People of the Whale
An illustration from the book, Storm Boy, which tells a tale of the relationship between native peoples and the orca.
We make signs because people want to be known. The central question behind every sign we create, however, is what they want to be known for…or in the case of one of our clients, the Tulalip Tribes, what they want to be known as.
The tribe wanted signage for a large canopy covering a gas station on 33rd Ave. NE in Tulalip, near its iconic casino and shopping complex. They chose to honor their totem animal, the orca, as the logo element, and sent us the digital design files we needed to fabricate the highly sculptural forms based on their native history and culture.
This is how it starts…
We were curious as to the relationship between the orca and the Tulalip peoples, and the tribe was good enough to share the following story — a story that comes to us through Martha Lamont, Alfred Sam, Raymond Moses, and the late Helen Hillaire of the Upper Skagit.
Long, long ago, at Priest Point, there were two brothers who were famous seal hunters. There was some family trouble, and the brothers had to leave Priest Point and live elsewhere. They went to live in the ocean and became Killer Whales, qaLqaleziv in our language.
People continued to live at Priest Point, including the descendants of the two brothers. Then something happened. According to one of our storytellers, in the fall and winter of one year, there were some unusual storms and temperature changes, and the people could not put food away as they usually did. By early spring, everything they had stored was gone. There was no game to be found, and the people were starving.
Just in time, the early salmon run started, and the people thought their suffering was at an end. But hordes of seals invaded the waters around Priest Point, chasing the salmon and devouring them before the people could catch any. The people were in despair.
It was then that they remembered their ancestors, the qaLqaleziv. The people called out to them for help, remembering that the two brothers had been experts at getting food for the people.
The Killer Whales heard the peoples’ call. They arrived and caught every seal. They ate the seal heads and then tossed the seal bodies onto the beach for the people. In that way, they saved the people from starvation and preserved the salmon run for coming generations.
Another of our storytellers says that the seals used to come frequently in the spring, and that the Killer Whales were called many times, not just once. But both versions of the story make it clear why the Killer Whale is the logo of the Tulalip Tribes.
We have been told that if you are in a canoe and Killer Whales come up to you, you can greet them like this:
“qaLqaleziv, qaLqaleziv, t(i) adyeLyelab goel ti dyeLyelab,”Killer Whale, Killer Whale, your ancestors were also my ancestors.”
Knowing the significance of the orca to the Tulalip Tribes, as well as other indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, we at Meyer Sign & Advertising were mindful of the trust that was being placed in us to render this majestic animal as faithfully as possible to the tribe’s vision. This was more than a structural element — this was a piece of folk art that symbolized the relationship between a people and the Earth that sustains them.
Meyer Sign general manager Ken Hitt provides a sense of scale — and workmanship — of the Tulalip Tribes’ orca signs.
From a strictly fabrication point of view, these signs took a lot of skill and patience to bring to life. In fact, to call them signs hardly does justice to their reality as three-dimensional illuminated sculptures. Creating them first of all meant slicing their design files into digitized layers, cutting out the shapes on our computer controlled router, and then welding these layers together with a seamlessness that made the finished shapes appear as though they were crafted from a single piece of aluminum. As you can see from the photos, we used LED lights to ensure that they would not only shine brightly, but inexpensively — and for a long time to come!
You could easily cut corners on fabrication to speed up the process and nobody would know. Except us.
LEDs have definitely revolutionized our industry, and their environmental impact helps protect the planet!
If character is what you do when no one is looking, our orca signs are a testament to the integrity we at Meyer Sign & Advertising want as our totem value — and in that sense, we thank the Tulalip Tribes not simply for being a customer, but for giving us the opportunity to display our identity along with theirs in the finished product. For those of us who are fortunate enough to live in the Pacific Northwest, we are all the people of the whale.