Copyright © 1997 NLThomas
All Rights Reserved
To: Requestors of Chief Seattle's "Ecology" Speech
From: Washington/Northwest Collections, Washington State LibraryThe speech given by Chief Seattle in January of 1854 is the subject of a great deal of historical debate. The most important fact to note is that there is NO VERBATIM TRANSCRIPT IN EXISTENCE. All known texts are second-hand.
Version 1 appeared in the Seattle Sunday Star on Oct. 29, 1887, in a column by Dr. Henry A. Smith. He makes it very clear that his version is not an exact copy, but rather the best he could put together from notes taken at the time. There is an undecided historical argument on which native dialect the Chief would have used, Duwamish or Suquamish. Either way all agree the speech was translated into the Chinook Jargon on the spot, since Chief Seattle never learned to speak English.
[Version 1 begins: Yonder sky has wept tears of compassion on our fathers for centuries untold, and which, to us, looks eternal, may change. Today it is fair, tomorrow it may be overcast with clouds. My words are like the stars that never set. ...]Version 2 was written by poet William Arrowsmith in the late 1960s. This was an attempt to put the text into more current speech patterns, rather than Dr. Smith's more flowery Victorian style. Except for this modernization, it is very similar to Version 1.[Version 2 begins: Brothers: That sky above us has pitied our fathers for many hundreds of years. To us it looks unchanging, but it may change. Today it is fair. Tomorrow it may be covered with cloud. ...]Version 3 is perhaps the most widely known of all. This version was written by Texas professor Ted Perry as part of a film script. The makers of the film took a little literary license, further changing the speech and making it into a letter to President Franklin Pierce, which has been frequently reprinted. No such letter was ever written by or for Chief Seattle.[Version 3 begins: The Great Chief in Washington sends word that wishes to buy our land. The Great Chief also sends us words of friendship and goodwill. This is kind of him, since we know he has little need of our friendship in return. But we will consider your offer. For we know that if we do not sell, the white man may come with guns and take our land. How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. ...]Version 4 appeared in an exhibit at Expo '74 in Spokane, Washington, and is a shortened edition of Dr. Perry's script (Version 3).[Version 4 begins: The President in Washington sends word that wishes to buy our land. Buy our land! But how can you buy or sell the sky? the land? The idea is strange to us. ...]The best description of the saga of Chief Seattle's speech can be found in an essay by Rudolf Kaiser: "Chief Seattle's Speech(es): American Origins and European Reception" published in Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature by the University of California Press, 1987. Another excellent discussion appears in David Buerge's article "Seattle's King Arthur: How Chief Seattle continues to inspire his many admirers to put words in his mouth", appearing in the July 17, 1991 Seattle Weekly.
Newsweek Michael Her Many Horses remembers the first time he doubted Chief Seattle's famous speech about caring for the planet. It was a TV program about the Northwest rain forest. The narrator quoted the 19th-century Suquamish Indian's plea for living in harmony with nature. "My reaction was that here's a guy that understood what the environment could provide for his people," recalls Her Many Horses, executive director of the Oglala Sioux [sic] tribe on the Pine Ridge (S.D.) Reservation. But somehow the chief's words didn't ring true. "It made me feel good, but it seemed too perfect."
May 4, 1992
p 68 [subject] the Arts
"Just Too Good to Be True:
another reason to beware of false eco-prophets"
by Malcolm Jones Jr. with Ray SawhillIt is too perfect. Chief Seattle did give a speech in 1854, but he never said "The earth is our mother." He never said "I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train." The chief lived in the Pacific Northwest. He never saw a buffalo. Those oh-so-quotable quotes were written by a screenwriter named Ted Perry for "Home", a 1972 film about ecology. Perry wanted Native American testimony on environmental problems, so he made up some eco-homilies and stuck them in Chief Seattle's mouth. Since then, the so-called Fifth Gospel speech [so referred by Monsignor Bruce Kent] has been widely quoted in books, on TV, from the pulpit. Last week the organizers of Earth Day asked religious leaders from around the world to read the speech. And a kid's book, "Brother Eagle, Sister Sky: A Message From Chief Seattle", has sold 280,000 copies since its release last September.
The book is one of 10 nominees for the American Booksellers Association's Abby award for the book booksellers most enjoyed selling in the past year. Last year, ironically, the Abby was given to "The Education of Little Tree", the purported autobiography of the late Forrest Carter, who claimed he was raised by two wise Cherokee grandparents. Even when it came out that Forrest Carter was in fact Asa Carter, a notorious white supremacist, the book continued to sell well; it's now sold almost 700,000 copies.
The public's appetite for environmentally correct Native Americans is apparently bottomless. ... The Smithsonian Institution's Herman Viola, an expert on American Indian history, sees little harm in the trend. Chief Seattle's mythical speech "conveys the feeling a lot of Indians had. There was some Indian out there who would have said that kind of thing."
Open eyes: Ted Perry takes a darker view. Now a professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, Perry has tried repeatedly to set the record straight. Moreover, he thinks that the myth is pernicious. "Why are we so willing to accept a text like this if it's attributed to a Native American?" he asks. "It's another case of placing Native Americans up on a pedestal and not taking responsibility for our own actions."
In any case, it's probably too late to do anything for poor Chief Seattle, who is by now more legend than anything else. Even the one known photograph of him has been doctored repeatedly. In the original, his eyes were closed. Subsequent version were retouched so that his eyes looked open. In some versions, he carries a cane, but not always. And in the most revisionist makeover, his head has been grafted onto the body of another man.
In 1854, the new territorial governor, Isaac Stevens, began the long awaited process of making treaties with the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest. The purpose of these negotiations was clear: the Indians were to sign away their lands to the settlers in return for small reservations and promises of government aid. Dr. David Maynard, sub-Indian agent and a friend of Chief Seattle, arranged for Governor Stevens to meet with Seattle and his people in December 1854. The Indians congregated on the beach just north of the present Kingdome.
At this meeting, Chief Seattle is said to have made an impassioned speech in his native tongue. As Seattle spoke, Dr. Henry Smith, for whom Smith Cove is named, took notes from which he reconstructed the Chief's words some 33 years later, publishing them in the October 29, 1887 edition of the Seattle Sunday Star. Smith's flowery rendering of Chief Seattle's oration does not conform to what we know of the speaking style of the Puget Sound Indians. Native speech was not given to ornate embellishment. Dr. Smith, for his part, was known as a "poet of no ordinary talent" who "wove into verses and essays much of his musings." Thus while this earliest version of the speech may present the gist of Chief Seattle's remarks, it seems likely that it is also the product of Henry Smith's poetic musings. However flawed it may be, this is the only eyewitness account of Chief Seattle's most famous speech.
That fame is due, in part, to the appearance of a magnificent call to environmental responsibility that has been wrongly attributed to Chief Seattle. In the winter of 1971/72, Ted Perry, a screenwriter working for the Southern Baptist Convention's Radio and Television Commission, used Chief Seattle's speech as a model for the script of a film on ecology called "Home". The film's producer wanted to show a distinguished American Indian chief delivering a statement of concern for the environment, so Perry wove such wonderful lines as "The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth" among pieces of Chief Seattle's 1854 oration. Perry expected to be given credit for writing this film script, but he made the mistake of including the Chief's name in his text. According to Perry, the producer didn't credit his screen writer because he thought the film might seem more authentic without a "written by" credit. Since then, Perry's environmental text has bee widely circulated as a prophetic ecological statement by Chief Seattle himself.
June, 1990 Moyers: Don't you think modern Americans have rejected the ancient idea of nature as a divinity because it would have kept us from achieving dominance over nature? How can you cut down trees and uproot the land and turn the rivers into real estate without killing God? ... Scientists are beginning to talk quite openly about the Gaia principle.
Museum of History and Industry
Seattle, WashingtonJoseph Campbell, with Bill Moyers
"The Power of Myth"
Doubleday: NY 1988
p 32-4Campbell: There you are, the whole planet as an organism.
M: Mother Earth. Will new myths come from this image?
C: Well, something might. ... And the only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet, and everybody on it. That's my main thought for what the future myth is going to be. ...
M: So you suggest that from this begins the new myth of our time?
C: Yes, this is the ground of what the myth is to be. It's already here: the eye of reason, not of my nationality; the eye of reason, not of my religious community; the eye of reason, not of my linguistic community. Do you see? And this would be the philosophy for the planet, not for this group, that group, or the other group.
When you see the earth from the moon, you don't see any divisions there of nations or states. This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come. That is the country that we are going to be celebrating. And those are the people that we are one with.
M: No one embodies that ethic to me more clearly in the works you have collected than Chief Seattle.
C: Chief Seattle was one of the last spokesmen of the Paleolithic moral order. In about 1852, the United States Government inquired about buying the tribal lands for the arriving people of the United States, and Chief Seattle wrote a marvelous letter in reply. His letter expresses the moral, really, of our whole discussion.
"The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. ... [quotes the entire -Perry- text!]
-= Authentic Text of Chief Seattle's Treaty Oration, 1854 =- The text was produced by one "Dr." Smith, an early settler in Washington State, who took notes as Seattle spoke in the Suquamish dialect of central Puget sound Salish (Lushootseed), and created this text in English from those notes. Smith insisted that his version "contained none of the grace and elegance of the original." The last two sentences of the text here given have been considered for many years to have been part of the original, but are now known to have been added by an early 20th century historian and ethnographic writer, A.C. Ballard.Source:
"Four Wagons West" by Roberta Frye Watt
Binsford & Mort Portland Oregon, 1934
originally published in the "Seattle Sunday Star"
October 29 1887There are many versions and excerpts from this text, including a wholly fraudulent version mentioning buffalo and the interconnectedness of all life which was written by a Hollywood screenwriter in the late 70's and which has gained wide currency. The bogus version has been quoted by individuals as prominent and diverse as former U.S. President Bush and Joseph Campbell. At the time this speech was made it was commonly believed by whites and as well by many Indians that Native Americans would inevitably become extinct.
Yonder sky that has wept tears of compassion upon my people for centuries untold, and which to us appears changeless and eternal, may change. Today is fair. Tomorrow it may be overcast with clouds. My words are like the stars that never change. Whatever Seattle says, the great chief at Washington can rely upon with as much certainty as he can upon the return of the sun or the seasons. The white chief says that Big Chief at Washington sends us greetings of friendship and goodwill. This is kind of him for we know he has little need of our friendship in return. His people are many. They are like the grass that covers vast prairies. My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain. The great, and I presume -- good, White Chief sends us word that he wishes to buy our land but is willing to allow us enough to live comfortably. This indeed appears just, even generous, for the Red Man no longer has rights that he need respect, and the offer may be wise, also, as we are no longer in need of an extensive country.There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory. I will not dwell on, nor mourn over, our untimely decay, nor reproach my paleface brothers with hastening it, as we too may have been somewhat to blame.
Youth is impulsive. When our young men grow angry at some real or imaginary wrong, and disfigure their faces with black paint, it denotes that their hearts are black, and that they are often cruel and relentless, and our old men and old women are unable to restrain them. Thus it has ever been. Thus it was when the white man began to push our forefathers ever westward. But let us hope that the hostilities between us may never return. We would have everything to lose and nothing to gain. Revenge by young men is considered gain, even at the cost of their own lives, but old me who stays at home in times of war, and mothers who have sons to lose, know better.
Our good father in Washington--for I presume he is now our father as well as yours, since King George has moved his boundaries further north -- our great and good father, I say, sends us word that if we do as he desires he will protect us. His brave warriors will be to us a bristling wall of strength, and his wonderful ships of war will fill our harbors, so that our ancient enemies far to the northward -- the Haidas and Tsimshians -- will cease to frighten our women, children, and old men. Then in reality he will be our father and we his children. But can that ever be? Your God is not our God! Your God loves your people and hates mine! He folds his strong protecting arms lovingly about the paleface and leads him by the hand as a father leads an infant son. But, He has forsaken His Red children, if they really are His. Our God, the Great Spirit, seems also to have forsaken us. Your God makes your people wax stronger every day. Soon they will fill all the land. Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly receding tide that will never return. The white man's God cannot love our people or He would protect them. They seem to be orphans who can look nowhere for help. How then can we be brothers? How can your God become our God and renew our prosperity and awaken in us dreams of returning greatness? If we have a common Heavenly Father He must be partial, for He came to His paleface children. We never saw Him. He gave you laws but had no word for His red children whose teeming multitudes once filled this vast continent as stars fill the firmament. No; we are two distinct races with separate origins and separate destinies. There is little in common between us.
To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret. Your religion was written upon tablets of stone by the iron finger of your God so that you could not forget. The Red Man could never comprehend or remember it. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors -- the dreams of our old men, given them in solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit; and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people.
Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb and wander away beyond the stars. They are soon forgotten and never return. Our dead never forget this beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its verdant valleys, its murmuring rivers, its magnificent mountains, sequestered vales and verdant lined lakes and bays, and ever yearn in tender fond affection over the lonely hearted living, and often return from the happy hunting ground to visit, guide, console, and comfort them.
Day and night cannot dwell together. The Red Man has ever fled the approach of the White Man, as the morning mist flees before the morning sun. However, your proposition seems fair and I think that my people will accept it and will retire to the reservation you offer them. Then we will dwell apart in peace, for the words of the Great White Chief seem to be the words of nature speaking to my people out of dense darkness.
It matters little where we pass the remnant of our days. They will not be many. The Indian's night promises to be dark. Not a single star of hope hovers above his horizon. Sad-voiced winds moan in the distance. Grim fate seems to be on the Red Man's trail, and wherever he will hear the approaching footsteps of his fell destroyer and prepare stolidly to meet his doom, as does the wounded doe that hears the approaching footsteps of the hunter.
A few more moons, a few more winters, and not one of the descendants of the mighty hosts that once moved over this broad land or lived in happy homes, protected by the Great Spirit, will remain to mourn over the graves of a people once more powerful and hopeful than yours. But why should I mourn at the untimely fate of my people? Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We will see.
We will ponder your proposition and when we decide we will let you know. But should we accept it, I here and now make this condition that we will not be denied the privilege without molestation of visiting at any time the tombs of our ancestors, friends, and children. Ever part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits. And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man."
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