Chief Seattle's Speech

Introduction

Chief Seattle had become world famous in this century for a long and moving speech he made in the 1850s, just before his lands were taken from him and his people. According to a printed account that appeared many years later, Governor Issac A. Stevens spoke first, outlining the general terms of a proposed treaty. Then Seattle towered over the young governor and spoke extensively, seeing prophetically into the future of his region and even into the global dilemmas in which we now live (Clarence, 56).

Discussion

In 1854, the new governor, West Point soldier and frontiersman Isaac I. Stevens, invited all the tribes in the Puget Sound area to a spectacular powwow to hear about the generous terms of the land purchase. Stevens made a speech of welcome, and in glowing terms outlined the magnanimity in the latest scheme for getting the Indians out of the way. Then it was Chief Seattle's turn to res pond. He could be remembered back or thought he could be the coming of Vancouver's ships, the days of the early traders, of Lewis and Clark Astoria. The North West Company and with this perspective had his say in one of the great political addresses of the century. Though at least a little of poetry and tempered cynic ism in the speech may be attributed to Seattle linguist. Dr. Henry, A. Smith, who heard it and translated the sonorous Chinook oratory into English (Furtwangler, 190).Letter to Chief Seattle

Return Address Line 1

Return Address Line 2

28 (July, 2011)

Chief Seattle

I find a great contrast of characters: on the one hand, a tall chief finely proportioned the rightful leader of a large people, who generously “lent your name to a great city; on the other hand, a governor, soldier, frontiersman and swindler. Your voice here has a claim to speak for the place. Within the speech itself, this point becomes explicit. You claim to speak for the land and for your ancestors and kinfolk who have inhabited every feature of it, and who will continue to abide there long after Indians have moved away and been supplanted. On the other side, Governor Stevens appears in this scene as a figure exerting many new claims on the land. He had come west, in fact, by leading a major surveying party across the Plains and the Rockies, to map and report a railroad route from the upper Mississippi to Puget Sound.

He consciously and eagerly represented new forces that would make the United States a great continental nation. Indeed he fostered the rapidly approaching literal “iron engines” that would ravage the surrounding hills and forests and transform them beyond recognition. The continuing fascination of your speech is, therefore, a puzzle about where to put one's loyalties and faith. Is there a voice within the American landscape, whose tones modern Americans can trace, even faintly, in the records of Henry A. Smith and whose admonitions he ignore at our peril? Or are we inescapably bound to the world of ...