Devil-Fishes and Friendly Whales: Encountering Gray Whales on the California Coast

• In Event: Extractivism, Environments, and Encounters: Legacies of interaction and relationship

Abstract

Every year, Eastern North Pacific gray whales migrate between Baja California Sur, Mexico and the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas. Throughout their long migration, gray whales often stay close to the coast. They swim through shipping lanes and kelp forests, take detours into urban harbors, and encounter coastal communities. Gray whales are well-known for entwined tales of their historical decline and recovery and their transformation from ‘devil-fish’ to ‘friendly whale’. As the story goes, gray whales were long known as ‘devil-fish’ from the mid-nineteenth century, until they became ‘friendly whales’ in the 1970s, following protections earlier in the twentieth century. This paper critically examines the origins and development of this narrative framing of gray whales’ history and its intersections with environmentalisms of the twentieth century and beyond. Historical evidence of gray whale histories in Alta California, Baja California, and Baja California Sur from the mid-nineteenth to late twentieth centuries reveals complex, nuanced, and even contradictory human–whale encounters along the California coast. Historical and contemporary encounters with gray whales interweave with infrastructural and extractive histories, particularly of saltworks, fishing, and whale-watching (eco)tourism development. This paper aims to connect these seemingly separate histories to analyze how encounters with gray whales – and environmentalisms emerging out of those encounters in watery borderlands – are part of broader more-than-human environmental histories of emotion, power, and memory.

Author

• Anna Guasco, University of Cambridge