Re: [DL] Chief Seattle

["Netse =?iso-8859-1?Q?=D4htseveh=E2tse=" <netse@severian.chi.il.us>]

A very pretty speech.  But Chief Seattle never spoke it.  It was
written in 1972 for a TV program.  Read on ...




The _1994 Information Please Almanac_ contains the debunking, which
they reprinted with permission from Omni magazine, 1992. The author
is Linda Marsa:

Just like Elvis and Marilyn, Chief Seattle's notoriety after his
death has eclipsed his fame in life. The eco-sermon this
nineteenth-century tribal leader gave in 1854, extolling the virtues
of living in harmony with nature, has become part of environmental
lore. The speech is quoted everywhere. Even mythologist Joseph
Campbell and Prince Philip have referred to it. And this past April
[1992], it was reverentially recited by leaders at Earth Day
gatherings around the world.

No doubt about it. Chief Seattle is the ecology movement's patron saint. 

Except for one niggling detail: It's all bogus. 

Historians say Chief Seattle, a Suquamish Indian who lived on the
Puget Sound outside the city that bears his name, was a skilled
diplomat and a great orator. But he never uttered the words credited
to him. They were actually penned by Ted Perry, a screenwriter
inspired by some writings unwittingly attributed to the Chief, for
_Home_, a 1972 ABC film about ecology.

How this myth was perpetrated and how Chief Seattle's original
message was distorted is like the kid's game of telephone played out
over decades. Environmentalists, of course, see no harm in canonizing
Chief Seattle. But Native Americans aren't happy with the cooption of
their spiritual ethos by American culture.

Historians have re-created the events surrounding the famous 1854
oration of the 68-year-old Chief during treaty negotiations between
the Suquamish and Isaac Stevens, Washington's first territorial
governor. But they are divided on the authenticity of surviving
texts.

Eyewitness accounts say the Chief, a repected tribe elder, spoke
movingly and eloquently in his native dialect about his people and
about the inevitability of their displacement by the white
settlers. Henry Smith, the frontier doctor who became Chief Seattle's
self-appointed Boswell, however, didn't actually publish a
translation of the Chief's speech until 1887--more than 30 years
later. By that time, the remote outpost had mushroomed into a
bustling metropolis of 35,000.

"Smith was well-educated and a minor poet given to flowery images and
the romantic verbiage of the Victorian era," says Murray Morgan, a
Pacific Northwest historian. What Smith wrote was probably a
composite of comments the Chief made at two meetings with Governor
Stevens, embellished with Smith's trademark flourishes and warped by
the memory lapses that come with time.

In the 1930s, authors tinkered with this version of Chief Seattle's
talk. By the time Ted Perry heard it read at the first Earth Day
festivities in 1970, the speech had been significantly
altered. Impressed, Perry incorporated the essence of Seattle's
sentiments into a script that he wrote for the Southern Baptist Radio
and Television Commission.

"This is where things got out of hand," says Daniel Miller, a social
activist. The film's proucer Christianized Seattle's sensibilities
and dropped Perry's name--despite his protests--from the script,
which left the impression that these were Seattle's words. But the
speech is littered with such anachronisms that the only real mystery
is why no one caught on to this artistic license sooner.

Probably the most flagrant: "I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes
on the prairies left by the white man who shot them from a passing
train." Bison did not live on Puget Sound, which was a thousand miles
from the plains. The speech was given 15 years before the
transcontinental railroad connection was completed, and the great
buffalo slaughter peaked in 1972, several years after Seattle
died. Lines such as, "What is there to life if a man cannot hear the
lovely cry of a whippoorwill," are equally ludicrous. Whippoorwills
are not indigenous to the Pacific Northwest.

"I'm embarrassed now when I'm seen as someone who put words in Chief
Seattle's mouth, " says Ted Perry, a tweedy professorial type who
teaches film at Vermont's Middlebury College. "That was never my
intention." Of course, most people are puzzled by the raging
controversy. After all, Chief Seattle is a revered icon. So no harm,
no foul. Right?

Wrong, say scholars. "Native American culture is constantly being
exploited and apporpriated as illustrations of whatever European
theory is in fashion," says Jack D. Forbes, a professor of Native
American studies at the University of California at Davis. These
range from the extreme individualism of the 1983 novel _Hanto Yo_ to
the New Age spiritualism of Lynn Andrews. "When," asks Forbes,
echoing the frustrations of other Native Americans, "will the thefts
of our spiritual traditions end?"