Chrono-Controversy: The Makah’s Campaign to Resume the Whale Hunt

Abstract

Rhetoric’s multifaceted relationship with time has been explored, yet the role of “chrono-logics” (visions of time’s unfolding and the situating of past, present, and future, ethically and pragmatically) as constitutive features of controversy remains undertheorized. This essay explores clashes between environmentalists and the Makah Indian Nation regarding the Makah’s desire to resume whale hunting. In this controversy, competing conceptions of time form a central fault line. Exploring this debate as a chrono-controversy highlights the rhetorically situated and performed nature of time-based appeals and suggests a framework for approaching controversy and oppositional argument that may be useful for future controversy studies.

Keywords:

• Controversy
• Environmental Rhetoric
• Native American Rhetoric
• Oppositional Argument
• Time

Notes

^1. While scholarship exploring temporality’s implications for rhetoric and argumentation is limited, there are notable exceptions, such as Stahl (2008). Likewise, Jack’s (2006) “chronotopes” are similar to the chrono-logics I explore. Nevertheless, there are important differences in emphasis distinguishing chronotopes from chrono-logics. First, topos suggests something overtly articulated and introduced into the debate, in contrast with a logic that structures the debate, subtly and perhaps even imperceptibly. For instance, Jack references the “precautionary principle” which, upon being invoked in the public debate, becomes a specific argument to be contested. Second, chrono-logics and chronotopes operate at different levels of specificity. I argue that there are two primary chrono-logics (linear and cyclical). Jack’s essay suggests that “dominant chronotopes” could include things like “time-space compression” (pp. 54–55). The other chronotopes she analyzes, “substantial equivalence,” the “precautionary principle,” and the “life cycle approach” (p. 68) are similarly specific. Having both frameworks allows us to, on the one hand, classify specific chronotopes in terms of overarching chrono-logics, and on the other hand, to trace particular chronotopes once we have identified overarching chrono-logics in a controversy. Finally, while Jack’s analysis is consistent with Olson and Goodnight’s (1994) framework of social controversy and oppositional argument, my analysis more specifically delineates not just the processes by which certain chronotopes are dominant and others marginal, but what specifically makes competing chrono-logics a basis for “oppositional argument.” Given the rich set of scholarship about “oppositional argument,” this helps to extend the scope of rhetorical scholarship regarding temporality. Overall, these differences are about tendency rather than sharp distinction, and Jack’s essay offers many points of overlap with my own.

^2. Following Lake (1991), I am not arguing that every Native American considers time cyclically, nor am I romanticizing “noble” natives, though ignoring difference is problematic (Drinnon, 1997, pp. xviii–xix).

^3. As Gorman (2000) notes, in studying news coverage of the controversy, “The core issues of the Makah whale hunt are treaty rights, gray whale population numbers, and the cultural/subsistence needs of the Makah tribe” (p. 9). The five questions structuring my analysis intersect with these primary issues. The supplemental texts that I engage are sites where temporality is articulated in relation to such core disagreements, illuminating how the chrono-logics employed by Johnson and Watson help to structure this controversy and also find purchase in the broader public sphere, and from numerous voices (including members of the Makah Indian Nation and newspaper readers writing letters to the editor). However, time does not account for the entirety of the arguments in the Makah whaling controversy, as illustrated by topics such as whether the broader Makah community supported resuming the hunt, whether the Sierra Club opposed the hunt, and whether the Makah considered selling the whale meat. These were all debated by Johnson (2001) and Watson (2001) but were not primarily temporal and thus not featured in my analysis. Thus, these supplemental texts interact with the primary texts by highlighting moments where chrono-logics appear, rather than suggesting that such moments are representative or defining of the entire controversy.

^4. This letter, along with Johnson (2001), Watson (2001), and a few other texts, is included in an anthology by Ramage, Bean, and Johnson (2001) on Writing Arguments: A Rhetoric with Readings, suggesting that this letter resonated in giving insight into the controversy in ways that similar letters and other artifacts did not.

^5. Lake (1991) also draws on Eliade and sacred time in developing “time’s cycle,” the basis of my “cyclical chrono-logic.” Also, while Cox sharply distinguishes between the irreparable and sacred, I argue that seeing such temporal logics as rhetorically situated and performed enables us to see rhetors using both at once.

^6. This conservationist–preservationist dialectic represents another instance of the malleability of chrono-logics. If we considered proforest advocacy, for instance, a typical conservationist appeal could exemplify a linear chrono-logic: Maintaining forests allows us to continue to use their resources now and in the future (much as the ICRW was originally created to conserve whale populations). Conversely, a preservationist appeal, in arguing for the harmony in nature that the forest fosters, suggests a cyclical chrono-logic. Watson’s preservationist appeal, though, is rooted in the more recently developed ethical sensibility that no life should be killed, whale or otherwise, exhibiting a linear chrono-logic.

^7. In this case, the Makah’s arguments clearly feature linear and cyclical chrono-logics. Watson’s opposing arguments are clearly linear and, while not conclusively cyclical, they adopt constructions of irreparability consistent with a cyclical chrono-logic. Future scholarship might explore situations under which dominant Anglo rhetoric could be categorized as clearly linear at times and clearly cyclical at others.

^8. This argument builds on Jack’s (2006) characterization of the flexibility of chronotopes: “The ideological connections of each chronotype are not necessary ones; chronotopes shift over time and may be redeployed for alternative ideological purposes” (p. 69).

^9. Also, while in this case, environmental advocates primarily deploy arguments rooted in linear chrono-logics, future work might illuminate how environmentalists often either use cyclical chrono-logics, such as in praising the simple life of Henry David Thoreau, or alternately are attacked as “anti-progress” by those using linear chrono-logics and thus dismissed (DeLuca, 1999).