He believes that birds and other wildlife rebounded only after early European explorers came into contact with natives, infecting them with fatal diseases such as smallpox, malaria, and influenza and killing off as much as 90 percent of the Indian population.
    As a result, hunting pressure diminished, and by the mid-1800s, geese and ducks “were so abundant you could kill them with a club or stick,” he says. … ”
    read it all here.
    http://www.physorg.com/news10821.html
    ” … Early California: A killing field
    February 13, 2006 Early California: A killing field
    This vintage photo shows a steam shovel demolishing of the Emeryville, Calif., shellmound in 1924 to make way for a paint factory. University of Utah archaeologist Jack Broughton analyzed 5,736 bird bones from the ancient Native American garbage dump to demonstrate that California was not always abundant in wildlife as it was when settlers arrived, but that ancient native people hunted some bird species to local extinction. Credit: Courtesy Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology,University of California, Berkeley.
    Research shatters utopian myth, finds Indians decimated bird
    “The wild geese and every species of water fowl darkened the surface of every bay � in flocks of millions�. When disturbed, they arose to fly. The sound of their wings was like that of distant thunder.”
    When explorers and pioneers visited California in the 1700s and early 1800s, they were astonished by the abundance of birds, elk, deer, marine mammals, and other wildlife they encountered. Since then, people assumed such faunal wealth represented California’s natural condition � a product of Native Americans’ living in harmony with the wildlife and the land and used it as the baseline for measuring modern environmental damage.
    That assumption now is collapsing because University of Utah archaeologist Jack M. Broughton spent seven years � from 1997 to 2004 � painstakingly picking through 5,736 bird bones found in an ancient Native American garbage dump on the shores of San Francisco Bay. He determined the species of every bone, or, when that wasn’t possible, at least the family, and used the bones to reconstruct a portrait of human bird-hunting behavior spanning 1,900 years.
    ..”

  45. Largest single kill of North American Bison, for hides, 1873 Cheyanne tribe, 30,000 in one day.. all for the hide trade…

  46. Whale wallets?
    So what can we make all those poor baby seals into when they “wash up” and “die” on the other coast?

  48. Well, I hope the complied fully with the BC regulations concerning burials. Licensed undertaker in attendance, was he?

  49. AtlanticJim stole my comment. But that’s ok, batman has given me occasion for another one.
    Quoth batman: “I don’ t know or care if this is a genuine tradition or not. It’s their land and their money.”
    Actually, its MY money which has been extorted from me over the years in steadily increasing amounts, being used for purposes which I find improper.
    If it were just Sharon Cooper and a couple of suckers who volunteered, that would just be some random weirdo doing some weirdo stunt. Whatever.
    But this has evolved into a full blown propaganda event, being funded with government (i.e. -my-) money, in support of the Canadian Indian Industry. An industry that in my area is running illegal smoke shops, smuggling guns, drugs, booze, smokes and people across the US/Canada border, and squatting armed men on private land that isn’t theirs. Oh, and they beat people up too. While the OPP watches.
    So yes, it would appear that you are behaving like a 12 year old, mocking something you don’t understand.
    BTW, Kathy Shaidle is right. The whale corpse will probably sue to get its own casino. Ably assisted by the band council, of course. All part of the Indian Industry Inc.

  50. It’s kind of silly but that’s the way a lot of people are today. If the bones are preserved and wrapped up – as according to the story – maybe there is eventual use at the University – and maybe this type of whale being beached is not that common. The woman responsible probably had some goofy emotional attachment to whales. It’s no different than dog owner’s who do weird burial ceremonies for their dogs. Probably at one time, the 4 main First Nations people on the west coast would have used every part of any beached whale for some sort of practical purpose. At one time before the idea of dogs and cats as pets, they served a practical purpose – not an emotional modern pet type crutch (or cross).

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