SEATTLE — A federal grand jury has charged five members of the Makah tribe with misdemeanor counts for killing a protected gray whale during a rogue hunt last month, the government said Thursday.
The indictment charged the men with conspiracy, unlawful taking of a marine mammal and unauthorized whaling, each punishable by up to a year in jail and up to a $100,000 fine.
“The charges brought today are the most serious available to the government in this case,” U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan said in a news release.
According to the indictment, the five took two motorboats into the Strait of Juan de Fuca off the tribe’s reservation at the tip of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula on the morning of Sept. 8 and harpooned the California gray whale. They then shot it at least 16 times with at least one of the three high-powered rifles they had obtained from the tribe, it said.
The men did not have the tribe’s permission for the hunt, nor did they have a federal permit to kill the whale, which eventually sank in the strait.
The killing was a public relations disaster for the tribe, which had been working with federal authorities to obtain a permit for a legal hunt, and Makah officials rushed to Washington, D.C., to assure the government they did not approve.
On Monday, Sullivan and several members of his staff traveled to the tribe’s reservation at Neah Bay to tell the tribe they planned to seek an indictment under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
At the meeting, representatives of the tribe thanked the prosecutors for letting them know and “made it abundantly clear they were not in any way supportive of this conduct,” said Robert Westinghouse, chief of the criminal division in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The Makah, who have been whalers for centuries, have sought to resume the hunts as part of their cultural heritage. But their treaty rights to hunt whales have been tangled in the courts for several years.
The federal government removed the gray whale from the endangered species list in 1994. Five years later, with a permit from the National Marine Fisheries Service, Makah tribal members killed their first whale in more than 70 years.
Animal welfare activists sued, leading to a court order that the tribe must obtain a waiver under the Marine Mammal Protection Act to continue hunting whales.
Makah officials strongly condemned last month’s hunt, pointing out that the tribe had been working with the government to obtain the waiver and that the process was close to completion.
The crew in the legal 1999 hunt was captained by Wayne Johnson — one of the men involved in last month’s killing.
Johnson told reporters at the time he wasn’t sorry for what he and the others did. In addition to Johnson, the men indicted were Theron Parker, Andy Noel, William Secor and Frankie Gonzales.
Tribal attorney John Arum said he did not know if the men had obtained lawyers. The tribe still hopes to prosecute them under its own laws, he said.
“We hope to be able to cooperate with the federal government so both prosecutions can occur in tandem,” Arum said.
The five have been summoned to appear for arraignment on Oct. 12 in U.S. District Court in Tacoma.
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