Whale whisperer Hori Parata was just seven years old when he attended his first mass stranding, a beaching of porpoises in New Zealand’s Northland, their cries screeching through the air on the deserted stretch of sand.
Seven decades later, Parata, 75, has now overseen more than 500 strandings and is renowned in New Zealand as the leading Maori whale expert, called on by tribes around the country for cultural guidance as marine strandings become increasingly complex and fatal.
“Man’s greed in the ocean is hurting the whales,” said Parata, a fierce and uncompromising elder of the Ngatiwai tribe of eastern Northland.
Hori Parata at his Ptaua farm, the place where he was born and grew up
“We’re having to put up with a lot of stuff today. The public want to hug the whales, they want to touch them, they want to feel good — that’s not the thing. We feel that is ridiculous,” Parata said.
Whale experts regard New Zealand — or Aotearoa, as it is called by Maori — as the whale stranding capital of the world, with more than 5,000 incidents recorded since 1840 and an average of 300 individual animals beaching themselves each year.
Concrete information on why whales strand remains elusive, but “sickness, navigational error, geographical features, a rapidly falling tide, being chased by a predator or extreme weather” are all thought to contribute, the New Zealand Department of Conservation said.
Climate change is also to blame, with warming ocean temperatures moving whales’ prey closer to the shore and forcing them to pursue their food into shallow waters, scientists have said.
November marked the beginning of whale stranding season and it started with a surge in incidents, with 140 pilot whales beaching and dying on Stewart Island, 10 rare pygmy whales on Ninety Mile Beach, 51 stranded and dead on the Chatham Islands, and a spate of individual cases around the country, whale rescue group Project Jonah said.
As more whales beach and die — from exhaustion, heat stroke or seagulls feasting on their flesh — an acute sense of grief is growing among New Zealand’s indigenous people, who regard whales as their ancestors and taonga (treasures).
“These days it is like a zoo. People just want to come and gawk at us, without even trying to understand what is happening with the animals and the environment,” Parata said, bristling with anger.
“When will we talk about what is hurting these animals out on the sea? They are drowning out there, they can’t breathe, they beach themselves to be with the Aunties,” he said.
Ngatiwai believe that the whales beach when they are ready to die and want to return to their families, the Maori people. Then, their human families use the whales’ gift of their bodies for sacred carvings, for traditional medicines and even for compost.
There are marked tribal differences across New Zealand and while some tribes work to refloat stranded whales, others, like Parata’s Ngatiwai, stand back and allow the conservation department and volunteer groups to take the lead in rescue efforts.
Then the tribe moves in en masse and holds a karakia (prayer), names each animal and sets to work removing their bones, blubber, eyes and teeth for cultural purposes.
However, indigenous elders said that they are not being listened to when they tell the government that their whale kin are sick, and trying to escape an increasingly polluted and unpredictable ocean.
Earlier this year in South Taranaki, a mass stranding that was described as “unprecedented” left the local Maori tribe scrambling. Security was brought in when thieves attacked a sperm whale with an axe, trying to remove valuable teeth from its jaw.
Parata and his 22-year-old son, Te Kaurinui Robert Parata, were called in to assist. Te Kaurinui Robert Parata was called after the first whale that his father ever named, and left university this year to return to Whangrei and study whale tikanga (protocol) and carving.
He said that mass strandings are getting more local and international attention, and money from donations, but traditional knowledge is being dismissed as overly spiritual.
Maori harvest rights over dead whales have only been officially recognized since 1998, and the practice still elicits horror from some New Zealanders and visitors.
“Our own ancestors wouldn’t say to go down there and hug the whales. That’s a modern thing,” Te Kaurinui Robert Parata said.
Ngatiwai have been investigating the link between the crisis of the kauri dieback disease killing New Zealand’s native Tane Mahuta trees and the increasing number of whale strandings.
Hori Parata and his family believe that whale oil and byproducts could be used to try to cure kauri dieback, and want more government money and attention directed toward indigenous knowledge of the interconnectedness of the New Zealand environment and possible indigenous solutions.
“People dismiss us when we tell them our spiritual understanding of whales — why they are beaching, why they are hurting,” Te Kaurinui Robert Parata said.
“We are not foreigners in this land. We did not take this land off anyone else. We were not lost waiting for some bullheads to tell us what was going on,” he said.
Kaitaia conservation department ranger Jamie Werner of Ngatiwai recently attended his first mass beaching on Ninety Mile Beach. It was the first recorded time that pygmy whales had stranded on New Zealand shores.
“I arrived at the beach and we leapfrogged between the animals. They were calling out to each other and reassuring each other,” Werner said. “It was a shock. We’re working to adapt, but the ocean is changing so fast.”
The recent spate of mass strandings has been described as “heartbreaking” by the conservation department.
However, for Hori Parata and his family the slow, painful deaths of their ancestors are personal — and ultimately devastating — for the health of the tribe and the sea.
“It’s very emotional. Our ancestors tell us the strandings are a sign from the sea. So what is the sea telling us? We need to listen,” he said.
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