Shared routes of mammalian kinship: Race and migration in Long Island whaling diasporas

Abstract

In this paper, I bring together the historiography of Indigenous shore whaling on Long Island with narratives of Black diaspora and whale studies to discuss shared routes of migration in the 17th-19th centuries and shared fates under colonial capitalism. Demonstrating how the extractive conquests of colonial settlers shaped the exploitative treatment of whales and the movements of social groups who lived in dependence to them, I build on Black feminists’ theoretical work and methodologies to look for interspecies, trans-oceanic navigations of survival. In doing so, I demonstrate how intimate relations between whales and whalers were shaped by processes of colonization, coastal displacement, and by conditions of indebtedness, enslavement, and fugitivity. I argue the importance of recognizing whales as mammalian kin, caught in the same net of colonial capitalist settlement and resource extraction as their hunters. Finally, inspired by the metaphor of echolocation, a method of listening which helps whales to navigate oceans, I suggest that we might listen for the socio-ecological reverberations of historic whaling diasporas to learn from emergent strategies of survival.