What it will require to bring Tokitae home

By The Herald Editorial Board

Recent reports have buoyed hopes that Tokitae, a Southern Resident orca captured from Whidbey Island’s Penn Cove in 1970 and forced to perform at a marine amusement park for more than 50 years, could eventually be returned to her Salish Sea home waters.

The orca, now thought to be about 57, is known by three names. Shortly after her capture, she was given the name Tokitae, a name said to mean “nice day, pretty colors” in a Coast Salish language. But since the first days of her display and performances at Miami Seaquarium, she has been widely known as “Lolita.” But to the Lummi Nation, the Whatcom County-based tribal nation that is working with others to secure her return, the whale’s name is Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut (pronounced SKA-li CHUKH-teNOT), “Sk’aliCh’elh” for the Whidbey Island cove where she was captured, and “tenaut,” meaning a female relative.

The last captive: Tokitae’s status as the last surviving orca whale in captivity has animated aspirations to return her to the Salish Sea, where L pod — and her mother, Ocean Sun, now in her early 90s — still swim.

Campaigns to bring the whale home have been undertaken off and on since the mid-1990s but were repeatedly blocked by the Seaquarium’s owner until his death in 2017 and the sale of the amusement park to a new owner. As a condition of the aquarium’s license with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the new owner agreed to end the whale’s public performances and display and has since signed an agreement with a group called Friends of Toki to begin the process of returning Tokitae to the Salish Sea.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/editorial-what-it-will-require-to-bring-tokitae-home/