Reflecting on the legacy of the last orca capture in Washington state, 50 years later

Many of the orcas captured and sent to marine theme parks in the 1960s and 1970s came from the Pacific Northwest. An incident 50 years ago this month changed that.

A staffer in then-Washington Governor Dan Evans’ office witnessed a crew hired by SeaWorld chasing a pod of orcas into a shallow bay. A court case ensued, and within two weeks, SeaWorld agreed to end captures in Washington state.

Ellie Kinley is a mother, fisherman, and a member of the Lummi Nation in the Bellingham area.

Lummis call orcas "qwe lhol mechen," the people who live beneath the sea. Kinley says they always refer to them as people.

“Our history isn't written," she said, “it's told by stories. And in our stories, we say 'qwe lhol mechen' are our relatives that put on their regalia and go under the water.”

Prior to the ‘60s and ‘70s, and films like “Free Willy” and “Blackfish,” many non-tribal residents of the Northwest did not feel such kinship with the now widely-loved creatures, and few protested when they were captured and sent to marine parks.

Environmental journalist and author Lynda Mapes has written extensively about orcas in the Northwest, which many people thought of as menaces.

“Fishermen commonly shot them," she said, “because they didn't want them raiding their nets.”

Those fears had started to shift by the mid-1970s, when the business of displaying orcas in theme parks was thriving.

SeaWorld was running a television ad that featured a mock tribal narrator who talked about “stories told for centuries about visits from powerful and deadly creatures from another world, feared by everything in their domain.”

SeaWorld had worked around loopholes in the Marine Mammal Protection Act, passed by Congress in 1972, to keep capturing orca calves, mainly in waters bordering Washington and British Columbia known as the Salish Sea.

Then, on March 7, 1976, a SeaWorld crew trapped a pod of nomadic orcas in a place called Budd Inlet on south Puget Sound, in view of the state capitol in Olympia.

Ralph Munro worked in the governor’s office, and happened to be there, sailing with his then-wife Karen and some friends.

Lynda Mapes later interviewed Munro about that day for The Seattle Times.

“There was a whole pod of whales coming towards us,” he said. “They were swimming really fast and on the surface. Then we realized that there was a boat chasing them."

Munro said the crews used a seaplane, boats, and explosives to corral the animals.

“Then the whales realized they were out of space, and they turned and made a run for it,” he said. “And by that time, the big fishing boat, Pacific Maid, had set a set net across the bay, and so when the whales went back, they ran right square into that set net. As they closed the net ends, it really got gruesome.”

The crew separated calves from their families. Munro said what he saw and heard that day haunted him for the rest of his life.

“You could hear the whales scream to each other, back and forth,” he said. “I can still hear it sometimes. It was awful. It was just disgusting and sick.”

Karen Munro Ellick remembers staying on the water for hours to witness the details of the captures, and what happened next.

“Ralph and I talked about it on the way back, and said, 'We better call our friends in the press,'" she said. “And the next morning, Ralph went out to get the paper real early and said, 'We've won round one. It's on page one of the Post Intelligencer.'”

Ralph Munro also called his boss, Governor Evans, and the state attorney general, Slade Gorton, who helped spearhead a lawsuit against SeaWorld.

Amazingly perhaps — at least by today’s standards — a judge ruled against SeaWorld in just over two weeks. On March 23, 1976, the theme park owners agreed to stop capturing orcas in Washington state.

Years later, Munro remembered it as a groundbreaking moment.

“This was all new territory,” he said. “Trying to save a whale? We won. And it was the last whale capture in America.”

The Budd Inlet Six, members of a species now known as Bigg’s orcas, were released.

The whales were relatively rare visitors to Puget Sound back then, since the state had promoted killing off their preferred prey, seals and sea lions. Now, their population is thriving.

On the other side of what Munro and others witnessed that day 50 years ago was Jeff Foster, a 19 year-old member of the capture crew. Foster grew up in the Seattle area, and said many people he knew were fearful of orcas and treated them like a dangerous predator, like great white sharks.

But he hadn’t grown up fearing them. He saw things differently at the time.

“It was a really exciting thing,” Foster said. “It's a bit of a rodeo, but it's super exciting for a young guy who doesn't know any better. Part of my feeling was, by bringing these animals into captivity, we learned more about these animals and their behavior and their intelligence.”

Foster kept working with capture crews in Iceland until 1990, but his reservations grew.

“I was more excited about the adventure and these amazing animals,” he said, “but over time, you realize that these animals were calling out, and as I spent more and more time with these animals, I realized that they're a lot like us.”

Now, Foster lives on San Juan Island, and is doing the opposite of what he used to do. He works with groups like the Whale Sanctuary Project and Sea Life Trust & Conservation to help transition marine animals from parks to ocean sanctuaries.

Ellie Kinley knows and speaks very highly of Foster. She says she’ll often call him if she comes across a pod of orcas, to get help identifying them.

Munro went on to become a five-term Washington secretary of state. He died last year on March 20, the same day a newborn Bigg’s orca was spotted for the first time in the Salish Sea. The calf, a descendant of one of the Budd Inlet Six, was later nicknamed "Munro."

There’s a somber coda to the end of orca captures in the United States. A group of whales now known as Southern Resident orcas had made the Salish Sea their home for thousands of years, and had suffered the brunt of the capture era.

Their numbers totaled approximately 110 prior to the '60s and '70s. Around 50 of them were captured and taken to marine parks. Others died in the capture process.

Three years ago, Lummi Nation member Ellie Kinley was involved with a group working to release the last captive Southern Resident orca, a 57-year-old called by various names — Sk'aliCh'elh'tenaut, Tokitae, and Lolita — from the Miami Seaquarium. The rescue team was days away from transporting the whale back to Washington state when she suddenly died of kidney failure. She had spent 53 years in captivity.

“I felt like a member of my family had died,” Kinley said. “It hurt that bad, because it was so important for us to bring her back home to her waters, to send the message to the rest of the Southern Residents that we see you're in trouble, we know you need help. And to us, that was part of the message, that we could bring their stolen daughter back.”

Fifty years on from the legal victory that ended orca capture in Washington state, and ultimately nationwide, the Southern Resident orca population hasn’t rebounded. Approximately 76 remain.

They struggle with fewer salmon to eat, polluted waters, noisy, dangerous shipping traffic. Many young calves die before their first year of life.

Kinley hopes people can still make a difference in their long term survival, and says she’ll keep sharing stories about them, “because you never know when that story might reach that one person that actually can make a difference.”

Upcoming Humanities Washington program: The Last Orca Captures