Chief Seattle's speech

The only known photograph of Chief Seattle, taken in 1864

Chief Seattle's speech is one that Chief Seattle probably gave in 1854 to an audience including the first Governor of Washington Territory, the militaristic Isaac Stevens. Though the speech itself is lost to history, many putative versions exist, none of which is particularly reliable.

The evolution of historic records of the speech, from a flowery Victorian paean to peace and territorial integrity, into a much briefer environmentalist credo, has been chronicled by several historians.[1] The first attempt to reconstruct this history was a 1985 essay in the U.S. National Archives' Prologue magazine.[2] A more scholarly essay by a German anthropologist followed in 1987.[3] In 1989, a radio documentary by Daniel and Patricia Miller resulted in the uncovering of no fewer than 86 versions of Chief Seattle's speech. This then prompted a new discussion, first in the Seattle Weekly and then in Newsweek.[4][5] The historian Albert Furtwangler then undertook to analyze the evolution of Chief Seattle's speech in a full-length book, Answering Chief Seattle (1997).[6] More recently, Eli Gifford has written another full-length book, The Many Speeches of Chief Seattle (2015), which assembles further elements of the story, gives accurate transcriptions of 11 versions of the speech, and explores possible motivations for manipulating the words in each case.[1]

  1. ^ a b Gifford, Eli (2015). The Many Speeches of Chief Seattle (Seathl): The Manipulation of the Record on Behalf of Religious Political and Environmental Causes. pp. 38–39. ISBN 978-1-5187-4949-0.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference clark was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Rudolf Kaiser, "Chief Seattle's Speech(es): American Origins and European Reception", in B. Swann and A. Krupat, eds., Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature (University of California Press, 1987).
  4. ^ David Buerge, "Seattle's King Arthur: How Chief Seattle continues to inspire his many admirers to put words in his mouth," in Seattle Weekly, July 17, 1991.
  5. ^ Malcolm Jones Jr. and Ray Sawhill, "Just Too Good to Be True: another reason to beware of false eco-prophets", Newsweek, May 4, 1992.
  6. ^ Furtwangler, Albert (1997). Answering Chief Seattle. University of Washington Press. ISBN 9780295976334. Retrieved August 31, 2007.