A group of Siletz Indians are holding a presentation Saturday, June 6 to honor a humpback whale that washed ashore near Yachats last fall and died. The event is to help non-Natives understand the historical and cultural significance of these mammals.
A crowd watches as workers flip over the beached whale at San Marine State Park near Yachats, Ore. on Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2025. Scientists, veterinary students and members of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians worked together to disassemble the whale, which was euthanized the day prior.
Saskia Hatvany / OPB
The Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians sent a team in mid-November to do a traditional salvage of the whale, a common practice for coastal Native people for centuries. The bones, blubber and baleen of the 28-foot, 10-ton mammal were harvested by the Siletz, while an Oregon State University necropsy team worked alongside them, removing samples of their own for study.
The side-by-side events have been celebrated as a positive partnership between Indigenous people and academic researchers. The Siletz team showed the OSU crew how to carefully remove sections of the whale without power tools, while the OSU people displayed the creature’s anatomy in ways they’d never seen before.
Lisa Norton, the Siletz’s chief administrative officer, told KLCC that one of her sons was on the beach that day, “able to watch in real time that cultural transmission of practices that all others might have thought was lost.”
She said that experience “was truly a blessing.”
Norton told KLCC that at the June 6 whale honoring event, she and several others from the tribe will discuss whales largely through traditional storytelling in a welcoming and open space near the Amanda Trail.
One important distinction Norton said she wanted to make was that while there was humor sometimes being displayed by her and other Siletz tribal members, it was not making light of the whale’s death or the circumstances leading up to its entanglement in a crab pot line.
“By the end there, when we were very exhausted, there was a fair amount of joy and laughter that day,” said Norton. “I think that needs to be told, and not in a way of like, ‘Ha ha! We’re just doing this thing.’ It was a beautiful thing and joyous, even if it was a tragic ending to this very important whale to the people of Yachats and the surrounding area.”
Norton said being able to salvage the whale harkened back to cultural traditions practiced before colonization, which were a means of sustenance for coastal communities. She hopes the audience leaves with one main takeaway:
“Gaining an understanding of what it meant to us as a people, as individuals,” said Norton. “And for those who were already connected with the whale, to understand that connection a little bit deeper or maybe understand that that connection isn’t over. And that it will live on in the stories that we do tell.”
The event is scheduled for 1 p.m. on Saturday, June 6 at the Amanda Gathering Area near the Amanda Trail in Yachats. A shuttle is leaving the Yachats Presbyterian Church at 12:00 p.m. and 12:30 p.m. that day, and will drop off passengers 300 feet away from the site.
Norton said the Siletz Tribe’s cultural and natural resources department will eventually decide what will be done with the whale’s bones and other materials.
Brian Bull is a reporter with the KLCC newsroom. This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
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