Anna Guasco: Justice, histories, and narratives of gray whale migration (ep415)
“Human and grey whale relationships really interrupt the kinds of binaries that we often try to put on human relationships with whales more broadly.”
What might the histories of human and gray whale relations show us in terms of how the stories we tell shape the texture of our relationships to our more-than-human kin? How can adopting a plurality of narratives and cultural perspectives in and around a particular species disrupt the kinds of binaries that so often underly academic research methods? And what might a more diverse, accessible, and context-specific approach to field research look like with humility and deep-listening at its core?
Tune in to this episode with our guest, Anna Guasco, to explore these questions and more.
About our guest:
Anna Guasco is a PhD candidate and Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation examines histories, narratives, and justice issues circulating around the migration and conservation of gray whales along the North American Pacific Coast, and her interests broadly include environmental history, more-than-human geographies, and political ecology.
Artistic credits:
Song feature: Lunar Landing by Johanna Warren
Episode-inspired artwork by Shyama Kuver
Dive deeper:
Pollution is Colonialism, a book by Max Liboiron
End Capitalism, excerpt from Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Access is Love, led by Sandy Ho, Mia Mingus, & Alice Wong
Emptiness and Beastly Encounters, article by Nayanika Mathur
Expand your lenses:
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transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Anna Guasco: So gray whales, just to get a quick start, they're the only living member of their category. Their species name is Esrichus robustus. And that ‘robustus’ part is something that several scientists I've talked to really find a helpful way for understanding the species' evolutionary history, the idea of it being robust and resilient amidst a lot of environmental change.
[Grey Whales] are kind of an interesting species in my opinion, because they're both considered a bit boring among whale species, and they're also known for one of the most spectacular behaviors of any large whale species.
So on the boring side, they're one of the only large whale species or baleen whale species, which as a side note, those are whales that don't have teeth and instead are filter feeders like humpbacks, blue whales and so on. They're the one of the only baleen whale species that doesn't sing.
So if you think of humpbacks with their haunting melodies that are very famous as part of the overall ‘Save the Whale’ movements from the 1970s onwards, gray whales don't do any of that. They kind of do a knocking and grunting type sound, but they don't sing. They are not as splashy, both on a more metaphorical level and a quite literal level. They don't do as much of the jumping and the sorts of things we associate with some spectacular whale encounters in nature documentaries.
They're pretty quiet. They migrate really close to the coast. So they'll come into urban harbors, sometimes get stuck in urban harbors. They're seen by paddleboarders, surfers, commercial fishers, recreational fishers throughout their migration. But they're also, as I said, so they're kind of boring, they're quiet. They kind of just chug along doing what they do. But they're also really known for this spectacular friendly whale behavior that takes place in the lagoons of Baja California, Sur, Mexico. Where when people are in small boats, gray whales will approach those small boats and allow themselves to be touched and petted in these really close proximate encounters. So they're an interesting to me contradiction in some sense of sort of, they're known as boring, but they're also known as sort of dramatic and charismatic in that way. And the other sort of dramatic aspect of this species, I suppose, is its migration. So it's the longest known marine mammal migration on Earth.
The Eastern North Pacific gray whale, which is in what is known as the Eastern North Pacific or the east side of the Pacific Ocean, which is the west coast of North America. The Eastern North Pacific gray whale migrates from its birthing or calving lagoons in Baja California Sur, where most gray whale calves are born, all the way up to Arctic Alaska in the Bering and Chukchi and sometimes Beaufort seas. So this really dramatically long journey ends up connecting all of these different communities that Grey Whales swim through. And as I mentioned….
What I find really quite interesting about Grey Whales is that they serve almost as this sort of connecting piece between places and people and histories that we might think of as very distant and separate from each other, but actually are entangled in really interesting ways.
So the different histories and time periods then that I've looked at with Grey Whales, it ends up being a little bit of a hodgepodge, methodologically speaking. Primarily, my time period starts from around the mid-19th century, which is about when Grey Whales started to be officially described in Western science, but with a bit of a critique about that being where a lot of the records start, because obviously Grey Whales histories did not start with when they were recognized by Western scientific taxonomies. Gray whales have long been in relationships with indigenous communities throughout the entire West Coast. So for where I'm from, that's Chumash land, and I'm on unceded Chumash land where the Chumash peoples continue to have relationships and histories and memories and stories of various marine species, including gray whales but that's not just in the area that I'm from, it's throughout the entire coast, all of which has multiple layers of colonial histories that inform the histories that I'm looking at from the 19th century onward.
So I end up focusing primarily on four sets of places in my dissertation. I start where gray whales are born in the lagoons of Baja California sur, Mexico. I then move up to California which is a contested cartography because California is not just the US state of California. It's also Baja California and Baja California Sur, which are in Mexico. And those borders have shifted a lot with those colonial histories. And then I look to the Pacific Northwest, primarily up in the area of what is currently Washington State. And then I move to Arctic Alaska as the structure of my dissertation, which roughly follows the migratory pattern of eastern North Pacific Great Whales.
Kamea Chayne: I can imagine it must be really interesting to look at the stories of different communities across such a vast range of migration area for the whales. And you mentioned the changing narratives surrounding gray whales and how they went from the devil fish to becoming the friendly whale. Where did these narratives begin? And as you dove deeper into looking at them, what have you troubled about this arc of a story?
Anna Guasco: Yeah, thank you for asking that. As I mentioned, this ‘devil fish to friendly whale’ narrative was really one of my entries into thinking about gray whales and their histories and how they've related to humans and how humans have related to them over time. And when I first got started with this, I didn't really question that history so much. I was more interested in kind of on a somewhat objective, if we can sort of add a little asterisk to that, level, when did this history start? Of sort of when were they known as devil fish and when did they become friendly whales? And I expected I might actually find two somewhat distinct timelines in that history of there might be a point in time in which we could identify that gray whales were changing their behavior. And then there might be a point in time when people recognized that gray whales were changing their behavior and interpreted that as friendly. And those might have quite a bit of a lag time between them.
And I was basing this in part on a quite established record in marine historical ecology of looking at sources that hadn't traditionally been used for ecological information, like whaling records and so on, to look back at these sources and see can we find changes in something like animals behavioral ecology over time. So I was thinking I'd kind of contribute something just kind of on a linear scale like that. But as I started looking into the types of written records of people talking about gray whale behaviors and describing their interpretations of those behaviors in the time period I mentioned from about the 19th century, mid 19th century onward. What I found was it was way messier than I had expected. There really wasn't one point in time when gray whales were known as devil fish and then another in which they became the friendly whale. It was sort of overlaying messy back and forth of both. So some of the earliest records in English language of Grey Whales being called devil fish come from mid-19th century whaling records, but not so much actually the log books as retrospective accounts, as well as some contemporaneous newspaper descriptions of Grey Whales as devil fish. And one of the important figures in that history was Yankee in this context means United States, whaling captain Charles Melville Scammon, who's very well known for, he's often given credit for starting the commercial whaling industry for gray whales in the lagoons of Baja, California, Sir. He actually didn't quite start them, but he sort of was the main actor, one of the biggest players in that industry.
And his notes about all sorts of different marine mammals on the West Coast, but particularly gray whales, contributed enormously to scientific knowledge and thinking about gray whales in the 19th century and early 20th century. And he described gray whales as devil fish. But even his own notes were actually, or his published materials, were much more ambivalent about his thoughts about gray whales. He describes them as wily and sagacious replete with maternal care, that type of thing, but he never quite describes them as friendly. And according to the sort of common narrative of devil fish to friendly whale, that would be consistent. We wouldn't expect him to, but we wouldn't expect anyone to see gray whales as friendly until after mid 20th century conservation efforts and the sort of rising movement of what led into the save the whale movement in the 1970s.
But what my historical research found instead was that people were actually recognizing gray whales as friendly as early as the 1890s, if not earlier, in published material in which they called gray whales friendly or affable, sociable, at the same time as they were describing them as monstrous or as devilish, sometimes even in the exact same account.
So what I found really interesting to just summarize and not get too bogged down in all of the archival and historic evidence is that instead of this really binary transition from devilfish to friendly whale that admittedly has a lot of appeal as a story, human gray whale relations throughout that time period really were a lot messier.
[Human and Grey Whale relationships] have been messy and they continue to be messy, and they really interrupt the kinds of binaries that we often try to put on human relationships with whales more broadly.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, so it's less so in either or, but like... all of the above simultaneously. And one of your key guiding questions has been, how are Grey Whale histories and contemporary encounters narrated in different places along the whales' migration and at different points in time? And what are the ramifications of these narratives? End quote. I'm curious what you've thought through so far in terms of the impact of these different and evolving stories, whether they pertain to cultural perspectives, policy, conservation, justice, or otherwise.
Anna Guasco: Yeah, absolutely. That's a question that I'm really still grappling with in my work, because I think the way that Grey Whale stories are narrated fundamentally shifts how we understand not just their past, but their present and also their future. So how we've gotten here shapes what we think we need to do to say preserve Grey Whales or protect Grey Whales or sustain them into the future. And my work is trying to understand what it means to sort of question the types of things that are often taken for granted, whether it's terminology or stories or histories that we might need to look at more carefully before proceeding with an assumption that we know what's happened or that we know what's best. So I think, for example, with the devil fish to friendly whale story, this one really can feed into the kinds of binary relationships with whales that I hinted at.
And what I mean by that is that the devil fish to friendly whale story, sometimes not always, can be sort of positioned as people used to be afraid of or hate whales back in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But then they started learning about conservation and they started learning that maybe whales are important ecologically or are more sentient than was previously thought. And then they cared about them and stopped hating them, stopped killing them, stopped eating them, etc. And that's a very overly simplistic understanding of the history of gray whales or any other whale species. But I also think it's one that perpetuates some very troubling understandings of what good relations with whales look like. And particularly, I think it can suggest that any form of eating or killing whales is inherently bad. And that's a real problem in the context of food sovereignty and indigenous communities' rights to whales and to whaling. So with the context of gray whales, in particular, this comes up around a Native American community called the Makah Tribe in what is currently Washington State and their treaty designated rights to whale hunting, which includes gray whales.
And in the sort of wake of the 1970s mainstream Western environmentalist Save the Whale movement, there's been a lot of demonization and vilification of indigenous whaling, including the idea that hunting whales cannot be sort of something that goes along with respectful relationships with whales and sustainable relationships with whales. And that's something that I want to push back against that there isn't sort of just one right way of living with whales and it isn't just a sort of binary between love and hate or eating or not eating or conservation or not conserving.
I want to show how these stories that we might tell about their histories can even inadvertently perpetuate some of those really problematic broader framings about our relationships with whales.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you for these important inquiries and inspirations to move beyond that sort of either or thinking. And my last question for you in regards to your research on gray whales has to do with the why and why looking at the stories and narratives and history surrounding gray whales, complementary to the science, the research data on their well-being and status and population and so forth, matter for their protection. So what have been your primary motivators to contextualize our understanding of gray whales with their history and bio-cultural stories and what can people learn from this approach.
Anna Guasco: Yeah, that's a really interesting question. Thank you. And what it really makes me think of initially actually is, so I came to this dissertation, having looked at gray whales before in my senior thesis and taken a little break from looking at gray whales because I sort of thought, okay, enough about whales, I'm gonna look at something else. And in my master's, I looked at extinction storytelling in museums and essentially why the way that we tell stories in museums matters, particularly for issues of social justice. So what sorts of messages are being conveyed? How is the science being framed? And why does that matter? And I do feel that across my work, there's this kind of continuing refrain of what stories are we telling and why does that matter? And when I chose to come back to Grey Whales for my PhD, one of the things that I thought was interesting was that it wasn't really an extinction story that I was looking at this time. I'd been thinking a lot about extinction and endangerment, and gray whales instead were known as a conservation success story. I wasn't going to be looking at extinction narratives. At most, I'd be looking at narratives that had to do with a species that came to the brink of extinction.
But ended up being very successfully conserved and is looked to as a model of large marine mammal conservation successes. And I wrote my research proposal in 2018 and started my research in 2019. And that's the same year that the current unusual mortality event for gray whales started. An unusual mortality event is pretty much what it sounds like. It's classified as essentially a large die-off of usually marine species that in some way is not fully understood or isn't normal, isn't typical for sort of a yearly pattern. And gray whales have been having an unusual mortality event since 2019. And that's much longer than the previous unusual mortality event that they experienced at the end of the 20th century.
So this is the story of the Grey Whale, as I even understood it when I started looking at it, has shifted dramatically. And that ends up having quite a lot to do, not just with understanding the past of Grey Whales, but thinking about the future of Grey Whales. So over the course of looking at Grey Whale stories, I've seen how people have been rethinking what is the Grey Whale story and what is the Grey Whale story going to look like into the future. And those types of questions and that type of rethinking of narrative and storytelling really shapes what kinds of proposals people draft, it shapes what the news coverage looks like. It shapes all sorts of decision making and anticipation about that species.
So I think a really important aspect of planning and shaping the future of ecological management or of ecologies, of more than human communities, lies in how we tell the stories about those species or those communities, and it's important to look at that too.
Kamea Chayne: That really resonates with me. I'm not so sure about your chronological timeline, but I think this would be to backtrack a little bit. When you first began your master's degree in environmental studies in Scotland, you were using crutches. And this led you to approach your engagement with place-based environmental history differently than a lot of other people in your program. So what would you like to share about your personal experience here and how it's led you to think through disability and approaches to understanding environmental history differently.
Anna Guasco: Thank you so much for that question. So for me, one thing I've really noticed about environmental history or environmental humanities more broadly, as well as geography, all of the different areas that my work sits within, is there can be a real emphasis on an outdoorsy type of methodology and even just ethos, the idea of we need people to get outside more and get their boots muddy and not just think about the mountain or the whale or whatever else, but go out there and experience it, kind of roughing it in the wild. And there's a long history of these kinds of ideas outside of environmental studies that has been thoroughly critiqued by quite a number of different fields, whether that's feminist histories of science, environmental history. All sorts of different critiques of the history of essentially kind of white men conquering mountains to prove themselves and to garner knowledge in a nutshell.
And that type of history of a discipline or of environmentalism writ large can be very exclusionary for anyone who doesn't see themselves represented in that image. So for myself, my previous history working in a national park. I sort of would seem to fit the you know the outdoorsy bill pretty well. But I started to experience shifts in my mobility that relate to my own disability. And since around 2016, I've personally been really rethinking my own sort of embodied experience of being outdoors, being out in the wild, what it means to be doing what some people might call like walking methods and so on, because those sorts of sort of often valorized or romanticized methods are often something that I can't do. And this led me to think about what I have called an ethic of not going there, which I practice in my PhD thesis. It may have started in part with my own concerns about accessibility and how sort of expectations around fieldwork were really not going to work for me as an individual who uses mobility aids and who was having issues with mobility that would limit the fieldwork travel that I had been planning for my dissertation.
But for me, a frustration around that started emerging around sort of people hearing me critique the attitudes and expectations around fieldwork. And kind of saying, okay, I understand why you're not doing fieldwork, but not really questioning the sort of central and normative role that fieldwork has in these academic areas of study.
So it led me to start thinking about that role beyond the more sort of individual accessibility issues and to start really looking into the expectation of doing fieldwork and as it relates to ethics.
And specifically the expectation that sort of going to some place, having been there and being able to claim that kind of experience somehow gives one an immense amount of knowledge and the ability to claim authority on that place, which intersects with long-standing anti-colonial critiques of research and scholarship, including field work as well as other methods. And particularly Max Liboron's pollution is colonialism was really influential for me for thinking about how accessibility, although on the one hand can be a very positive thing, can also be a very negative thing in terms of assuming that we should have access to other people's lands, to other people's story, to other people's data. So my own experiences around accessibility led me to think very critically about accessibility both positively and negatively in the experience of sort of going to places and expecting to go to places in research and beyond research. If that makes sense.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, there's a lot to think about here. And to go a little deeper, you share, the trouble with fieldwork in environmental history is that it “quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. Whose body performs fieldwork? Whose body fits into the image of fieldwork? And what does it mean when one's body doesn't cooperate with place-based research and fieldwork?” End quote. You also ask, which places are, quote-unquote, the field, and which places are not? So with these in mind, what more comes to mind for you? And how would you invite a more expansive take on the idea of having an embodied experience to field work?
Anna Guasco: Yeah, that's a great question. So I would say that an embodied approach to research and to place and to whatever kind of work or practice that you're doing doesn't have to be based in kind of a valorized or glamorized or romanticized attainment of some sort of physical summiting of a mountain, so to speak. I think that there can be, especially in the environmental field, this idea of sort of pushing yourself to your limits, of that you're not just getting outside or getting to know a place, but really, even if it's unintentional, essentially conquering that place, akin to that longstanding history I was talking about earlier of sort of, you know, white men summiting a mountain type environmentalism.
I think that that image still has a bit of a hold in the environmental community and that breaking out of that is essential both to make environmental research and practice more accessible for everyone. So getting a sort of allowing—- and not just allowing but embracing—- everyone's different kind of embodied engagement with wherever they are, however works for them. But also…
if we break out of this kind of physical conquering and pushing the limits of endurance type image of engagement with place, we think about place differently.
And we can move beyond the fetishization of both the places that we call the field and the fetishization of the role of the body in experiencing those places. So for me, I consider myself a critical place-based researcher. And I didn't go to every single place that I talk about in my dissertation. And that's something that I will continue to grapple with and think about when is it right for me to go to a place both for myself and for that community? And when does it feel like not the right decision? And what instead will I be doing to meaningfully engage with communities who are in place there?
And as a critical place-based researcher, one thing that ends up being very important for me is really thinking about where my research has developed. So my own hometown, the place that this work got started in when I was working at Channel Islands National Park, that ends up being featured more heavily in my research than you might expect or then that might be for another researcher if they were to approach this topic even with the same questions because really sort of being accountable to the place that I'm from and that I have been drawing upon is very important for me. So essentially my thoughts on sort of embodiment and field work and research and all these things are about being more open to different modes of engagement both for the researcher and for the place.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, and from my understanding, both your troubling of whale narratives and your critiques of fieldwork challenge the binary of quote unquote ‘nature’ and ‘human’ or ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. And I think one lingering question that I have is there are critiques, for example, of anthropological or journalistic accounts about specific cultures and communities coming from people who haven't firsthand been to these places to a) be able to have more quote unquote embodied and immersive perspectives. And b) to be able to earn the respect and develop place-based relationships with the local community, to be able to tell perhaps a more situated and holistic narrative. And maybe some of these terms also need to be challenged. But yeah, so I guess in addition to more conventional approaches of this objective, quote unquote objective, observer trying to tell a story, I know people increasingly value people from within different communities being able to tell their own stories because they come from a more situated understanding of place.
I wonder if there are aligning considerations when it comes to environmental histories and narratives as well, and through taking on an all of the above approach, I wonder if maybe embracing more expansive research approaches of the how and the who and the what and the from where is how we might arrive most closely and intimately to understanding a place.
Anna Guasco: Absolutely. I think that's a really key aspect and one thing that it relates to is this kind of question of whether or not you're always the right person to tell a story. There can be a really interesting story about a place and perhaps you're not the right person to share it. We're not necessarily as researchers or writers or anyone else engaged in this sphere. It's not always our story to tell and it's, I think, important to know that as well. And to know, so to speak, when to hand the mic over. And to make sure that I think creating spaces for collaboration is really important here, because the classic PhD model is very not collaborative. It's very hard to co-author anything for a sort of traditional single authored PhD, right? It's supposed to be sort of this, work of solo genius that just came out of your own brain. And of course, no work ever emerges like that. But I think trying to interrupt some of those traditional academic models in particular, interrupt the idea of sort of who knowledge is coming from, who's sharing their story, who's telling their story, and who should be listened to, and whether or not the researcher is always the right person to sort of look to as an authority, even if you've done field work somewhere, that doesn't necessarily make you the right person to tell that story or the person who has the most knowledge about the situation.
I think breaking out of those sorts of more traditional understandings and formats for sharing stories and knowledge within and beyond the academy is really important.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you. Well, we are now coming to a close for our main conversation, but I would love to leave an open end here for you to share anything else on your mind in regards to the key takeaways and learning lessons you've had, and especially their implications for this difficult time, many people are facing as well as any calls to action or deeper inquiry that you have.
Anna Guasco: Thank you.
I think to me something that's really important about work in environmental humanities and related areas is listening and humility.
Sometimes this might not be something that academic expectations around productivity and sort of constantly writing, constantly coming up with new ideas and sharing them encourages. And sort of that can be this very fast paced pattern in academia, right, where you're sort of trying to always put things out there, get new things out all the time. But that doesn't always leave enough space for humility, for listening, for learning, and for rethinking your own assumptions. So I think for me, I guess my call to action is about that sort of carefulness of really listening, of questioning the assumptions that you might be bringing into your work.
Questioning that which is taken for granted and naturalized as just sort of normal or inherently out there in the world or in nature. I think that a lot of the types of more problematic stories that I've ended up looking at in my work or coming across tend to be rooted in these kind of just often repeated truisms or maxims or standard and naturalized ideas that can end up being really harmful or sort of reproduce patterns, whether in academia or outside of it, that are really troubling and harmful for various people and for the broader more than human world. So I guess for me, it kind of what I try to constantly bring myself back to in my work is that kind of carefulness and reconsideration and questioning that which is taken for granted.
Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a wrap here, but we will have additional links and references from this episode in our show notes at greendreamer.com. And for now, Anna, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been an incredible honor to speak with you. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers as we close off?
Anna Guasco: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure speaking with you. And I think my sort of call to action or what I would say I would put forward is the importance of stories and storytelling. It's obviously important that in the context of climate change and biodiversity loss and all of these immensely pressing environmental issues and then of course, beyond specifically environmental issues as well to focus on the data or the science, and those are all obviously important. But the way that we put together those things through stories has, I believe, a massive effect on how we understand the past and how we take the past into the present and into the future. So rethinking stories, finding ways to tell stories better, to question the stories that are in front of us, and to use stories to shape a more just and sustainable world is what I hope we can all do together.
