LUMMI NATION, Wash. — After traveling thousands of miles from Lummi to the Miami Seaquarium calling for the release of the 52-year-old orca Tokitae, Lummi Nation members and others protested outside the park when management refused to meet.
KOMO reports Lolita, as she’s known at the Seaquarium, was captured from local waters in the mid-seventies along with other whales and is the last one still alive.
The orca’s trainer criticized the Lummis’ effort to return her, claiming the tribe doesn’t care about the whale’s well-being, only furthering their “political agenda to obtain money and to gain media attention.”
Several weeks ago the tribe signed a Memorandum of Understanding with an Orcas Island landowner that would provide Tokitae with her own netted off cove and a source of Chinook salmon from a hatchery on the island.