"Concern for the environmental health, welfare and future of our planet requires our enthusiastic support for vanishing cultures like the Makah's as well as for threatened species," said Lapointe. "Nature demands carefully balanced biodiversity, that includes cultural diversity." 

The Makah First People and their Canadian relatives, the Nuu chah nulth Nations of British Columbia have included whale among their traditional dietary fare for centuries. That relationship ended nearly 100 years ago because of the depletion of whale stocks by industrial whaling concerns from Europe and the United States. The Makah nation itself was reduced to a scant 52 members by the turn of the 20th Century due, in large part, to European-introduced diseases beginning in the 18th Century. 

Today, 2300 Makahs survive. Today, too, 23,000 gray whales thrive along the Americas' Pacific coast. 

"The outcry by animal rights activists over the taking of the Makah's whale is not only short-sighted, it's wrong," said Lapointe. "We must encourage native cultures to flourish, just as we labor to conserve our wildlife and wild places. Too much or too little disrupts the balance." 

"If a species is threatened with extinction, the world rallies to its side. Now we have cultures in the same precarious position, but those who call themselves environmentalists seem too willing to push minority groups of people into oblivion. The loss of a culture, like the loss of a species, diminishes us all," Lapointe said. 

IWMC-World Conservation Trust is dedicated to the global conservation of nature's resources and the preservation of the identities and sovereign rights of the planet's cultures and nations. IWMC/WCT was founded by Eugene Lapointe, former Secretary General of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).�