After much contentious debate, though, the tribe’s council had ruled that the Ways of the Ancestors dictated that only a téna could attack sperm whales, so when those behemoths were sighted, the ancient boats still launched. The outboard engines were now ascendant, and a new type of small motorboat, the jonson, was used for everyday hunting of small prey. When I returned in 2014, this time with the intention of spending months to write a book about the Lamalerans, much had changed. As I left, son and father told me to come “home” soon. That day we did not catch anything, but over the next two weeks, I witnessed Ignatius and Ben’s older brothers catch several sharks and just miss an orca while Ben studied their tactics. We rode the wind into the deep ocean, but once the breeze subsided, we powered up an outboard engine to chase small game.
The next dawn, I helped Ben, Ignatius, and a dozen other men raise a sail made of palm leaves over their téna, a majestic 35-foot-long wooden whaling boat built without nails or other modern components. Ben invited me to join him at sea the next morning as he studied under his father, Ignatius Blikololong, one of the tribe’s most renowned lamafas, who was nearing retirement.Ī hunter returns home after a successful hunt, a freshly caught devil ray in the stern of his boat. For I had arrived at a pivotal moment in Lamaleran history, when the modern world was colliding head-on with the Ways of the Ancestors.
Soon, however, he was questioning me about European soccer and American punk-rock bands. He explained that the tribe still honored the Ways of the Ancestors, a set of rules of everyday conduct passed down through the generations which dictate that the Lamalerans hunt for their livelihood. Wandering down the bone-strewn beach a few days later, I met Ben Blikololong, a 24-tear-old training to become a lamafa, a harpooner. (Sperm whales still have a worldwide population in the hundreds of thousands.) They use every part of their catch, drying the meat to sustain them through lean times, and trade leftover jerky with neighboring farming tribes in an ancient barter economy: Six inches of dried flesh converts to a dozen bananas. The 1,500 Lamalerans get most of their calories by harpooning everything from sharks to devil rays, but their most important prey is the 20 or so sperm whales they kill annually.
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