A climate leader and matriarch-in-training, Kayah George is helping strengthen the generations-long alliance between the Coast Salish peoples and the orcas who live among them
Orcas have a massive capacity for memory, navigation, communication and data processing, evidenced by the size of their brain , the thickness of their cerebral cortex, and the gyrification of their brain, the most gyrified in the world. Orcas also have the most elaborated insular cortex in the world, which is involved in emotional reasoning, compassion, empathy, perception, motor control, self-awareness and interpersonal experience.
Chief Dan George, Kayah's great-grandfather, in 1971. George was a chief of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation.Kayah says that her people have known all of this for far longer than modern scientists, and that in her communities, their relationship with orcas goes back generations. “We have stories of our people going whaling hundreds or thousands of years ago and always leaving the tongue for the orcas. We knew it was their favourite part. That’s how we grew our relationship with them.
Kayah George, a Coast Salish matriarch-in-training, sings an orca song while out on a boat visiting her orca relatives in Oak Bay, Victoria. The song was created by her Ta’ah Amy George, a Tsleil-Waututh matriarch.Unfortunately, this relationship, and therefore thousands of years of cultural reciprocity and knowledge, was disrupted by settler colonialism in a region that is to this day still considered “unceded” or unrelinquished land.
With young orcas being taken away, you can see the impact on the pods. With young Indigenous kids taken away, you can see the impact on families and communities.Kayah and her aunt, Charlene Aleck, are part of the Sacred Trust Initiative, a Tsleil-Wautituh effort to enact sovereignty of their land and traditions to protect the land and water from pipeline expansion and other entities.
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