BSA Auto/Biography Study Group summer Conference 2024: Tokitae: turning a life of disappointments and dissonances into joy (wonder)

Description

Tokitae, a female orca, was violently captured in 1970, at the age of 4, from her Southern Resident community in the Pacific Northwest (USA) and forced into slavery in the marine park industry. Miraculously, in 2023, 53 years later, she was still living in the same tiny, impoverished tank in Miami, when plans were being made to take her home, to a sea pen. There she would be able to swim in a straight line for the first time in 53 years and maybe hear her mother’s voice; Ocean Sun, who still swims in the Salish Sea. However, on the afternoon of the 18th of August 2023 Tokitae tragically died. The disappointment of the “Empty the Tank” activists, many of whom had been fighting for Tokitae’s release for 30 years, was visibly raw and shattering. Orcas have been shown to possess self-awareness, and can think of themselves, as an “autobiographical “me,”” (Marino et al, 2020, p. 71). Tokitae as a highly social being, would therefore feel the dissonances of kinship. In this piece I draw on Mason’s (2008) human centred framework, to narrate Toki’s extraordinary kinship characteristics. This is not to anthropomorphise Toki, but to support the argument that her kinship should not be oppressed and silenced as a species less than human but should be celebrated as a non-human person. Inevitably narrating Toki’s story involves responding reflexively, and so I recognise I am ‘a self-in-relation’ to her (Plumwood 1999, 1993).

Period	11 Jul 2024
Event title	BSA Auto/Biography Study Group Summer Conference 2024 Disappointments and Dissonances: Disappointments and Dissonances
Event type	Conference
Location	Reading Show on map