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The Truth of Chief Seattle

by Joyce E. Meredith and William C. Steele

Although Chief Seattle's familiar "web of life" speech was in fact never delivered by Seattle, it is not the hoax that some have branded it. The version of the speech that environmentalists have come to know is the product of over 100 years of textual evolution. Labeling the speech a hoax ignores the significance of the process by which it has become well loved and oft quoted. The "gospel" of Chief Seattle exemplifies our need for a voice of environmental wisdom from the past. In our efforts to share the voice of wisdom with others, we must first be sure we know whose voice we are hearing.

In the May 1992 issue of Please Note... , a newsletter for which we were contributors at The Ohio State University, we ran a piece entitled "Earth Stewardship... A Native American Perspective." In it we quoted the famous "web of life" speech of Chief Seattle of the Suquamish tribe ("All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth.") Afterward we received several letters from our readers informing us that the Chief never said any such thing. The revelation came from an article by Dr. Garrett Hardin (1989), ecologist and expositor of "Lifeboat Ethics," entitled "The Gospel of Chief Seattle is a Hoax." According to Dr. Hardin, the speech is actually a piece of fiction from a 1972 screenplay. So now the truth is out, the hoax exposed. Thank goodness the environmental community has been set free from such a fallacy.

Or have we? After we were first notified of our error, short corrections of a similar nature started appearing in other newsletters. They were so short, in fact, that they left readers (at least these readers) wondering if there ever was such a person as Chief Seattle, and if he ever said anything of note. Well, we were reluctant to give up on the Chief, so we did a little digging into the available information. What we found made us wonder if the environmental community isn't making a second mistake.

We looked up Hardin's article for ourselves and found that he is not the originator of the expose as our correcting sources suggested. Rather, he is the reporter of information exegeted by two independent authors, Rudolf Kaiser (1987) and J. Baird Callicott (1989).

Kaiser's fascinating and well documented treatment of the subject explains the evolution of the "original" Chief Seattle speech into the widely quoted "web of life" speech. The Chief, whose name is better rendered as Seeathl, made two short speeches at the Port Elliott Treaty negotiations of 1855, both of which are documented in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Dr. Henry Smith, a physician who was present at the scene, reproduced from his notes another speech, which he claimed to witness, and published it in the Seattle Sunday Star on October 29, 1887. No one knows how accurate Smith's reproduction of the speech was, but it's all we have now and is the closest to "original" as we are likely to come.

In 1969, William Arrowsmith "translated" a version of Smith's reproduction into more modern English. So far the content of the speech was still basically the same. Shortly after this new version entered the picture, however, a screenwriter named Ted Perry asked Arrowsmith's permission to use the latter's rendition of the speech as a basis for a filmscript he was working on. He wrote a speech that he himself called a fiction, and thus was born the familiar oration that so many of us have quoted for years as Chief Seattle's. Perry had no intention of perpetuating a hoax. It was the producers of the film who neglected to credit Perry for the writing and set in motion a network of misinformation which still persists.

What did Chief Seattle say? He did not say "all things are connected...." as we have thought for all these years. He did say, at least according to Dr. Henry Smith, that his people's dead love the land because they still reside in it (unlike the white dead, who dwell away from this world). He also did inspire the work of screenwriter Ted Perry. In fact, significant portions from Perry's work are strikingly similar to the Chief's "original." Consider the following excerpts from the two "speeches," both of which appear in their entirety as an appendix to Kaiser's (1987) writing:

Your God loves your people and hates mine; he folds his strong arms lovingly around the white man and leads him as a father leads his infant son, but he has forsaken his red children; he makes your people wax strong everyday, and soon they will fill the land; while our people are ebbing away like a fast-receding tide, that will never flow again.

Chief Seattle as reported by Dr. Henry Smith.

God loves your people, but has abandoned his red children. He sends machines to help the white man with his work, and builds great villages for him. He makes your people stronger every day. Soon you will flood the land like rivers which crash down the canyons after a sudden rain. But my people are an ebbing tide, we will never return.

Ted Perry.

Some phrases from Perry's version are identical to the "original." The familiar line, "We may be brothers after all. We shall see," appears in both versions.

Ted Perry's version of the speech is longer than the "original," and, as Hardin points out, contains some historical anachronisms as well as passages that differ in meaning and tone from the Chief's speech. Still, in reading the two versions, it is obvious that Perry was familiar with, and inspired by, the words of Chief Seattle.

"We must make sure to determine the truth... before we pass it on to others."

That title of Dr. Hardin's article lays a good groundwork for our analysis of this situation. His use of the word gospel is quite appropriate (although, according to Kaiser (1987), the first person to actually use it in reference to Chief Seattle was British Monsignor Bruce Kent). Just as the Biblical gospels have evolved over time in the Judeo-Christian community through oral tradition and subtle changes by transcribers of text, so the "gospel" of Chief Seattle has emerged within the environmental community. It is here that Hardin's use of the word hoax seems paradoxical. Most readers of the biblical gospels would not consider them a hoax even though they are likely quite different from the "original" text. Biblical scholars do analyze attempts to find their "original" intent, but they also consider the process by which these texts evolve to be meaningful for the community of faith.

The evolution of the gospel of Chief Seattle is similarly significant for the environmentalist community. The significance of the gospel of Chief Seattle is this: it represents our dire need to express the state of our environment, a need that feels desperately difficult, even hypocritical, to fulfill from within the mainstream American culture. We need a voice of wisdom from the past. The gospel of Chief Seattle as we have come to know it is not historically accurate, but it is certainly not a hoax. If anyone is to blame for its widespread use it is all of us who have been so eager to latch on to it without doing our homework. The same kind of wrong will be promulgated if we widely discount Chief Seattle as a hoax without knowing the full story.

Perry's familiar words have come to epitomize our popular construction of the American Indian environmental ethic. If they are not authentic, we are left to wonder if there ever was an ethic. Have we, in our need to draw wisdom from outside ourselves, simply romanticized the original inhabitants of this continent into a oneness with nature? this is the question addressed by Callicott's (1989) article. In an ethnographic analysis of a number of American Indian traditions, Callicot concludes that the environmental ethic was indeed alive and well in the new world prior to Columbus' arrival. He writes, "A traditional American Indian land or environmental wisdom was not a neo-romantic invention. But we are just beginning to explore what it actually amounted to -- and only in some cultures and in some bioregions." Note Callicot's caution that the American Indian environmental ethic is just beginning to be explored through critical scholarly analysis. It is important to remember that American Indian environmental attitudes may have been as diverse as the cultures in which they resided.

The gospel of Chief Seattle is much more complex issue than whether or not the Chief said one thing and not another, and whether he did or did not write a letter to President Franklin Pierce. If an environmental wisdom has not been handed down to us as neatly as we once thought, the articulation of our own environmental ethic may seem hollow. Perhaps it is time to recognize that an environmental ethic has developed in western culture, if only in certain segments of it. This is not to say that we should abandon the search for wisdom in American Indian cultures. On the contrary, we must continue to look to this source of wisdom and strive to understand what it really has to say, not what we wish it to say.

We must make sure to determine the truth, all of it, before we purport to pass it on to others.

Literature cited.

Callicott, J.B. (1989) American Indian land wisdom? Sorting out the issue. Journal of Forest History, 33(1), 35-42.

Hardin, G. (1989) The gospel of Chief Seattle is a hoax. Environmental Ethics, 11(3), 195-196.

Kaiser, R. (1987) Chief Seattle's speech(es): American origins and European reception., In B. Swan and A. Krupat (eds.), Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature, Berkeley, University of California Press, pp. 497-536.

Chief Seattle's Testimony - An 1854 Oration

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Reprinted by permission from Legacy (March/April, 1993).

Source: "The Truth of Chief Seattle" by Joyce E. Meredith and William C. Steele from Pantheist Vision Vol. 14, No., 3, September, 1993.

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Chief Seattle's Testimony - An 1854 Oration

The following is an excerpt of the full statement attributed to Chief Seattle, written by Ted Perry, discussed in the article, "The Truth of Chief Seattle" by Joyce E. Meredith and William C. Steele reprinted in Pantheist Vision Vol. 14, No., 3, September, 1993.

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us.

If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.

The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man - all belong to the same family.

So, when the Great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land, he asks much of us.

This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells us events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father.

The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, and feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember to teach your children that the rivers are our brothers, and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.

We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his fathers' graves behind and he does not care. His fathers' graves and his children's birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only desert.

The air is precious to the red man, for all things share the same breath - the beast, the man, they all share the same breath. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for many days, he is numb to the stench. But we if sell you our land, you must remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred as a place where even the white man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow's flowers.

We will consider your offer to buy our land. If we decide to accept, I will make one condition: the white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers.