Toki’s Legacy guides us to respect and honor Toki’s courageous spirit, her keen intelligence, her engaging personality, and her gentle nature as seen by her willingness to build trusting, insightful and playful friendships with her human companions while enduring decades of stressful, heartbreaking conditions.

We are inspired by Toki's remarkable resilience to maintain her gracious composure and kindness under such duress. Toki still brings together a huge diversity of people from different backgrounds and experiences around the world, to share and solve difficult issues. Toki continues to help us heal and learn to live as "one heart, one mind," in the words of our Lummi teachers.

One of the most remarkable things about Toki’s life and death in the days since her spirit flew home, is how much she helped people. Toki gave people inspiration and strength, and in return people worked tirelessly to free her, for decades, that continues even after she is gone.

Toki's Legacy is to:

  • Educate others to see and empathize with marine mammals still held for display and entertainment worldwide, and support legislation and policies to alleviate the resulting stresses; 

  • Gather and circulate the best available information and understanding of the environmental conditions needed by Toki’s family, the Southern Resident Orca Community, as well as all marine mammals and the full panorama of life seeking to survive in and around the Salish Sea; 

  • Support benign research to better understand the highly evolved cognitive abilities inherent in Orcinus orca, their indelible family relationships, their highly developed cultural traditions and relationships, and their wondrous communicative capabilities;

  • Generate awareness and foster actions to reinvigorate and protect the whales’ natural world. Toki’s family, So. Residents orcas, need clean, healthy water, Chinook and other salmon populations need streams and rivers, and the full range of spawning, nurturing, and foraging habitat.