Voices in the Ocean

by Susan Casey

  Millennia ago, more than twenty thousand Chumash people lived in fire-lit settlements along the central and southern California coast, from Point Conception to Point Dume, as well as on the nearby Channel Islands: Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, Anacapa, and San Miguel. Then the Spanish arrived in the eighteenth century, bringing conquest and disease and missionary zeal: by 1900 only two hundred Chumash were left. But despite this tragedy, the tribe’s past has not been extinguished. Its heritage remains, and so does its bond with dolphins.

  At Malibu’s northern edge, in fact, next door to a phalanx of multimillion-dollar houses, there is a replica of an authentic Chumash village. Its name is Wishtoyo (the Chumash word for rainbow), and its cofounder and present-day steward, a Chumash man named Mati Waiya, has been actively reintroducing his culture’s traditions to a world sorely in need of a refresher course.

  I drove down the dirt road to the village on a late summer afternoon, the dust from my tires billowing red and gold in the dusky light. If you weren’t looking for Wishtoyo, you might never find it—it isn’t a showy place. Tucked next to a gulch on a cliff above the Pacific, its buildings blend into the landscape so thoroughly it’s as though they’ve sprung from the earth itself, and actually, they have. Wishtoyo’s six dome-shaped dwellings are made of willow branches and woven tule reeds, their entrances draped with deerskin and framed by whalebones and antlers, adorned with stones and seashells. Their floors are soft sand.

  As I pulled in to park, three huge German shepherds came loping toward me, followed closely by Waiya himself, a tall and strapping man in his fifties. His waist-length black hair was pulled back and secured by two long slivers of bone. A smaller bone bisected his nose, sitting atop a sleek mustache, beard, and goatee that almost looked as though they were tattooed onto his skin. Waiya wore strands of beaded necklaces, a tribal print sarong, and a sleeveless shirt that revealed thickly muscled arms. He was barefoot. A raptor claw hung from his left ear. If I hadn’t already talked to Waiya on the phone and heard his voice, a smooth California drawl, I would have expected him to start speaking Smuwic or Samala or another one of the Chumash languages.

  Waiya greeted me, and we launched into the stories. “We’re a maritime people,” he told me, as we walked around the village. “The dolphins are our relatives, our brothers and sisters. A’lul’koy is our blue dolphin. Malibu is Humaliwu, where the waves crash loudly. Muwu is the big ocean. These are all Chumash names that people don’t even know.” He stopped in front of one of the buildings, which was about the size and shape of a large igloo. “It’s called an ap,” Waiya said. “A family would sleep in here.” We ducked inside, followed by Sumo, one of the German shepherds. The air was cooler under the dome, fragrant with sage and chaparral. Waiya picked up two kingly condor feathers, which he waved in the air to punctuate his speech.

  “The creation story is really what a lot of it is about,” he said. “Our people came here from Limuw—Santa Cruz Island.” Hutash, the Earth Goddess, had beckoned the Chumash from the island to the mainland, Waiya explained, promising them a paradise for future generations. She made a shimmering bridge out of a rainbow and told them to walk across it, over the sea. But she warned them not to look down. “Well, some of the people couldn’t resist and they did look down,” Waiya continued, “and they got dizzy and fell. As they hit the water and started to sink, Hutash asked our God, Kakunupmawa, our creator, our grandfather, ‘Don’t let them die.’ Down they went and as they fell to the bottom of the ocean, their bodies started becoming silky and then these fins came out, and they surfaced and took their first breath of air. They turned into A’lul’koy. They became dolphins.”

  Waiya reached into a pouch that was slung over his shoulder. He pulled out a rattle and began to shake it and sing. The song was haunting, full of cries and long, rasping growls. I felt the skin on my arms tingle. Sumo lay down and put his head on his paws. The Chumash tongue was unlike anything I’d heard before: it was soft and hard, flowing yet crisply defined. There were sibilant sounds and shushing sounds and clicking sounds, all coming from somewhere deep in the windpipe. Waiya’s words were as primal and indescribable as nature herself.

  Watching him as he finished—singing the ancient language with his head thrown back, condor feathers in one hand and rattle in the other, his face pierced with bear bone—you wouldn’t guess that in his thirties Waiya had been a busy building contractor, well assimilated into the SoCal world of fast food and twelve-lane highways, far detached from his native roots. It was only after a series of fateful coincidences that he’d reconnected with his lineage. One day, driving home from a construction job at Pepperdine University, he’d glanced aimlessly out his truck window just as he passed the Wishtoyo site. “I felt this vortex,” Waiya recalled. “And I wondered, ‘What is it? Why does it feel like I’m seeing some long-distance vision?’ ” The site was county-owned wasteland, desolate and strewn with junk, choked by invasive plants. After that, every time Waiya saw the place it drew him nearer. He had no idea why. Later, he would learn that it had once been a thriving Chumash settlement.

  That same evening, at his house, some local kids came by with flyers for a celebration at the Chumash Cultural Center. “Really?” Waiya remembers asking them. “I’m Chumash. There’s a cultural center? Where is it?” They pointed to a mountain directly behind Waiya’s home. This would be remarkable enough, but Waiya had moved in only a few days earlier.

  He visited the center the following weekend: “And my whole life changed forever.” Waiya then spent a decade immersing himself in the Chumash ways, rekindling his inner embers, apprenticing with one of the tribe’s few remaining elders. When Waiya expressed frustration at how hard it was to take everything in, the elder disagreed: “No. It’s unlearning what you’ve learned that’s the hard thing.”

  Given the significance of the A’lul’koy, one of the most important Chumash ceremonies was the Dolphin Dance. Now, as an elder himself, Waiya performed it. He showed me a photo of the dance in progress: Waiya was clad in full dolphin dancer regalia, body-painted with black and white stripes and dots, wearing an elaborate feather headdress and skirt, both hands holding wansaks, or clapper sticks. Fire blazed in front of him. “It’s a trippy dance,” he said, grinning. “The clappers sound like dolphins.”

  Eventually Waiya returned to the land that had called to him, and was able to begin the process of reclaiming it. He and his wife, Luhui’Isha, had started by clearing the space for a single ap, twelve years ago. Soon, they were spending days and weeks there. They went to sleep under the constellations and awoke with the sunrise. They watched eagles sailing overhead and dolphins gamboling offshore. “Of course the construction stuff was lacking,” Waiya said, “but I didn’t want to do it anymore.” His voice dropped, and he spoke in an urgent tone: “Because I’d seen ten years go by really fast, doing bids and giving money to taxes and dealing with my employees—and this is every day. And I wondered, ‘What is life about? It can’t be about just living to work.’ ”

  These days, Wishtoyo was a hub of Chumash ritual. Waiya and Luhui’Isha hosted groups of all ages, teaching their people’s traditions, honoring solstices, and holding retreats. One of their main audiences was schoolchildren. “I can put fifty kids in here,” Waiya said, gesturing around the ap. “I have a PowerPoint presentation about marine life. I’ll tell them all about the ocean, about ecosystems and endangered species, all these different ways of looking at the environment and stewardship and balance and understanding, not just the science and the laws, but how it’s a part of you and you’re a part of it. And they’re watching and smelling and seeing and hearing the songs and stories of a people who were living the heartbeat of life itself, not just this fabricated system that’s telling you that your freedom is this document, not your birthright to have healthy land, water, and air. That’s your true freedom. Fight for that. Be the voice of that which can’t speak for itself. Because that’s yours too.” He laughed. “So I’m building little advocates.” />
  Once he got rolling, Waiya’s voice rose and fell with the cadence of a chant or an incantation, picking up emotional speed too. He was a natural orator. It was easy to envision a bunch of kids sitting in here, transfixed. “I tell them, ‘If you love that ocean, that whale, that dolphin, that forest, that river, that bear, those eagles—all those beautiful things that are part of the world,’ ” Waiya said, “ ‘then you’ve got it. It’s already in you.’ ”

  One of the most admirable things about Waiya was how he applied the Chumash teachings in ways his ancestors had never dreamed of. Teaming with a talented young lawyer, Jason Weiner, and ocean advocacy groups like Surfrider, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s international Waterkeeper Alliance, Waiya proceeded into state and federal courtrooms. Armed with a fine-tuned understanding of Native American rights and cultural protections, he set out to assert them. “We can’t be the people that we used to be,” Waiya said. “That’s past. But we are the people who are going to make the future. And we have an obligation to protect our home.”

  The list of eco-triumphs that he and his partners had under their belts ran dozens of pages long. They’d sued private and public enterprise, cities and counties, the state of California and the federal government, to stop reef-killing discharges of toxic effluents from a wide array of sources; they forced polluters into court and made them clean up their acts to prevent further damage. They challenged a megadevelopment that would have erected twenty thousand new homes, bulldozing Chumash burial sites and destroying a fragile watershed—a battle that continues. They petitioned and filed official complaints at a relentless pace.

  Recently, they had helped derail the Pacific Gas & Electric Company’s plan to blast eighteen airguns—250 decibels each, firing every fifteen seconds for seventeen days—across a 130-square-mile stretch of coastal waters, a sonic onslaught that would have harmed vast numbers of dolphins, whales, porpoises, sea otters, seals, turtles, squid, and fish (not to mention surfers, swimmers, divers—anyone who happened to be within earshot of such crippling emissions of noise). PG&E argued that it needed to test the seismic durability of the seafloor (although comprehensive studies already existed), and that the benefit to its Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant outweighed the “unavoidable adverse impacts.” At the hearing, Waiya gave an impassioned speech that was later singled out as the day’s most moving testimony. The dolphins, he told the California Coastal Commission, were not mere statistics on a chart—they were family. “They mourn the death of their loved ones just like you do,” Waiya reminded them. “No one has the permit to take lives. This is what our ancestors say.” In the end, the air guns lost. The vote was unanimous against them.

  Currently, Wishtoyo is working with government agencies to create a network of marine protected areas along the California coast, patches of ocean that will be fully restored and allowed to flourish as they did thousands of years ago. “We gotta do the right thing somewhere,” Waiya said, as we exited the ap and walked to the edge of the bluff. “Our oceans are the bloodline of our world.”

  The sun was slinking down, flattening the Pacific into a zinc-dark slate, while a ghost moon rose above it like a pale shadow. Behind us, traffic streamed along Highway 1, but all I could hear was the sound of the waves. Below us, silhouetted in the amber light, two surfers waited for the day’s last sets, floating among soft rafts of kelp. I wished I was out there with them, that I could take off my shoes and stay here longer, while my e-mails and to-do lists stayed somewhere else, at least for a little while.

  I mentioned this to Waiya, and he ran with it. “We’re living in a computer screen!” he said. “All this technology is gonna be our demise. And these health ailments that we’re getting, diabetes and obesity, and now our social skills are being threatened because we’re texting and we’re e-mailing and we’re not even talking anymore.” He inhaled deeply. “I want to see your eyes, I want to hear the sound of your voice, I want to understand what you’re saying. Because you can’t put a breath in a sentence.”

  In his own badass, eco-warrior, poetry-slam way, I realized, Waiya’s was a voice that combined ageless wisdom with the quicksilver tempo of modern life. Wishtoyo wasn’t some quaint antique village—it was a reminder to breathe. It posed the question: When something precious is at stake, why not slow down and consider the options, not just for yourself but for, as Waiya put it, “a future that you will never see”? His words struck at the heart of a paradox that had been nagging at me: In a time when we’ve never had more knowledge to inform our actions, we’ve never been more heedless. You are living for the moment, Wishtoyo whispered, while everything else around you is living in geological time.

  “We’ve lost our way,” Waiya said, matter-of-factly. “We’re an insatiable people who always want more. Dolphins and whales have their own language that they’ve had for millions of years, and us, we keep adding words to the dictionary because we’re never satisfied. So where are we going so fast?” He laughed, and swept his condor feathers across Wishtoyo, as though blessing it. “Our stories are part of our world, and our dance, and the way we relate, and that meditation, that therapy, that ceremony, that medicine, that magic we hear when we come together. It’s bitchin’! That’s why I built this place.”

  Deep beneath the waves, the Chumash believed, there is a crystal house guarded by mermaids, frequented by the A’lul’koy and the swordfish people, the Elye’wun. Their stories also spoke of seven crystal rods buried under the ocean, vibrating in tune with the elements. “Crystal is like water,” Waiya told me. “It holds the primary colors of life. It’s like the diversity of humanity: We come from all over the spectrum. And in that, rainbows are born.”

  In the Chumash tradition, as in so many others, the dolphins were the keyholders to unknown realms, the emissaries between their element and our own. “The A’lul’koy represents the west,” Waiya said, nodding at the horizon, “where the day ends and your dreams begin, where the land and the ocean meet. It’s transition, where our people exit this world for the spirit world. And one day will be our last sunset and we, too, will transition from this life to the next.” As if to illustrate his point, the moon suddenly grew brighter, taking its place on the stage.

  “There’s another dimension out there,” I said, pointing to the ocean.

  “Oh yeah,” Waiya said, bowing his head. “It’s real.”

  Even from ten thousand feet in the air, the Solomon Islands looked foreboding. The ocean had a strange, Hadean stillness, so glassy the clouds reflected off it as though in a mirror. Nothing was moving; there wasn’t a whitecap or even a ripple as far as I could see. Below the surface, streaks of reef ran like veins. On the horizon, the green-black peaks of Guadalcanal reared up, a jungly netherworld that saw some of World War II’s most vicious fighting. Sunken warships from seven major naval battles rest in these waters, so many skeleton vessels that the area is known as Ironbottom Sound. All over the Solomons, rusted-out, bombed-out, cast-off military equipment litters the landscape, forgotten but not lost. While the rest of the world carried on and left this corner behind, it devolved into a nearly failed state. The government teeters precariously; tourism is close to nonexistent. Beheadings occasionally occur. Rare strains of malaria thrive. I pressed my forehead against the window of the Air Niugini plane and wondered what would be waiting for me on the ground.

  Only a week ago, I had no plans to come here. I’d hoped that O’Barry would eventually return to the Solomons, and I thought if I ever made my way to these islands, it would be with him. Given the chaos here, I wasn’t in a hurry to visit. But then the news broke that a remote village called Fanalei had killed nearly a thousand dolphins in two days, followed by another three or four hundred dolphins the next day, and that the villagers had vowed to continue killing as many dolphins as they possibly could until they were paid a huge amount of cash. It was a hostage situation, tense and gnarly and haywire, and ironically, one that had begun with the best of intentio
ns.

  In 2010, O’Barry and Mark Berman, along with Lawrence Makili, Earth Island’s local director, had ventured to Fanalei and two other villages, Walande and Bita’ama, and offered a proposal: If they would stop hunting dolphins, their communities would receive financial support. Money would become available to build schools, create sustainable businesses, and shore up houses. After much communal discussion, all three villages accepted the deal. Earth Island then began to release the funds, large sums entrusted to village elders. The process was complicated because the Solomons culture involves a system called wantok, which requires that families, villages, and other interested parties who are yoked together by blood and obligation share everything. The spoils are owed to everyone. It’s the Melanesian version of Social Security. In a tribal way, wantok offers protection, but because everybody’s hands are out all the time, it can also result in nepotism and barely disguised looting.

  In Bita’ama and Walande, things went smoothly. The money was transferred and used as intended; the dolphin hunting halted. In Fanalei, however, things went awry. After the first payments were wired they promptly disappeared, siphoned off by a splinter clan of Fanalei associates who lived in Honiara, Guadalcanal’s capital city. The people who were supposed to distribute the village’s cash claimed they’d never received it, despite records proving it had been sent. Expressing a typically Solomon Islands viewpoint, one Fanalei elder explained, “It is far better for us to steal our own money than have a total stranger misuse the money.” When the agreement between Earth Island and Fanalei lapsed, it was not renewed.

  Meanwhile, in the village of Fanalei itself—an outpost near the southern tip of Malaita, an island located sixty miles by sea from Guadalcanal—the locals who hadn’t received any money looked for someone to blame. Everyone was enraged at everyone. Wilson Fileil, the chief who had brokered the deal, was forced out. The villagers, he told the Solomon Star newspaper, had embarked on “a killing spree.”