07-24-2018, 04:24 AM
The modern day need is to appear to have special status due to Native Hawaiian ancestry both in their own eyes and in the eyes of the rest of the world. The main reason there is an issue is because they touched it. The world is full of people who would kill that whale for its teeth, or baculum maybe. Practically speaking the only thing the Feds can do is make it illegal to do anything with the animal at all except in certain special circumstances like allowing the Inuit to hunt for subsistence. As such I could get behind traditional Hawaiian burial practices for sea mammals as long as they were just that, traditional. I never heard of this before even though I have heard of whales washing up, obviously dead, on shore with nobody rushing out to perform Native Hawaiian last rites and bury them at sea.