Sharing Futures Orcas: Our Shared Future

Entering the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton (Canada), the exhibition Orcas: Our Shared Future (curated through the Royal British Columbia Museum) uses the silhouette of an orca whale’s tail as an archway entrance to the multi-room exhibition. This archway immediately frames and invites visitors into a multisensory exhibition that intermingles multiple interpretations of these creatures. Throughout the exhibition, one is immersed in the sounds of water, orca recordings, and lights that mimic watery reflections. In the first room, a visitor encounters the brilliant two-meter-long wooden sculpture, Feast Dish (1960), by the Kwakwaka’wakw artist Nakapenkem (Chief Mungo Martin) (1881–1962). The whale, carved from cedar wood and painted, as the caption tells us, is a “crest of the host” symbolizing the chief’s wealth and oceanic riches. Throughout the exhibition, visitors see orca whales informed by a balance between scientific and Indigenous renderings, and, in what seems like a deliberate move, sometimes conflating them. The second room brings you to a multiscreen film of water. In this space, sculptures of orcas are in suspended animation above, each named as an individual with its own personality. From J Pod, a group of orcas that researchers have been observing for decades in the Salish Sea off the coast of British Columbia, Canada (they also travel to the waters around the San Juan Islands, USA), visitors get to “Meet the Matriarch,” known as Granny, an infamous leader of J Pod for over a century, whom scientists regarded as “the knowledge keeper” of her pod. After she died in 2019, Slick the Orca took over the leadership of the pod. Another caption introduces you to Scarlet the Orca, and so on, as each family member of J Pod has an individual role and personality. The next few rooms further present orcas as people, from Indigenous people who claim them as ancestors, scientists and trainers who advocate for orcas to be legal persons, and a model of an orca brain that demonstrates, alongside a model of a human brain, how much bigger and just as complicated its cerebral lobes are as those of humans. The exhibit successfully convinces you that orcas and humans are also entangled in the environmental disasters that humans have wreaked—the poisons in the ocean, the plastics that choke its watery residents. Humans will also suffer, and the orcas show us just how devastating our havoc is on their homes. This is one marked difference, though, between orcas and humans, as presented by the exhibit: the accountability of humans, at least when it comes to our shared futures. The exhibit’s glass enclosures of fishing buoys and trash surround a map of the world’s oceans with an interactive game to “Keep the ocean healthy!” by showing on a tabletop animation how different pollutants, which shift and must be matched by players with game pieces, alter the “health graph” of the ocean and its surrounding environments. While I was in the exhibition space on a Sunday afternoon, children visiting also turned it into a raucous game, with their shouts of “I need a plastic bottle!” pealing across the room. The message is clear: humans have not done their part to keep the ocean or our kin, the orcas, healthy. While the shared looming disasters hold humans accountable, the exhibition stops short of delivering a full-on ethical condemnation of humans (and visitors). Allowing visitors to equate whales and humans flattens the unique qualities, vulnerabilities, and responsibilities of both species. Partly, this comes from the necessity of emphasizing that the kinship between humans and orcas hinges on human responsibility. And this is why some of the exhibit’s displays …