The Last Whalers: The Life of an Endangered Tribe in a Land Left Behind

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One family, one heart, one action, one goal" to remind Lamalerans that the unity of the tribe is paramount.

Clark’s writing is supple but unshowy. Here’s an account of one harpooner’s encounter with a whale: An immersive and absorbing chronicle that takes the reader deep into the lives of this tribe and is told with a richness of interior detail that renders their lives, and the choices they face, not just comprehensible but somehow familiar... Clark's writing about the ocean and its creatures is superb, so vivid that the reader can feel the sting of salt water up the nose...The magic in this work is Clark's decision to cede the story over to the Lamalerans themselves. In doing so, he captures the drama of the tribe as it attempts to navigate new opportunities that, while enticing, may bring about the extinction of their culture...Whether that culture will, in the end, withstand mounting pressures from the outside remains to be seen. If it doesn't, The Last Whalers will at least document all that has been lost."-- Gabriel Thompson, San Francisco Chronicle I started the book with high hopes, and the first few chapters were very interesting. The author describes the life of a small group of whale hunters in a remote island in Indonesia. Apart from describing the high-adrenaline whale hunts and everyday life in the village, the author focuses on a couple of families in the village, all interrelated. He introduces us to a handful of people in the village, harpoonists and ship builders, a shaman, patriarchs. And, inevitably, we hear the modern world is encroaching on the village's traditions, with young men preferring to work in the cities and listen to pop music rather than to live on dried whale meat and participate in the old ceremonies. A forceful debut...Clark's prose soars...Furthermore, his sympathy for and devotion to his subjects is real: he speaks both Indonesian and Lamaleran and fosters an intimacy that allows him to disappear entirely in the telling of their story. He brings us into his characters' lives, showing us the rhythms of Lamalera and the day-to-day tensions the villagers face...Clark successfully depicts these people in their full human complexity rather than as primitive tropes... His finely wrought, deeply reported, and highly empathetic account is a human-level testament to dignity in the face of loss and a stoic adherence to cultural inheritance in the face of a rapidly changing world."-- Tim Sohn, Outside MagazineLamalera has also attracted the unwanted attention of conservation groups. In 2017, for example, the Nature Conservancy began working with the Indonesian government on a push to limit the hunt, arguing that the introduction of motorboats meant the Lamalerans had already given up their traditional culture. There is a dark irony here, that having escaped colonialism for five centuries, the Lamalerans could be forced to lay down their harpoons by the neocolonial effects of conservation. “For the Lamalerans, the very idea of conservation is foreign,” writes Clark, and they’re not wrong to be dubious. “History has shown time and again that depriving indigenous people of their livelihoods often leads directly to their end, as they lose their identities within a generation.”

I was mesmerized in the beginning, but by the time I was halfway through, certain questions started to come up in my skeptical mind. How did the author know so much about what these villagers were thinking? Had they really confided their inmost secret longings, some of them considered shameful, to this foreigner? Had this American journalist really spent a considerable amount of time living with these folks? How come he stayed outside of the story altogether - there was nothing about how he came to live with them, or how he communicated with them. (Disclaimer : I stopped reading the book about half-way through, so if this information was introduced later, I simply didn't get that far.). I found it odd - don't chroniclers of specific populations typically describe how they got to meet them and how much time they spent with them, and who their informants were? Over the course of three years, the author, a two-time Fulbright recipient, spent months at a time on the island of Lembata with the Lamalerans, a group of hunter-gatherers. Of the 1,500 members of the tribe, 300 are dedicated to hunting sperm whales as well as other marine mammals and fish. Scrupulously leaving himself out of the narrative, Clark focuses on a few individuals to tell the story of the group. Chief among them are two young men who aspire to become harpoonists, the most prestigious—and dangerous—position on the whaling boat. Jon, raised by his grandparents after his parents abandoned him, struggles to find a place in a society that scorns him. Ben, an expert harpooner and boatmaker, finds himself drawn by the attractions of life outside the island. The author also closely follows Ben’s father, Ignatius, and other older builders and masters of the long rowboats whose construction, unchanged for generations, is guided by the “Ways of the Ancestors.” Clark pays less attention to the women of the group, many of whom are sent away to be educated and work elsewhere in Indonesia, sometimes returning to care for elderly family members, though he does devote space to the daily life of Jon's sister Ika, who wants to marry a young man from another tribe. In between the stories of the individuals, the author chronicles the history of the group and the ceremonies he attended in a society that meshes Catholic faith and animistic religion. Perhaps surprisingly, among the chief villains of the narrative are the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy, which promote whale-watching rather than whale-killing. The author argues that sperm whales are less endangered than the Lamaleran society.

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The author describes their culture and life through some individual members of the tribe who we get to know, and through them the reader sees the stresses of balancing the ancestral ways with the impact of their collision with the modern world and their efforts to adjust to this new world.

The existential conflicts were reflected in the occupational decisions of the individual Lamalerans, in particular the younger generation. I'd have liked more older female perspectives though as the narrative felt overall to be quite male-centric. By the book's end, Clark advocated that it is an ethical imperative to preserve traditional cultures and thereby to protect the earth's most vulnerable peoples. ... globalization has been an immensely inequitable process, with its greatest rewards flowing to the elite capable of capturing them, while vast swaths of the 370 million indigenous people worldwide have emerged worse off -- deprived of their ancestral livelihoods and support networks in exchange for the lethal poverty of urban slums or plantations. One thing you learn, in squeamish detail, is how to carve up a dead beached whale. “By the end,” Clark writes, “only the flippers retained their skin, so that they rested against the flesh like mittened hands trying to cover a naked torso.” Thirdly and probably the most important, it was almost mindboggling to think about how an indigenous culture like this could survive amongst the globalized world. It is a recurring theme in the book, ranging from using motorboats instead of tenas, driftnet instead of only harpoons, opening to a global market or just stay with subsistence fishing and bartering with nearby tribes. I feel like there would be more erosion of cultures and tradition - with both positive and negative impacts- as the area is opening up in terms of available infrastructures and many expat Lamalerans bringing modernities and whatnots. It is really hard to balance but they themselves just have to find and decide for themselves the most suitable formula, not us in Jakarta, or Kupang (provincial capital), and other parties. Lembata, in Southeast Asia, is home to the Lamalerans who arrived there 500 years ago. They settled on the beach under a cliff, surviving by fishing for sperm whale and Manta ray and flying fish. Those who are successful in the hunt share with aging family members and community members. They are one of the few hunter-gatherer societies left in the world. But industrialized society is crowding in on them. Their children are enticed to the cities for education and jobs. Some remain for the air conditioning and running water. Outboard motors and smaller boats are replacing the handcrafted boats propelled by oar and the young carry cell phones. This was an extraordinary, and difficult, book to read. The Lamalareans are an indigenuous society, located at the far eastern tip of Indonesia. For centuries, their way of life had not changed, and their religion, culture and society were intertwined with the Way of the Ancestors. The Way provided them with all their physical and spiritual needs. And then the modern world intruded.

This is a non-fic about one of the last hunter-gatherers’ tribes on today’s Earth and the only one, which mainly survives of whale hunting. I read it as a part of monthly reading for December-January 2021/2022 at Non Fiction Book Club group. A New York Times Notable Book and Finalist for the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Best Travel Book Award This humility gives the book an organic and resonant propulsion. Accumulated tensions are only slowly released. Scenes are delivered, not summaries. This book earns its emotions. Like a first-rate novel, too, “The Last Whalers” has an abiding but unforced theme. It’s about the flood of modernity, in the form of outboard motors and cellphones and televised soap operas, as seen from the perspective of a curious but wary society that fears losing itself in the deluge. Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

Clark respects their traditions and way of life, noting that we should honor all cultures and be able to take the best each has to offer, learning from each other, cultural diversity perhaps essential to the survival of humanity. When whales are sighted by the Lamalerans, a chant rises (“ Baleo! Baleo!”) and is passed from house to house. The men race for their boats, which traditionally have been wooden ships called téna. They urge each other to “Row like you want to feed your families!” Amazing. Before reading The Last Whalers, I didn't know of the Lamalerans, how (in)famous they were & how controversial their way of living. I have so many thoughts, many of which I want to share when I've organized it all in my head much better. Deeply empathetic and richly reported, The Last Whalers is a riveting, powerful chronicle of the collision between one of the planet's dwindling indigenous peoples and the irresistible enticements and upheavals of a rapidly transforming world. Journalist Clark's carefully researched and often dramatic first book follows the residents of a small village on a remote Indonesian island as they engage in the tradition of hunting whales and adjust to the incursions of the outside world.Clark is hardly the first observer to study Lamaleran culture. Anthropologists and documentary filmmakers and others have been here before. But he brings empathy and literary skill to bear. This is a humbly told book, one in which the author’s first-person voice does not intrude. Over three years, Clark spent a year living with the Lamalerans, participating as a community member, even eating manta ray brains. stars. As an Indonesian, I am glad this book is written. There are not many books out there about Indonesia's marine communities and culture, let alone the Lamalerans in Lembata Island, East Nusa Tenggara Province. First of all, I like that the narrative is using the POVs of Lamalerans. They could be very, very detailed, from constructing the tenas (the whaling boats) to household duties. I enjoy being immersed like that. There are many types of POVs: Jon the aspiring lamafa (main harpooner), Ika his sister (I love her parts about the traditional market and bartering practice), Ignatius the old harpooner, Frans the shaman & shipwright, Bena the Katy Perry fan girl, and many more. As someone who grew up in the concrete jungle of Jakarta and part of one ethnic minority group, I feel like there are still so many facets and types of lives in my own country that are completely different from mine and considering the fact that we have more than 300 ethnic groups and 700++ languages, my own life experience is basically nothing.