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The call of Tokitae
Deep Reads features The Washington Post’s best immersive reporting and narrative writing.
She was 3 or maybe 4 years old on the last day she saw her family, when the men came in spotter planes and speedboats, hurling seal bombs that sent 200-decibel blasts reverberating through the currents of Puget Sound. She stayed close to her mother, the pair of them among nearly 100 terrified and disoriented southern resident orcas who were driven north along the eastern shore of Whidbey Island, until they were trapped in the shallower waters of Penn Cove.
It was unusually cold that August of 1970, and Terrell C. Newby still remembers that he arrived at Whidbey Island wearing a thick red-and-blue sweater that his mother had knitted for him. He was 30 years old, a student of marine biology and a Vietnam veteran who had returned from the war less than two years before. He had come to Penn Cove because he’d been invited by the men who were leading the orca capture: Ted Griffin, who owned the Seattle Marine Aquarium, and his business partner, Don Goldsberry. Their intent was to pull roughly half a dozen orcas from the water — young ones, 10 to 12 feet long, old enough that they wouldn’t perish when separated from their mothers but young enough to be compliant — and sell them to marine parks around the world for display.
Mothers and calves are separated during the Penn Cove capture in 1970. (Courtesy of Terrell Newby)
By the time Newby set foot on the dock, the most desirable whales had already been cordoned off behind nets in the water, and his job was to sit in an eight-foot pram and try to keep the panicked mother orcas away from their babies. It was exhilarating and frightening at once — virtually nothing was known about orcas at the time, and Newby had no idea what might happen to him if they tipped his boat and he fell into the water — but despite the desperation of the whales, none showed aggression toward him.
He found the scene disturbing, but he didn’t feel truly horrified until he heard shrill cries and saw that the men had trapped the juvenile female orca against the dock. She was squealing frantically as a net was pulled over her body, and her mother was calling out in response, lifting her eyes above the surface to maintain sight of her calf.
The young whale was lifted from the water, wrapped in moist towels and loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck, and Newby was told to ride with her down to Seattle. He took his place at her side, and found himself fixed in her wide, dark gaze. Here, he would say, five decades later, is where I started getting really undone. He watched her eye move from his face to the buildings shuddering past along the highway, and he wondered how foreign it all must seem to her — to be outside the only element she’d ever known, her body unfamiliar with the burden of its own weight.
A close-up of Tokitae's eye, taken as Newby rode with her to Seattle. (Courtesy of Terrell Newby)
She stared and stared. He took a photograph of her, and a sickened feeling began to spread in his chest. His mind carried him back to the Mekong Delta, where he had been tasked with making solatium payments to families who had lost livestock or loved ones to American attacks. He’d once sat beside a mother who wept over the body of her baby on a rice mat, as they tried to determine a fair price for a lost child. That moment returned to him as he looked into the piercing eye of the young whale.
It took nearly two hours for the truck to lumber south to the city, and the orca never made a sound. Newby gently rubbed her head, poured water over her, murmured It’s going to be okay, not believing his own words.
In Seattle, he touched her one last time before he slipped off the back of the truck. Bye, baby, he whispered. Then he got in a car bound for Penn Harbor to prepare the next whale for transport. He would finish his job, and then devote his life to the study and protection of marine mammals, fighting to outlaw captures like the one he had just participated in. Riding north in stunned silence, Newby had become only the first of many who would describe themselves as forever changed by the orca known as Tokitae.
She was sold for $20,000 to the Miami Seaquarium, where she would spend the next half a century performing in the smallest orca tank in North America, 80 feet long and 35 feet wide, dubbed the “whale bowl.” Of the nearly 50 southern resident orcas taken from the Pacific Northwest during the 1960s and ’70s, most died within the first years after their capture — but Tokitae endured, becoming the last member of her family alive in captivity. Her life was shaped by an expansive constellation of people drawn into her orbit: devoted trainers who cared for her; marine mammal scientists who understood the toll of her captivity; conservation advocates and legions of fans who called for her freedom; the Indigenous people of the Lummi Nation, who consider orcas to be sacred relatives of their tribe; a Latin American business executive who agreed in 2022 that the whale did not belong in the stadium he’d just purchased; a billionaire NFL team owner who pledged to spend upward of $20 million to bring Tokitae home to the Salish Sea.
To Raynell Morris, a 67-year-old matriarch of the Lummi Nation who spent the past six years working to return Tokitae to the Pacific Northwest, the remarkable alignment of people devoted to the orca — across different cultures and convictions — made perfect sense. “She had a purpose, and it was bringing people together,” Morris said. Tokitae, known by the name Sk’aliCh’ehl-tenaut
in the Lhaq’temish language of the Lummi, always held a singular magnetism, Morris said: “When her left eye walks on you, you are hers forever.”
Raynell Morris, a matriarch of the Lummi Nation, prays near the tribe's reservation. (Nick Cote for The Washington Post)
In March, a plan was announced to move Tokitae to a 10-acre netted sanctuary in the San Juan Islands, where she could live out her life in her natal waters. To Morris, helping the whale complete this journey was a sacred obligation on behalf of her people.
The team working toward her relocation began logistical preparations, addressing state and federal requirements and consulting with Native tribes. After enduring lonely periods of neglect, Tokitae seemed to flourish with the constant dedication of the trainers and veterinarians who were readying her for the transition. Her return home was finally within sight, a milestone that felt ecstatic to the many who had fought for her for so long.
And then, on Aug. 18, 53 years after she arrived at the Miami Seaquarium and just months before she was due to leave it, Tokitae died there.
What followed was a moment of reckoning. The hopeful symbolism of her rescue was gone, replaced by searching questions about the past and future of our relationship with her species, and the natural world we share. In life, Tokitae was a beloved but involuntary ambassador for her kind. In death, she had become something more: a parable and a guide, revealing the full spectrum of our human potential — to ruin, and to repair.
Tokitae at the Miami Seaquarium in January 2014. (Walter Michot/Getty Images)
In her prime, she was magnificent: over 7,500 pounds and 22 feet long, liquid lines of obsidian black and white, a sleek, strong body built to swim vast distances and dive hundreds of feet deeper than the 20-foot floor of the barren concrete tank where she performed every day in the center of a crowded stadium.
Her name, Tokitae — Toki for short — was given to her by the first veterinarian to care for her at the Miami Seaquarium; it was a nod to her region of origin, a Coast Salish greeting roughly translated as “nice day, pretty colors.” But to audiences packed into the Seaquarium, she was known only as Lolita.
In the beginning, Tokitae performed 20-minute shows multiple times per day alongside her companion, Hugo, a fellow captured southern resident orca. The whale bowl was small even for a single whale, but the pair shared the space until 1980, when Hugo was found motionless at the bottom of the pool. The young bull — 15 years old, far short of the 50 or 60 years he might have lived in the wild — was dead of a brain aneurysm after repeatedly ramming his head against the side of the tank. His body was reportedly disposed of at a Dade County landfill. Tokitae would continue to share her tank with other cetaceans, but she would never again be in the company of her own kind.
Former trainer Marcia Henton Davis and scientist Deborah Giles discuss what living in a small tank for more than 50 years meant for Tokitae's quality of life. (Joshua Carroll/The Washington Post)
The grim details of Tokitae’s years at the Seaquarium are chronicled in Sandra Pollard’s book “A Puget Sound Orca in Captivity”: Tokitae’s body was marred by sores and abrasions from the concrete pool, and “rake” marks from the Pacific white-sided dolphins who scraped their teeth over her skin. Her favorite toy was an old wet suit — some theorized it might have reminded her of kelp. She was sunburned, with no shelter to shade her, and her eyes suffered from constant exposure to dust and UV radiation. Tokitae regularly performed with injuries — bloody teeth, abscesses, infections — and was kept on a cocktail of antibiotics and medications.
“Her [tail] flukes dragged on the floor of that tank,” Pollard said. “She was never able to fully submerge in a vertical position.”
As our knowledge of orcas grew, and our cultural perception of captivity began to shift, the calls to release Tokitae reached a new intensity. In 1995, Ken Balcomb, the pioneering marine mammal researcher who founded the Center for Whale Research and spent his life tracking the southern resident killer whale population, announced a campaign to push for Tokitae’s return to Washington state. Balcomb’s brother, Howard Garrett, formed a nonprofit organization to support this effort, eventually called Orca Network.
For several years, Garrett campaigned in Miami, “trying to drum up awareness, media, do demonstrations, write open letters to the owners — everything that I could think of,” he said. But there was never a response from the Seaquarium. County records indicated that the marine park was making around $1 million per year on Tokitae at that time, he said, “so they certainly weren’t going to listen to me.”
Others listened, though. Garrett’s efforts drew widespread public attention, rallying support from state and federal elected officials as well as a few high-profile names. “I have been deeply moved by the efforts to free Lolita,” Elton John wrote in a 1999 letter, “and wish to add my name to the campaign to return her to her home waters.”
Marcia Henton Davis feeds Tokitae at the Miami Seaquarium in July. (Matias J. Ocner/Getty Images)
Over Tokitae’s years at the Seaquarium, several of her trainers developed committed bonds with the orca. Marcia Henton Davis saw Tokitae for the first time in 1988 as a 22-year-old visitor to the park, where she was instantly struck by the smallness of the tank and the lethargy of the whale within. Davis stared into one of Tokitae’s eyes, “and there was just such depth there,” she said. “I kind of started crying a little bit, just seeing her like that. … I knew right at that moment, ‘I need to be with this animal.’” She was hired by the Seaquarium a few months later.
Tokitae was gentle and patient, and often exhibited protective instincts, Davis said. She recalled one afternoon when she was joking around with another trainer and tossed a squid tentacle that stuck to his wet suit. In response, the trainer scooped Davis up as if he might drop her into the pool — and Tokitae came racing over from the opposite side of the tank, furiously bobbing her head in disapproval. “She thought that was aggression,” Davis said. “She got upset by that.” The trainers were careful to never play around in that way again.
Davis left the Seaquarium in 1995, after new management took over and implemented policies that she found irresponsible, including limiting the time that trainers could interact with Tokitae. “I cried for months about that,” she said. “But I couldn’t effect any change.”
Sarah Onnen, who joined the Seaquarium in 2001, spent more than 20 years working with the orca. At first, Onnen felt challenged by Tokitae, who had a stubborn streak and a sense of humor that sometimes frustrated her trainers. She had an impeccable memory, Onnen said, and would needle specific trainers with certain behavioral quirks. For years, Tokitae made a particular sound when she saw Onnen, an exhale like air hissing from a flat tire, which Onnen interpreted as something akin to a mocking snort. When Onnen learned to laugh at this — when she began to embrace Tokitae’s expressiveness — their connection deepened, she said.
She felt a responsibility to protect that relationship, Onnen said, because she knew the orca had lost so many others. Trainers would build rapport with her, and then leave for other jobs or to raise families. “It wasn’t their fault,” Onnen said, “but I saw people come and go. It always kind of broke my heart. So I kind of vowed to myself that I wouldn’t leave her.”
Everything about Tokitae’s existence — her routines, her relationships, her environment — was defined by humans; she’d grown familiar with the hum of motorized pumps, the blare of loudspeakers and screaming crowds. But when the stadium emptied at night, she would often vocalize in the quiet, calling out
in the way her mother had once taught her.
Tokitae performs in 2014. (Walter Michot/Getty Images)
In our collective imagination, the stories of individual orcas transform our understanding of what these animals feel and experience — as with Tilikum, the SeaWorld orca who was involved in the deaths of three people and became the subject of the 2013 documentary “Blackfish.” The impact of his story was significant: In the year after “Blackfish” was released, SeaWorld’s attendance plummeted, and in 2016, the company announced an end to its orca breeding program.
For years, Tokitae’s experience was less visible but no less illuminating, said Lori Marino, president of the Whale Sanctuary Project and a neuroscientist who has studied cetacean brains for 35 years. Structurally, an orca has a larger portion of its brain devoted to higher thinking than a human does, Marino said; Tokitae’s mind had afforded her extraordinary resilience, an unknowable inner life that allowed her to persist for so long in such an impoverished environment.
“She was coping in a way that she had worked out for herself,” Marino said. “There was a narrative there, a story she told herself about what was happening to her, and that allowed her to live.”
It is possible to fully understand the contrast between Tokitae’s life in the whale bowl and the one she would have lived in the wild, because her family is the most studied population of whales on the planet, with a complete annual census dating back 47 years.
Deborah Giles explains some of the unique characteristics of southern resident orcas and why they are endangered. (Joshua Carroll/The Washington Post)
All orcas around the world are the same species, the largest of the dolphin family, but they are divided into distinct populations that do not interbreed and rarely interact with one another. Tokitae’s family of southern resident orcas range from Northern California to southeastern Alaska, with their core habitat in the Salish Sea. They are known for their close-knit social culture, said Michael Weiss, research director at the Center for Whale Research on San Juan Island. The three matrilineal pods of southern resident whales — J pod, K pod and L pod — each communicate in their own specific dialect, and all are exceptionally bonded to their mothers.
“No one leaves their mom’s group for their whole life, not the males nor the females,” Weiss said. Female southern residents have been known to live as long as 90 or 100 years; males, on the other hand, are more than eight times as likely to die the year after their mother does.
Some say Tokitae might be the daughter of the oldest living orca, an L pod matriarch known as Ocean Sun, but this has never been confirmed. At nearly 100 years old, Ocean Sun is the only southern resident who was alive at the time of the captures — the only one who would remember Tokitae.
For creatures of such intelligence and social sophistication, the trauma of the capture era was profound and enduring. After the last of the young whales were pulled from the water in 1970, the fractured family of southern residents made their way back out to sea without the seven juveniles who were taken and the four whales who had died — three babies and a mother who drowned in the nets. By the time whale captures in the United States ended in 1976, roughly a third of the southern residents had been culled, Weiss said. Before the capture era, their population was more than 100 whales; as of the census in July, there were 75. Since 2005, the southern residents have been listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act.
The whales have faced new threats in more recent years, particularly the precipitous decline of their primary prey, the Chinook salmon, said Deborah Giles, science and research director at the conservation research organization Wild Orca. In the absence of sufficient salmon, other dangers to the orcas — the stress of boat traffic, the infiltration of chemical pollutants — are exacerbated, causing illness, death and pregnancy loss.
In 2018, the plight of the southern residents drew worldwide attention when an orca known as Tahlequah gave birth to a female calf who died less than an hour later. The grieving mother carried the body of her newborn for 17 days, sometimes in her mouth, sometimes draped over her head or back. Her vigil made global headlines, and many expressed astonishment to see an animal perform such an undeniable ritual of mourning.
Two years later, Tahlequah stunned onlookers again after giving birth to a healthy male calf. Giles was on the water with Tahlequah’s pod near San Juan Island on the afternoon when the new calf was first spotted, and suddenly the two other southern resident pods came charging in from the west, scores of whales soaring up and out of the water as they swam at top speed. Every member of the population was in attendance.
It was a “superpod,” a cultural phenomenon unique to southern residents, in which all three pods of whales come together in one group. Superpods have anecdotally been observed to occur around occasions of social significance to the animals — such as the birth or death of an orca — and this one was the first to occur in the area in several years.
“There’s not many animal populations*, period*, let alone other marine mammals … where they’re all socializing with one another, and they all know each other,” Weiss said.
For hours, Giles remembered, the whales breached and vocalized, slapping their fins and flukes against the water. The timing of the gathering, so closely following the arrival of the new calf, was especially striking.
“It feels metaphysical to me,” Giles said. “How did they hear? How did they know?”
Morris in her ceremonial orca-themed regalia. Orcas are considered sacred kin of the Lummi Nation. (Nick Cote for The Washington Post)
To the people of the Lummi Nation, orcas are considered to be people, sacred kin of the tribe; they are called qwe’lhol’mechen
, meaning “our relations under the waves.” But for decades, the Lummi did not know that dozens of southern resident orcas had been trapped and sold.
“We weren’t asked, in 1970, what our feelings were about the state of Washington issuing a permit to capture our relatives,” Morris said. “We didn’t hear about the captures. We didn’t know about them. We didn’t know about her until 2017.”
When a member of the Lummi business council learned of Tokitae, the tribe’s Sovereignty and Treaty Protection Office began to investigate her story. What it discovered felt painfully resonant, Morris said, echoing the abduction of Native children who were sent to American boarding schools and stripped of their families, culture and language. The council soon passed a unanimous motion, declaring their sacred obligation to bring Tokitae — Sk’aliCh’ehl-tenaut to the Lummi — back to the Salish Sea. This task was bestowed upon Morris by Lummi Hereditary Chief Tsi’li’xw Bill James before his death in 2020. He described the world as an interconnected web of life; bringing the orca home would mend the strand broken by her capture, he told Morris, and allow a new cycle of healing to begin.
A totem pole on San Juan Island memorializes the life of Tokitae, also known as Sk’aliCh’ehl-tenaut to the Lummi. (Nick Cote for The Washington Post)
But there was little precedent for such an endeavor, so Morris and fellow tribal elder Ellie Kinley approached Charles Vinick, executive director of the Whale Sanctuary Project, for guidance. Vinick prepared a proposed operation plan with Jeffrey Foster, a marine mammal expert who once collected orcas from the wild for SeaWorld before pivoting toward conservation, and his wife, Katy Foster. Numerous leading experts contributed to their work, and Vinick and Jeffrey Foster drew on their own experience as part of the team involved in the 1998 relocation of Keiko, the star of “Free Willy,” from the Oregon Coast Aquarium to a sea pen in Iceland.
The involvement of the Lummi breathed new life into the campaign to free Tokitae, but it wasn’t until August 2021 that her release began to feel truly possible. That month, the Dolphin Co. — the largest marine park operator in Latin America, led by CEO Eduardo Albor — announced its intent to buy the Miami Seaquarium. Soon after, the U.S. Agriculture Department issued a scathing inspection report of Tokitae’s living conditions, revealing that the orca had been fed rotting fish, given insufficient quantities of food and forced to perform with injuries.
When Albor purchased the Seaquarium in March 2022, Tokitae was officially retired from performance. The stadium itself had been condemned — only Tokitae’s caregivers were allowed within — which meant Albor found himself the new owner of an orca who could not be displayed to the public, contained at an unusable facility with an outdated, rapidly deteriorating infrastructure. He was a businessman with a liability.
He was also a father who had made a promise, years before, when he took his young adult daughter to watch Tokitae’s show. His daughter was distressed to see the whale in that environment, he said: “She told me, ‘If you ever buy the park, promise you are going to look for a better place for Lolita.’”
Charles Vinick describes the plan to tend to Tokitae’s fragile health and eventually move her from the Miami Seaquarium. (Joshua Carroll/The Washington Post)
Meanwhile, Vinick and Morris had joined forces with marine conservationist Pritam Singh, who had created a nonprofit — ultimately known as Friends of Toki — to advocate for higher-quality care for Tokitae, and announced that he would personally fund $1 million toward that goal. Soon after Albor bought the Seaquarium, Vinick and Singh traveled to Miami, prepared to hold a news conference calling for independent veterinarians to assess Tokitae. But Albor made it clear that a media frenzy would not set the tone for a productive conversation — so Vinick and Singh canceled their plans and agreed to talk privately instead. “That showed great credibility,” Albor said.
The resulting partnership was unprecedented: It was the first time a marine park owner had agreed to work with people who might be considered activists, Vinick said. “What was this collaboration based on? It was based on identifying an area of mutual agreement, on being able to respect one another, and speak with one another as collaborators and even partners, without worrying about all the things we disagree about.”
At first, Friends of Toki was focused on improving Tokitae’s daily care; there wasn’t enough funding to consider a permanent relocation to a sanctuary in the Pacific Northwest.
Then, in early January 2023, Vinick spoke with Jim Irsay, the billionaire owner of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts. He wanted to see the whale.
Irsay had watched Tokitae perform long ago, as a 12-year-old boy, and he’d never forgotten her. He’d always been enamored with animals, and whales in particular; to him, their staggering power and benevolence felt something like God. He told Vinick that he was interested in helping take Tokitae back to her native waters.
Charles Vinick looks out at the Salish Sea in Bellingham, Wash. (Nick Cote for The Washington Post)
Later that month, when Irsay walked up to Tokitae’s tank, she came to the edge of the pool to greet him. She lifted her head out of the water and met his gaze. Then she “baptized” him, as Vinick recalled, spraying a jet of water that soaked Irsay’s expensive suit. He laughed, instantly besotted. “I’m in,” he told Vinick, right then. “I’m in.” Irsay was every bit as dazzled by her as he’d been decades before, but now he was seeing something more.
“I know how it feels — to be held captive,” he said recently, during a video call from his home in Indianapolis. He wore a dark cowboy hat and sunglasses, and lit a cigarette as he spoke. He grew up in an abusive, alcoholic household, he said, in a family scarred by tragedy. “My sister died in a car crash when I was 11. My brother died from birth defects.” For much of his adult life, Irsay struggled with alcoholism and opioid addiction; he finally achieved sobriety many years ago, he said, because he didn’t want to die the way his father and grandfather had.
When he looked at Tokitae, he said, he understood what it meant to be the last one left, to be grieving, to be trapped.
So he knew what he had to do for her. “My goal, my job, whatever you want to call it, is to get her to freedom,” he said. “She told me that she wanted to be free. I mean, she told me. I’m telling you. She looked me in the eye.”
San Juan Island and the Salish Sea. (Nick Cote for The Washington Post)
The announcement was made at a news conference in Miami in March: Within 18 to 24 months, Tokitae would leave the Miami Seaquarium at last, bound for a netted sea sanctuary in the Salish Sea, where she would receive supportive care for the rest of her life. Irsay was prepared to spend upward of $20 million to fund her journey and remaining years.
The plan was not universally embraced. Some of Tokitae’s former trainers and veterinarians said that the stress of the move could kill her, that she couldn’t tolerate such radical change so late in her life. Some marine scientists were initially concerned about the potential impact of Tokitae’s presence in the Salish Sea.
There were also misunderstandings by some members of the public who were envisioning a more idealistic outcome. Tokitae would not be set free into the wild; it simply wasn’t possible. She was a captive whale with chronic infections, potentially carrying harmful pathogens. The southern residents were an endangered, fragile population that were already facing significant threats. Tokitae would live out her life supported by caregivers and veterinarians, her sea pen in a location where scientists were confident that nothing — not a drift of her exhalation, not the sound of her calls — could reach her family.
To Tokitae’s team, there was no question that her life would be monumentally better there. But what had been taken from her could never be fully given back.
The first time Jeffrey Foster saw Tokitae, when he arrived at the Miami Seaquarium as part of the Friends of Toki care team in September 2022, she seemed listless, barely moving beneath the surface of the pool.
“I watched her sitting in a corner, staring at a wall. She rocked back and forth,” Foster said. “It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen.”
She nearly died that October, after developing a serious pulmonary infection, but under the care of her team of veterinarians, she swiftly recovered. By early 2023, with her trainers offering constant engagement, she began to show more energy and vitality than she had in many months. Instead of retreating to a corner of the tank when trainers weren’t working with her, “she started swimming a lot more on her own,” said Mike Partica, her lead trainer. “She had people there to interact with her whenever she wanted.”
Partica came to know her idiosyncrasies, the meaning of her gestures and expressions. She was gentle and good-natured, but also direct in her communication, he said: A vigorous head bob meant “don’t do that.” If you touched her when she didn’t want contact, her eyes would widen. She loved company in proximity, so Partica and the other trainers spent a lot of time floating in the water by her side.
Over those months, Foster said, Tokitae became “just a totally different animal.” She would play with Li’i, the pacific white-sided dolphin who had shared her tank with her for 40 years, the two often racing through the water. “You could never imagine an animal that size swimming that fast in a pool like that,” Foster said. “You could tell that she was responding very well to what we were trying to do.”
To prepare for Tokitae’s eventual transport to the Pacific Northwest, the care team began to introduce her to the stretcher that would be used to lift her from her tank. The team hung it over the side of the pool, then lowered it farther and farther into the water. They offered her food beside it and taught her to line up against it.
Former trainer Marcia Henton Davis had joined the care team, after contacting Friends of Toki to ask if she could be of service once more to the whale she’d loved for so long. That time was filled with a sense of hope and possibility, she said, and she wanted Tokitae to feel it, too. “Every day,” she said, “I’d tell her, ‘You’re going home.’”
In June, Raynell Morris made her seventh trip to Miami to visit and pray with Tokitae. The orca had never seemed so exuberant, slapping her flukes against the water as Morris stood by the pool in her ceremonial regalia and played her drum. “Sk’aliCh’ehl-tenaut, you have such a strong spirit!” Morris exclaimed. When she sang her prayers, the orca called in response, each voice answering the other.
Mike Partica, Tokitae's lead trainer, feeds her in July. (Matias J. Ocner/Getty Images)
When Tokitae began to show signs of illness early in the week of Aug. 14, her caregivers were not alarmed. She was moving her body in ways that indicated discomfort, refusing to eat her usual volume of fish, but she’d had episodes of gastrointestinal distress before. Her veterinary team — including Tom Reidarson, a prominent expert in the medical care of cetaceans, and James McBain, considered a pioneer in the field of marine mammal veterinary medicine — had been encouraged by Tokitae’s recent return to health.
But her appetite and energy level dwindled over the following days, until it became clear that an urgent intervention was needed. The team members formulated a plan to drop the water in her tank Friday morning, to allow them to take a blood sample and administer fluids and medication. It was the same protocol they’d followed months before, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that she would recover once again.
“We weren’t cavalier,” Reidarson said, “but we knew how to take care of her.”
Their treatment was already underway Aug. 18, when an initial blood test revealed a rising level of creatinine, a sign that her kidneys were failing. Reidarson was distressed, he said, but the team was resolute. “There was no giving up,” he said. “It was as simple as that.”
Tokitae’s condition deteriorated as hours passed. She regurgitated bile and kept listing to the side, seemingly disoriented. Divers rotated in and out of the 55-degree pool, trying to hold her upright. Then, as they tried to raise the water level in the tank, there came a harrowing moment when the orca abruptly rolled over and sank toward the bottom. Foster dove down to lift her, along with several other trainers who labored to guide Tokitae back toward the surface.
Partica directed the staff to start draining the water again. A crane lowered Tokitae’s stretcher, and the team guided her into it. They were in the midst of providing more fluids and medications when her respiration grew erratic, the minutes stretching longer and longer between breaths. Partica and trainer Kyra Wadsworth were perched along the sides of the stretcher, and Wadsworth looked at him. “Are we losing her?” she asked. “Yes,” he said. Several members of the team had started to cry.
Sarah Onnen was cradling Tokitae’s head in her hands. Over her long tenure at the Seaquarium, she’d been present when other cetaceans had died; she knew they often experienced involuntary spasms as their bodies shut down, blindly thrashing or biting. She realized that Tokitae could hurt her without intending to, but Onnen stayed as close as she could, gently caressing the orca’s face.
Partica kept moving, climbing toward Tokitae’s head, waving his fingers near her eye and searching for a response. Submerged beside Tokitae, Foster did the same, and he saw her focus on him briefly. Then her gaze softened and drifted, and she closed her eyes. Her final breath left her like a whisper: Shhhhh.
In the water near Tokitae’s pectoral fin, Davis pressed her hand flat against the orca’s side, the place where Davis had always loved to feel that massive heart pumping against her palm. She felt it beat for the last time. In the moment that followed, a low roll of thunder echoed through the stadium — “as if the sky received her,” she would recall later — and a soft rain began to fall.
A stillness fell over Tokitae. She lay cradled by the stretcher that was always meant to lift her away from there, toward the escape she’d finally been granted, but she had already found her own.
Lummi elder Raynell Morris recalls her shock at hearing of Tokitae‘s sudden passing after her health had seemed to be improving. (Joshua Carroll/The Washington Post)
Within hours of Tokitae’s death, her body was transported to the University of Georgia for a necropsy. The invasive work meant she would need to be cremated, a development that surprised and disturbed the Lummi, who do not cremate their dead and said they had not been consulted. Morris, who had flown to Miami to bring the orca’s body home to her tribe for burial, returned to Washington to wait for the weeks-long process to be completed.
In Facebook groups and online forums, thousands of strangers around the world demanded to know what happened, as if searching for one discernible cause, a precise target to blame. In October, the necropsy results would show that Tokitae had died of a convergence of chronic illnesses: pneumonia, inflammation, heart disease and ultimately kidney failure.
This offered a more holistic understanding of her death, the outcome of damage accumulated over many years, until a tipping point was reached. It was a warning and a galvanizing truth: Help came too late for Tokitae, but there were others who still had time.
Davis visited San Juan Island after Tokitae's death. (Nick Cote for The Washington Post)
In September, Marcia Henton Davis stood on a bluff on San Juan Island, overlooking the Salish Sea. She’d once planned to move there with her husband, to be a permanent part of Tokitae’s care team after her relocation to the sea pen; now Davis had come to see Tokitae’s home for the first time, the place of her birth and burial.
“I thought she was going to change the world by coming here alive,” Davis said.
Instead, a sense of urgency had followed Tokitae’s death, the channeling of communal grief into action. Across the world, people were sharing information about the effort to breach four dams along the Snake River to help restore the population of Chinook salmon. They were making donations to marine conservation organizations. They were writing letters to SeaWorld imploring the marine park to release Corky, a wild-born northern resident orca captured in 1969, to a sanctuary off the coast of British Columbia.
Lummi elder Raynell Morris and former trainer Marcia Henton Davis reflect on Tokitae’s legacy. (Joshua Carroll/The Washington Post)
“So Toki is going to change the world,” Davis said. “I just wish she didn’t have to die to do that. But sometimes we humans have to get punched in the face before we take the right action. So maybe this is how she makes a difference.”
Tokitae’s circumstances were unique, Vinick said, but her account is both groundbreaking and instructive. An impenetrable wall has historically stood between marine parks and those who are branded as environmentalists — but Tokitae transcended that divide.
“She brought us together in a way that we would not, and have not, come together otherwise,” Vinick said. He hopes such unity will be possible again: The Whale Sanctuary Project is preparing to open a 100-acre ocean sanctuary in Nova Scotia as soon as next year, and it’s already eyeing animals that might be candidates for placement there.
Vinick looks toward where Tokitae's sea pen would have been. (Nick Cote for The Washington Post)
Vinick feels this work is now bound to Tokitae’s legacy, that her story demonstrates the need to act on behalf of the more than 3,000 cetaceans who remain in captivity worldwide, including approximately 53 orcas. The Whale Sanctuary Project’s ultimate goal is for the breeding of captive whales and dolphins to cease, and for the last of them to live out their lives in sanctuaries where they can explore larger spaces, interact with other animals, feel the currents of the tide.
“We cannot move them all. But if we can demonstrate a way to create a sanctuary, others will do the same — and collectively, we’ll be able to do it,” Vinick said. “Is it enough? No. But it’s probably the best we can do. Did we do enough for Toki? No. But we did the best that we could.”
Southern resident orcas from the J, K and L pods were spotted in the Haro Strait on Aug. 17, 2023. (Center for Whale Research, Permit NMFS 27038)
They began arriving on the afternoon of Aug. 17. Members of all three pods of southern resident orcas made their way into the Haro Strait off the western shore of San Juan Island, dozens of dark bodies surfacing together beneath scattered clouds and the distant Olympic Mountains. It was technically a “near-superpod” — a few of the whales would not arrive in the Salish Sea until days later — and the awed onlookers who watched the orcas greeting and socializing with one another that day did not yet realize the synchronicity, that the gathering was taking place in Tokitae’s final hours. Three thousand miles apart from the last survivor of their stolen family, the southern residents came together in the waters where she was born, filling the air with the sound of their voices.
By the following day, when Tokitae died, only a small group of L pod whales remained near the southern shore of the island. Deborah Giles was on the water with them in her research boat, and she watched Ocean Sun — the matriarch who is possibly Tokitae’s mother — as she distanced herself from the others, almost as if she were seeking a moment alone.
“Whether they somehow know, even across space or distance, that something is happening, a birth or that an animal is dying … I can’t possibly say,” Giles said. “What I can say is these animals are smarter than I think we know.” She doesn’t gravitate toward the mystical, she said, but neither does she dismiss a sense of possibility. Against the limits of our own understanding, we can only wonder at theirs.
Morris feels a deep connection to the orcas when she prays by the sea. (Nick Cote for The Washington Post)
Tokitae came home on a chartered jet late in the afternoon on Sept. 20, in a custom-made white cedar box holding her cremated remains, the lid painted with the precise outline of her tail flukes. Before the flight, Morris had brushed the box with sacred cedar boughs, a ritual meant to cleanse away negative energy.
There was still an undercurrent of sorrow, but Morris also felt relief — joy, even — that her relative was finally where she belonged. Of all the orcas who have died in captivity, Tokitae was the first to be returned to an Indigenous tribe; she would be the first to be buried in her rightful home. The Lummi believed Tokitae’s spirit had already joined the ancestors, but she would not be whole until her remains were put back in the sea.
“That cultural work in finishing this sacred obligation is everything, to give her the honor and respect that she has earned and deserves as a sacred being,” Morris said, as she sat by the Salish Sea at Cherry Point, a hallowed site near the Lummi reservation where she often comes to pray. “Only then, the healing can begin.”
Indigenous artwork of the orca, or qwe’lhol’mechen, meaning “our relations under the waves.” (Nick Cote for The Washington Post)
On the morning of Sept. 23, Morris arrived before dawn at the funeral home in Bellingham where the whale’s ashes were awaiting the final transport. She draped the box in a black-and-white burial shroud printed with the orca’s Indigenous name, laid cedar boughs atop it and whispered softly: “This is your day.”
They left as dawn was breaking, seven members of the Lummi Nation aboard the patrol boat carrying the box of ashes, escorted at a distance by the Coast Guard. The boat paused offshore near the Lummi Stommish Grounds, where other members of the tribe were gathered to pray and bid the orca farewell. At a Lummi burial ceremony, Morris said, it is traditional for pallbearers to lift a casket and rotate it in a circle; it is a gesture of honor, symbolizing a person’s final movement upon the earth. The mourners on the shoreline watched as the boat spun slowly on its axis, one last full turn for Sk’aliCh’ehl-tenaut.
The sun was rising through a cloud-dappled sky as they continued on their way. They traveled for an hour before arriving at the site they had chosen, then stopped and spoke the prayers to welcome their relative home.
When their work was done, Morris unlocked the cremation box and the seven people aboard the boat took turns scooping nearly 300 pounds of fine, dove-gray ash into the sea. They watched as the final essence of the whale vanished in the swells, borne out at last to open water.
Sunset over the Salish Sea on the day of Tokitae's burial. (Nick Cote for The Washington Post)
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