NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/talk/environm/5313

Text File | 1992-12-31 | 7.2 KB | 170 lines

Newsgroups: talk.environment
Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU!CSD-NewsHost!jmc
From: [e-mail] (John McCarthy)
Subject: Re: Need "Chief Seattle" reference
In-Reply-To: [e-mail]'s message of 31 Dec 92 21:52:32 GMT
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Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
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Date: 31 Dec 92 15:39:27
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Here again is something posted on sci.environment some time ago.

From: [e-mail] (Randy Payne)
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Subject: Re: Supposed 'Speech of Chief Seattle'
Summary: Newspaper Article discussing speech
Date: 11 Mar 92 05:18:27 GMT
Organization: Boeing Computer Services, Seattle


In recent weeks there has been some discussion on the validity of the speech
of Chief Sealth (Seattle).  I managed to dig up an article on this issue
published in The Seattle Times (July 1, 1991).  The following is reprinted
(without permission).  Whether Mr. Caldwell's hypothesis holds up against
scrutiny with other local historians I leave that for others to determine.

------------------------------- start of article -------------------------------

myth-quoted:  Words of Chief Seattle eloquent - but not his
by Ross Anderson, Times political reporter
copyright 1991, The Seattle Times

    Yes, Virginia, there was a Chief Seattle.  And, by all reports, he was
a very fine fellow indeed.

    But no, Virginia, Chief Seattle did not say: "The earth is our mother."

    In fact, the earth-mother quote is just one of many ecological insights,
widely attributed to Chief Seattle, that are pure, unadulterated myth - and
relatively recent myth at that.  Try these:

    * "We are a part of the earth and it is part of us."  Chief Seattle
might have believed this, but there is no evidence he ever said it.
    * "Contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own
waste."  Sorry.  No Way.
    * "I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the
white man who shot them from a passing train."  Get serious.  Chief Seattle
never left Puget Sound, so he never saw a railroad, nor a buffalo - dead or
alive.

    For at least a generation, local historians and Native Americans have
been trying to correct these and other myths surrounding the native patriarch
who gave Seattle its name.

    But myth dies hard.  Especially a myth that serves the ends of a vibrant
environmental movement.

    Rick Caldwell, the librarian at the Museum of History and Industry, has
become something of an authority on what Chief Seattle, also known as Chief
Sealth, did not say - and why.  Here, he says, is what is known:

    In 1854, an aging Chief Seattle attended a reception for territorial
Gov. Isaac Stevens, who was trying to buy Puget Sound lands from the Indians.
The chief, who spoke no English, delivered a speech, which supposedly was
translated by pioneer Dr. Henry A. Smith.  And in 1887, Smith published the
speech in a Seattle newspaper.

    "There was a time when our people covered the whole land as the waves
of a wind-ruffled sea covers its shell-paved floor," Seattle was reported to
have said in his native Duwamish language.  "But that time has long since passed
away...I will not mourn over our untimely decay, nor reproach my paleface
brothers for hastening it, for we too may have been somewhat to blame...

    "Our dead never forget the beautiful world that gave them being.  They
still love its winding rivers, its great mountains and its sequestered vales,
and they ever yearn in tenderest affection over the lonely-hearted living, and
often return to visit and comfort them...

    "Every part of this country is sacred to my people.  Every hillside,
every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some fond memory."

    And so forth.

    Nice speech.

    But even that translation is questionable, Caldwell says.

    "Dr. Smith claimed to speak Duwamish, but one wonders...He had only been
in the Northwest for a year," Caldwell explains.  "Smith has been referred to
as a poet of no ordinary talent.  So you have to wonder if those were Chief
Seattle's words, or Smith's."

    Still, Smith's has been the authorized version, accepted by local
historians from Clarence Bagley to Roger Sale.

    Then, some 20 years ago, comes he "green" version, with Chief Seattle
waxing eloquent, and at great length, about the earth mother and the buffalo
and contaminating one's bed.

    Sometimes it is a letter from the Great White Father, who happened to be
Franklin Pierce.  Sometimes it is a poem.  In 174, the speech droned from the
mouth of a Chief Seattle statue at the Spokane World's Fair.  It has been
reprinted hundreds, perhaps thousands of times in books, films posters and
brochures, published by groups ranging from Friends of the Earth to the
Southern Baptists.

    Skeptics cried foul.  In 1975, Janice Krenmayr wrote an article for The
Seattle Times, warning that "Chief Seattle must be turning over in his grave."
Bill Holm, curator at the Burke Museum, pleaded for environmentalists to step
forward and admit they had made it up.  Earlier this month, KPLU-FM radio
commentator Paula Wissel reviewed the scam on National Public Radio.

    But myth is more resilient than history.  It persists.

    Where did it come from?

    It took a West German historian named Rudolph Kaiser to figure that out,
Caldwell says.

    "Kaiser was intrigued by Chief Seattle and the American West," Caldwell
says.  "But when he asked where the environmental version came from, he kept
running into dead ends."

    Eventually, Kaiser tracked it down to an environmental film documentary
that was aired on national television in 1971.  The script had been written by
Ted Perry, an East Coast scriptwriter who composed the new version and referred
to Chief Seattle.  But something was lost in the editing process.

    Efforts to reach Perry for comment were unsuccessful.

    "He put in all that fine, ecological prose about the 1,000 rotting
buffalo, and it was all credited to Chief Seattle."

    And the rest is, well, history.

    So what's the difference?

    The unauthorized version is a passionate call to ecological
responsibility, a plea to halt the slaughter of an animal Chief Seattle had
never seen.  It reads like it was written by a card-carrying member of the
Sierra Club - which it was.

    The original speech was something else again.

    "Chief Seattle was a strong leader, well-respected, and a great military
tactician in his day," Caldwell says.  "Most important, he helped smooth the
transition in Puget Sound from native control to Western control.

    "Unfortunately, he did that by accepting promises of compensation -
promises made by people who didn't keep promises very well."

    Chief Seattle valued the land not because it was inherently sacred, but
because it was the dwelling place of his ancestors, Caldwell says.

    "His speech was in part a surrender to the advance of Western
civilization.  'My people,' he said, 'are no long able to withstand advance.' "

------------------------------- end of article --------------------------------

Randall D. Payne                  **  Standard Disclaimers Apply **
--
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
*
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.