In 1970, seven juvenile killer whales were captured in Penn Cove in Washington State. One of the young whales was shipped across the United States to the Miami Seaquarium in Florida, where she remained in captivity for more than 50 years. She was known by her stage name “Lolita,” but trainers knew her as “Tokitae,” meaning “bright day, pretty colors” in Chinook jargon. Tokitae was one of nearly 50 whales who were removed from the Southern Resident killer whales of the Salish Sea in the 1960s and early 1970s for display in marine parks—and after over five decades in captivity, she was nearly released into an oceanic pen in her homewaters in Washington, before her death in 2023.^[1]

Tokitae’s story, and the stories of other captured and captive-born whales, serves as an example of the commodification of killer whales through capture and captivity and the struggles over rehabilitation and release. Their stories can be examined through the lens of kinship between human and non-human animals. By centering decolonial and multispecies approaches to ocean equity, we can open the “black box” of the marine park industry and reveal the silenced voices and violent histories of oppression that have been hidden from sight. These histories illustrate the settler-colonial and white supremacist ideas of domination and control over human and non-human bodies, and kinship relations in the wake of this violent and oppressive system.     

Southern Resident killer whales being rounded up in Penn Cove, Washington State, in 1970, when Tokitae was captured. Source: King 5 News Seattle – March 8, 2024. 

Kinship refers to interspecies relations between human and non-human animals based on shared positionalities of exploitation and resilience within systems of settler-colonial conquest and capitalist exploitation.^[2] In this imagining, humans and whales are interspecies kin united by shared oppression and adaptation, challenging the Western human-nature dichotomy by centering animals as active agents who can shape their lifeways in response to violence, similar to human communities.^[3] Kinship centers marginalized and displaced human communities including Black and Indigenous peoples impacted by settler-colonial and capitalist systems, including the Coast Salish peoples of the Pacific Northwest. It also centers whales who share a similar positionality as exploited, including survivors of capture such as Tokitae, descendants of displaced whales who were born in captivity, and populations that remain in the wild, such as the Southern Resident killer whales from which Tokitae was captured.

Through this lens, capture for marine parks is a form of dispossession, where forced displacement of young whales from their homewaters has had long-term negative effects on the lifeways of both whales and Indigenous communities. Killer whales live in multigenerational, matriarchal social groups called pods, so the removal of juvenile whales prevents the transfer of language, behaviors, and communal ties from elders to young, paralleling the displacement, oppression, and genocide of Indigenous peoples.^[4] The death and displacement of 50 adolescents from the Southern Residents also destabilized the population by removing genetic diversity, contributing to the high rates of inbreeding and reproductive failure we still see today in the endangered population.^[5] This complicates recovery efforts and demonstrates the intergenerational harms that dispossession has inflicted on whales. Forced displacement of killer whales also represents dispossession from human kin, particularly Coast Salish tribes such as the Lummi Nation, whose lifeways and practices are intimately connected to the whales, and who call killer whales “our relations under the waves.”^[6] Dispossession of non-human kin interferes with Tribal sovereignty and rights to self-determination, situating whales and Indigenous peoples alike as someone to be colonized, exploited, and controlled.^[7]

Once a killer whale is in captivity, their handlers may be inclined to perceive their work as an act of care focused on the “treatment and welfare of others,” a phenomenon that has been at the core of various aquarium and oceanarium institutions for decades. This was documented in the 1980s by anthropologists Bob Mullan and Garry Marvin, who reported about their experience of a Shamu show in 1986:

“With both trainers and whales in the pool the commentator, with a voice full of sincerity and concern warns us: ‘We mustn’t forget that at one time so little was known about these magnificent creatures that killer whales were hunted and shot for the sheer pleasure of it and in some parts of the world it still occurs. We like to believe that because of marine zoological parks such as Sea World the public has turned fear into fascination and is going to respect the killer whales and even love one like Shamu or Kandu.’”^[8]

Former SeaWorld trainer Bridgette Pirtle, who was involved in the production of the 2013 documentary Blackfish and has since been a critic of the film’s anti-captivity message, reflected on her experience as a trainer and came to a similar conclusion: “I feel grateful and privileged because SeaWorld gave me an opportunity to care for these amazing creatures [emphasis added].”^[9] Other trainers share this perspective on caregiving toward captive whales. When discussing whether Tokitae should be released from her tank in Miami and returned to her homewaters in Washington, Heather Keenan, one of Tokitae’s former trainers, stated, “I don’t think [the plan is] based on what’s in her best interest…We’re only here for her best interest.”^[10]

Tokitae with her trainers during a performance at the Miami Seaquarium. Source: Kaarina Makowski.

Yet as Mullan, Marvin, and others have pointed out, care can be a fluid term and is not “inherently good.” Instead, it often embodies “uneven relation[s]” that reflect and reinforce constructed identities and hierarchies of control.^[11] Due to this, it is important to look beyond trainer-whale bonds and personalized acts of care (such as feeding and enrichment) to focus on the systemic hierarchies of domination upon which captivity was founded and perpetuated. Hierarchies are socially constructed by the creation of identities and the assignment of rights and capacities based on these identities.^[12]Constructed racial hierarchies assign Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized racial identities as a category related to but distinct from “the human,” and these hierarchies become normalized in both practices and worldviews to justify domination over others.^[13] These hierarchies are also reflected in marine parks through the categorization and subjugation of nonhuman animals. Captive whales are considered uniquely intelligent and social relative to other animals, but they are still distinct from “the human.” Animal handlers control their bodies by expecting or forcing whales to perform for the public, by closely monitoring and controlling reproduction through captive breeding or insemination programs,^[14] and by restricting their freedom of movement; whereas in the wild killer whales swim up to 40 miles per day, captive enclosures are typically 150 by 90 feet. Tokitae’s tank at the Miami Seaquarium was even smaller, at only 80 by 35 feet.^[15]

Tokitae lived and performed for over five decades in a tank measuring 80 by 35 feet in size. Source: Rachael Andersen.

These practices of control exist within a constructed space of “safe inequality,”^[16] where trainers may enter a whale’s tank at will and safely remove themselves, while the whale has limited capacity to restrict human access to their physical space and cannot retreat when that space is violated. When a whale demonstrates “animal-like” aggression or inflicts harm, such as when Tilikum the whale killed SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau in 2010, they are often isolated not only from trainers, but also from other whales, with immense harm to the whales’ psychological welfare.^[17] These tragic incidents are a reminder that captive whales are “neither polite nor apolitical,” and “the potential threat of injury characterizes the work of caring” for them.^[18] Relations of care in captivity are thus plagued with uneven, unsafe power dynamics. When former SeaWorld trainer John Hargrove realized the safety concerns and threats to both human and animal welfare in captivity, he resigned from his position, later sharing, “I knew the truth, and I just couldn’t handle it anymore.”^[19]

Within the violent and unsafe structures of captivity, what obligations are owed to whales and Indigenous peoples by the white settlers who have perpetuated that system and benefited from the exploitation and oppression of both people and wildlife? Although wild capture was outlawed in the United States in the 1970s, marine parks remain embedded within the global market for commodified animals. Indeed, there are over 50 known killer whales in captivity worldwide as of this writing.^[20] The question then becomes whether these whales can or should be released into the wild. Prior release attempts were plagued with challenges from disease and difficulty (re)acclimating whales to the wild, as demonstrated by the high-profile death of the killer whale Keiko, star of the film Free Willy, following his release in 2002.^[21] As critical social scientists have noted, understanding animals taken into captivity—let alone their breeding—must also shift our grasp of the very ontology of animals and what it means to be “wild.” Zoos and their related institutions “represent the power of human beings to command the presence of living creatures which would normally absent themselves from the human gaze.”^[22] Commodified for entertainment, processes of disciplining in fact fundamentally alter the “animal” qualities of “wild” creatures, which then creates further problems once notions of “re-integration” are broached. 

One response to the dilemma of releasing captive whales has been for some animal rights groups to advocate for whales to be released not into the open ocean, but into oceanic pens.^[23] Oceanic pens, however, again raise the question of what it means to be “wild,” where wildness is conceived not as a captive-wild dichotomy but instead as a spectrum of “semi-wildness,” where they are no longer “wild enough” to exist outside an enclosure, but they also are not granted rights to autonomy that are assigned to fuller categories of wildness or humanness. Handlers and veterinarians retain the power to determine whether captive whales are “rehabilitated” enough to be released, perpetuating the paternalistic assumption that whales are “better off” under the care of their handlers, or in captivity for their “own good.”^[24]

This begs the question: If whales are not released, is their confinement a continued act of domination rooted in a colonial system, or can their captivity be justified as an act of care that reduces suffering to animals who may die in the wild without human intervention? And—perhaps most importantly—who decides whether whales are sufficiently rehabilitated? While the power of white settlers over the lifeways of captive and wild whales can perpetuate colonial patterns of control, Indigenous-led reintroductions of their non-human kin alternatively represent an act of repatriation in alignment with the LandBack movement.^[25] From this perspective, release is not just anticolonial, or a rejection of the hierarchical systems that privilege white settlers at the expense of Indigenous peoples, but is decolonial, or actively working to deconstruct these hierarchies.^[26]

Using the concept of kinship to examine the commodification of killer whales, it may be concluded that capture and captivity, and dilemmas over rehabilitation and release, are embedded within a history of settler-colonial and white supremacist ideas of domination and control over human and non-human bodies. Captivity is one of many “colonial legacies” where certain groups experience disproportionate harm and by which human and non-human kin are united through shared positionalities as oppressed and resilient. It is within the wake of this colonial legacy that white settlers may reimagine obligations to and relations with Indigenous communities and whales in pursuit of kinship. Looking forward, the system upon which captivity was established and perpetuated should be questioned, and the hierarchical assumptions that have been normalized can be challenged both in scholarship and in practice. As such, settlers—myself included—are invited to re-envision the possibilities for our embodied relations with human and non-human kin. This requires confronting the legacy of these violent and oppressive histories to collectively reenvision a reality in which positionalities of kinship are based not only on a shared history of oppression, but also in a more equitable future where humans and whales alike have freedom of movement, space, resources, labor, reproduction, and bodies.

I conclude by returning to and reflecting upon the story of Tokitae. On March 30, 2023, following decades-long efforts by Indigenous peoples and advocacy groups, leadership at the Miami Seaquarium officially announced plans to relocate Tokitae into an oceanic pen in the Salish Sea, to be reunited with her Lummi family. The announcement came shortly after the Seaquarium retired Tokitae from public performances, after over 50 years in captivity. Sadly, as plans progressed to facilitate her return to her homewaters, Tokitae passed away on August 18, 2023. Reacting to the death of Tokitae and the subsequent eviction notice handed down to the Miami Seaquarium in 2024 on the basis of various health and safety violations (leading to its closure in 2025), Lummi elder Raynell Morris said: “The ancestors called her home, and she did not make it back in the live form to the Salish Sea. But we did transport her ashes back and put them back in her natal waters to join her spirit…Their spirit needs to be cared for.”^[27] This Indigenous ethic of care stands in contrast to the paternalistic notions of care embodied in trainer-whale relationships in a captive setting.

Protestors outside the Miami Seaquarium calling for Tokitae’s release. Source: NBC 6 South Florida, August 21, 2023.

The story of Tokitae, the Coast Salish peoples, and the Southern Resident killer whales—and the failure to successfully reunite Tokitae with her human and non-human kin—is a microcosm of the colonial legacies of the commodification of killer whales. It reminds us not only to reimagine notions of kinship, care, and our shared futures, but also to take tangible steps to challenge entrenched systems. The urgency of these actions is underscored by high-profile cases of whales abandoned in failed marine parks, such as the whales Wikie and Keijo in Marineland Antibes.^[28] If Tokitae’s spirit can continue to evoke care, as the Lummi suggest, then it might also provide the possibility for exploring better futures for human and non-human kin—and reminds us there is much more work needed to achieve a future of multispecies justice and ocean equity.

About the Author

Nikol Damato is a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington and an interdisciplinary social scientist with expertise in the human dimensions of marine conservation. Her research examines public policy and decision-making to support recovery efforts for the endangered Southern Resident killer whales.

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