Chief Seattle

H salt There are stories about him from snow quality to a northern Puget Sound to southern Puget Sound. A lot of it is obviously a mystery, nobody can really tell us exactly what he did or where he lived. What we know about Seattle was that he was one aggressive, pugnacious individual, frankly a scary person.

I believe that in good conscience that he was doing the best for his people. Seattle demand became a symbol of the cooperation between Indians and non-inheans that allowed civilization to flourish in the Puget Sound. This speech is so renowned, I mean it's world famous. I think you have to look at chief Seattle's speech as an interesting piece of white literature. We know when Seattle was born from the time he died and he died in 1866 and they said

he was about 80 years old so he was born sometime in the 1780s. That was a very crucial period in the history of his people. That was at the peak probably of the epidemics that were brought in by the traders that began appearing off the coast in the 1770s and became enforced in the 1780s. None of these pathogens, none of these diseases, has been present here in North America until Europeans arrive so that we have populations of people who have no acquired immunity to the diseases that Europeans bring. And with the trading that happened between Indian people in Puget Sound, those diseases spread quickly. We know that some populations suffering from smallpox for the very first time had death rates up to 90 percent. They had a very complex system that tied them all into a kind of a regional culture of

interaction. His mother was Dwamish. His father was Sakwamish. Seattle most likely would have had a number of relatives in villages throughout the Central Puget Sound. For the same reason, he would have had aunts and uncles who married people from other villages in order to create those kinds of ties. His father's brother was Kutsap, which we call Kutsap. He is probably one of the most influential leaders in the Puget Sound area in the early part of the 19th century. Kutsap was present when George Vancouver came sailing in in May of 1792 on board the HMS Discovery. And the winner dance in 1791, Kutsap, according to the stories, held up a glass trade bead and said with that in a short period of time, the beings that were trading these new things in these wonderful vessels in the North would visit them.

One year later, George Vancouver shows up. When this happens, Seattle is about six years old. According to his account, he was there. What we have to assume is that the Native people are all wondering what to think about these new people. Kutsap and Seattle's father are probably the two that Vancouver says came aboard the ship and that he brought into the after cabin and gave gifts to. What they saw were people, for example, whose heads were not flattened by a cradle board as theirs were. The young high-borns would have a headboard put onto their head that would actually make their forehead flat and that distinguished them as a person. It's almost like a royal marker or a crown that somebody would wear, it would be always with them. So what they saw were people who looked more like slaves. They saw people who had a great deal more facial and body hair than they did, which to them would probably have been repulsive.

They probably saw people who hadn't bathed in a very long time and these are Native people who bathed every morning. On the other hand, what they saw were people who clearly had what must have been a great deal of wealth and special powers that Native people didn't necessarily have because they saw very large ships, very elaborate clothing, metal tools, implements that weren't available to Native people. When Vancouver came here in 1792, his two ships, Discovery and Chatham, were loaded with 10,000 pounds worth of cheap bangles and cucumbers. It's an incredible sum. 10,000 pounds, the end of the 18th century, was roughly equivalent to something like three million modern dollars. And they must have emptied half the Habadashas shops in London in order to spend such a sum on these cheap trinkets.

He was there for about two weeks after restoration point, trading with the Native people made a tremendous impact in those weeks. The Soquois became the richest people on Puget Sound. The Indians made it absolutely clear what they wanted. They wanted iron, they wanted pewter, they wanted copper. So why was it that the Indians wanted iron and the Europeans gave them beads of Mirono glass? I think it was because, like most Native people in the colonial encounter, the Indians were thought of as essentially feminine. So they were thought to be sensitive and spiritual and nurturing. Their heads were easily turned by pretty things. Encounters like this were happening all the time through the late 18th century. The Soquamish were extremely gracious. One of the very first things they did was welcome him with a formal song in which they kept time beating their paddles and the gunnels of their canoes as they surrounded and the

ceremoniously rounded Vancouver ship. So this is an extraordinary, this is a magical encounter. It would be something like close encounters of the third kind, where beings from another world come to earth. Well, this would, how else could you describe anything like this but in supernatural terms? Seattle was there. He remembered it. The memory never left him. They go through quite an elaborate ritual before they will board the ship. Now, was this because they were afraid they were dealing with strange spirits or supernatural powers? Maybe. On the other hand, it's quite likely that this is what they did whenever they met strange people, either to call on their spirit powers to help them or to suggest to those other people what powers they had so that they would be respected. Chew Seattle was high-born, it was royalty. When a child of a nobility or anybody who wanted to make anything of himself in life,

when he became an adolescent, he had to undergo a vision quest. It has just a general fact of being an Indian going from a young man to an adult. He has to be able to go through quests and he has to find his powers. When he became an adolescent, he had to undergo a vision quest, go to an isolated haunt fast and experience a trance in which the supernatural power would come to that person and teach him his song, with the song then, the person who received the vision could then manifest the gift that the supernatural guardian gave him. He is noted to have received thunderbird power. Seattle had rattles which he would use during winter dances when it came time to manifest your guardian spirit. The person would then sing their song in this case, shake the rattles that had the figure of the spirit.

When he did that, in his strong, powerful voice, which many people remember him had, it was the other people who shook. One did not need to cross this man because they would be in dire straits. To be a great leader, you have to distinguish yourself and battle and that's something that there are several stories of him about. When he was in his early 20s, these upper Yakamas and Wenachis are coming over in wintering in the upper valleys in the western Cascades and according to the story, there is a slave raid that's being planned down on the Bayas. As a matter of fact, there had been several raids already that had taken important kin. The rumor was there was another one on the way and so how are we going to respond to this? Seattle steps forward a council meeting and says, I know how we can do it and so what he does is he goes up and at a bend of the river, he drops a tree so that it is resting above the water about six inches above the water. It goes from one bank to the other and then when the five canoe loads of warriors came

down, they see the tree too late. Their canoes tip over and as they crawl out of the river bank, then the people come out and they shoot arrows at them and they're dead. Chief Seattle had his own warriors behind him in the woods and as the canoes were coming down the river, the whole group, the whole war party was wiped out. For this, Seattle celebrated because it was done without any loss to his people and they sent a terrific message upstream and he does it by thinking the problem through, by figuring it out before he has to do it, by using strategy. That's something that shows that a man is not only a brave man but an intelligent man as well. Seattle's in middle age when he first appears in the historic record. This is in August of 1833. He has a nickname.

As they often gave nicknames to people, his is Legros, the fat one. Now what this means, we can only guess that Seattle was a large man, a large bodied tall man. The Hudson's Bay Company is moving into the Puget Sound region, they're building a chain of trading posts to make sure that they keep the Americans out of the Puget Sound region to keep the trade all to themselves. People were attracted to the Hudson's Bay Company trading posts from all over the Puget Sound and even from east of the Cascade Mountains and in many cases what you find is small camps of people from many different widely separated villages. So these are going to be people who don't know each other personally. And again, if you don't know people personally, don't have kin connections to them, you assume that they're potential enemies. Seattle's a frightening figure in these early years. That he was apparently large in imposing noticeable physically. He also made himself noticed if we can believe the Hudson's Bay Company records by getting

into a couple of fights on the beach at Fort Miss Gwally. He, at one point or maybe it's twice, shows up there apparently because he's on an expedition with others to take revenge on somebody. And so he's seen by the Hudson's Bay Company people as a troublemaker. He occurs again and again in this record as a formidable figure, that rascal, a black hearted villain, as a person basically threatens company officials with his gun twice. The governors of the Hudson Bay Company required the people who were overseeing their training posts to look out for the religious welfare of the people besides gaining furs in whichever way you can, convert them to and so they had a double mission. Imagine this remarkable scene in this rude log structure, Francis Heron, who's now the chief trader at the Fort, has about four or five native leaders inside and he's having

them confess their sins. And this is where Seattle steps forward and says, well, in my youth I killed a Sklaulam headman and I also took a length of high qua or shell money. The other leaders step forward and they confess their sins. And then at the end, Francis Heron brings forth a document. It's a treaty in which they promise not to kill each other or to keep at least killing to a minimum. And then he has them make each leader make his mark by their name. Now this is the first treaty Seattle or any of those people sign. We know that Seattle kills again because it's recorded that it was involved in killing a shaman. It was standard practice to execute essentially a shaman suspected of using their powers militantly. It causes a huge uproar in Puget Sound amongst his own people and at which point one of the chief trader says, I wish they would kill the brute. There were lots of meetings of all the tribes in Puget Sound and Indian leaders got together

some of them very upset at what was going on in the area, whether the British were something that they wanted to deal with, whether it was the Americans that they wanted to deal with or not. The other Indian leaders did not want to make friends with the pioneers and chiefs Seattle wanted to. When the American settlers first come into the Puget Sound region, they're very few and the native people are very many and the native people are powerful. They're armed, they have money, they have wealth, and so the Americans feel that they have to be on their best behavior with them and they are. I think that the chief was really good friends with the pioneers, the early settlers of Seattle. I understand he was really good friends with Mr. Maynard and Arthur Danny. When Danny shows up, he sends a letter back, found this wonderful place, come where there's room for thousands of people. Well, I think what we're hearing there is David and Chief Seattle working together, realizing this earlier poignant vision.

We can work together. There's all these people who can help us. So this is not the one-sided pioneer story. This is a larger epic involving two people trying to work together to bring something into reality that hadn't happened before. Seattle is in the middle of it. Chief Seattle, as a leader, he had to prove himself to people and to not only people within Duwamish and Suquamish tribe, but to all tribes in Puget Sound. Seattle, if nothing else is a power program, his real claim to fame is when he latches onto the Americans who settle right by him and he's responsible for their settling by him. I am glad to have you come to our country. For we Indians know but little and you, Boston and King George men know how to do everything. We want your blankets, your guns, axes clothing and tobacco and all the other things you make. We need all these things that you make as we do not know how to make them and so we welcome

you to our country, to make flower, sugar and other things that we can trade for. We wonder why the Boston men should wander so far away from their home and come among so many Indians. Why are you not afraid? The Americans settled at or between the village of Zitzi Lallich, which is where Pioneer Square is today, a village of about 200 people and a house site north of there called Bacquab, little prairies, where Pier 70 is. Between the two there, during the year where people gathered, there were 500 native people there. In the winter months there were at least 200 and there were probably about 13 or 14 Americans. So obviously it was the native people that were going to make this economy happen and they did.

I think the early settlers revered his leadership as the chief of the many villages around Seattle. We're not for the friendship and the direction provided by Seattle, getting his people to work in the fish packing plant, getting his people to enable settlers to explore the lands, to show them where the good settling areas were, to trade them foodstuffs, to provide the labor that was needed to bring the logs out of the forest to the mills. It was a native people that did all that. Seattle and other headmen directed their laborers. And so when the towns people, when the Americans named their budding community on the east side of Elliott Bay, after Seattle, it was a normal natural thing to do. He had shown the ability to acquire great wealth, to host enormous gatherings of people at which they feasted for days. Those were all both evidence of status and ways to gain status in native society.

So almost certainly there were large numbers of people who respected him, almost certainly there were people who resented him for the same reason. The problem that many Americans faced when they came into the area is that they had moved in and they claimed the land, but they couldn't get title. Because the title had not yet been gotten from the original owners of the native peoples. And to do this, Isaac Stevens was given the job of super-intended of Indian affairs, as well as governor of the territory. And when he arrived here, he quickly sent out word to the native communities and visited many of them, that these treaties were up and coming. His goal was to get the land from the Indians, promise them anything, and then go back to DC and go on with his life. Stevens was like a little Napoleon, that's what his critics referred to him as, and the territory was an enormously strategic location. They already knew that it was closer to Asia than any other part of the continental United

States. They were already talking about trade with Japan and trade with China. At that time, it's important to realize that a lot of the Indian leaders knew that there was no way that we could stop people from coming here. There was no way that we could stop especially white people from settling in the area, because of what we had already heard from other tribes across the country. The American authorities, particularly Stevens, set out quite consciously to create a few tribes with a few primary chiefs. Stevens went around, early in his tenure as governor, went around to the Indian communities and essentially told them that. We want you to appoint a head chief and a few subordinate chiefs. This organic process by which native people come into leadership positions amongst their communities is now frozen and made apart of the American bureaucratic system. So Seattle is now chief of the Soquamish and the Duamish.

He was the leader who actually brought together Indian leaders. Since he was Soquamish and Duamish, he could rightfully represent both tribes and speak with a very powerful voice. Many native people appear to have looked upon the treaties as temporary documents that would be altered later as needs became more apparent. But Stevens, if they wanted to get it done. If people gathered on the waterfront in the town of Seattle to greet the new governor, almost certainly they wanted to see the man that the Americans considered their most prominent man. I think it's quite likely that Seattle gave a long speech at that point and that that's the one that became the basis for what we now think of as his famous speech. It was not a speech given at the treaty itself, which was a year later. After recollection, we have comes from Amelia Sneatlam, who is a cousin of Seattle. And she remembered him saying, take care of the changers.

You folks observe the changers who have come to this lab and our progeny will watch and learn from them now. Those who come after us, our children, and they will become just like the changers who have come here to us on this land. You folks observe them well. Native people are still very much in the majority. And at that time, we must assume that they still believe that they can control their destiny. He gave this speech at a time when his people had just gone through yet another small pox epidemic. He was an old man by then. He may have been thinking about his own mortality. So he may well have given a speech that seemed obsequious, even. But this would still have been consistent with ways that Native people formed alliances in other circumstances.

The treaties are being negotiated, and here are not only as a warfare happening on the sound, even before the treaties are being negotiated, but here are surveyors coming through whole teams of surveyors, plotting lines throughout the forest, surveying so that the settlers can file their claims. There's also literally boatloads of settlers coming in. All this is happening even before the treaty councils meet. And so it is a recipe for disaster. In the Americans' mind, the treaty was first and foremost a land session. And they got the first paragraph, the Indian's agreement to give up all of the territory that they might have claimed as their lands, except very small areas reserved to them. In addition, they were going to get 20 years worth of payments, the Indians for these lands, and a number of government services, including instructions in how to farm, how to produce some of the things that Americans could produce.

They were going to get medical services, teachers, protection. There was a story circulating among Indian people that the American authorities' real plan was to round up all the Indians and take them to a land of perpetual darkness. So all of these things made a number of Indian people very edgy. The Point Elliott Treaty promised many things. It promised a reservation, allotments, hunting and fishing rights. They couldn't just take land from people, although that's what they were doing, was taking land. He had to do it some way legally and morally. And that's what the treaties were all about. The Point Elliott Treaty, for example, set aside a small area on what's now the Kitsap Peninsula. I look upon you as my father. I and the rest regard you as such. All of the Indians have the same good feeling toward you, and will send it on paper to

the great father. He invited Seattle to speak first in response to his remarks, and certainly would have put him at the top of the treaty signatures. It's not all that clear what Seattle thought of that, but by that time he may well have relished that role himself. One of the ways that you would judge an importance of a person in any kind of situation, especially when a treaty signing is coming, is who's the first signature? On the Point Elliott Treaty, the first signature that comes up is Chief Seattle's. There were, I believe, four or five other head chiefs of Duwamish villages that signed as well. But as people remember, Seattle was the important signature. Because without his cooperation, you probably wouldn't have had the other signatures on the treaty.

Seattle and Pat Canem and Goliath and Chowitzu, the leaders of the people from Elliott Bay all the way up to the Canadian border signed their lands away. And so the stage was set for conflict. There were people disgruntled throughout all of the Indian tribes. Chief Lushias, he's known now, was very upset at the white people and the settling because his land, his own personal land as an important Indian leader, was not given to him. And that upset him very much. And he saw at that time that he had to act, he had to do something. Violence had been taking place here even before the treaty. Never already attacks being made on native communities by Americans. Large-scale attacks where revenue cutters were bombarding villages at the mouth of Hood Canal, where Stevens and his group of people bombarded and destroyed another village on

would-be island. Indians were being routinely shot, flogged, taken distillicum for hanging. If they felt that the Indians were encroaching on their property, they would just shoot at him, burn their house, and basically chase him off the land. They felt that was their spot here into the city. So I think that's when the cultural genocide began. I think it's likely that Lushias, some of the other people up the white Puyallup and the Squally Rivers, are the ones that took up arms because they're relatives in Eastern Washington did, but also because they were the people who were the most threatened by the rapid American settlement and they decided to try to intimidate the Americans instead. Seattle clearly deliberately did not decide to join the armed rebels. November and December of 1855, word gets out that there is going to be an attack made

on the towns of Seattle and Stilicum. So they take measures to defend against us, they build a palisade in Seattle. The United States' warship Decatur comes into the harbor, patrols the thumb. Lushias was angry, Lushias was mad, and it was the last effort to try to gain some dignity in the only way that they knew how, the only way that they could get respect was issuing the same kind of force against the white people that had been issued already against them. They are probably, um, when actually some Yakima and the Squally, they are a group of native warriors, native fighters who are trying to do what they had done before in their traditional war practices was to wipe out the largest encampment of the enemy and they take up positions in the forest around Seattle.

Where do this get out? But the real indication that it's about to happen is that most of the native people who are encamped in Seattle give their canoes and roll off a couple of hundred yards off shore at 8.30 in the morning, so there they are because I know it's about to happen. By the time Lushias came here, he was fighting a siege battle against weapons that he could not win against. The Marines who are a shore, fire a howitzer, and that provokes an enormous fuselage of firing from the native forces into the town. After that first volley of shots, the settlers who are still in their houses flee. And then the firing commences. The decatur opens up with its cannon bombarding the forest with exploding shells, canistered grape shot. A lot of Indian people in future sounded never heard of cannon before and the great thunder is roar when it went off and also when it hit the ground and then exploded was something that was absolutely amazing to them.

This goes on for most of the day, but the Indians realize that they can't succeed. They cannot drive the people out. They can't wipe out the town. About three or four in the afternoon, the force, the native force retreats. And as they do so, they burn every house down that they can. And so they end up burning down most of the settlers' houses and cabins and barns in King County. Seattle remained on the west side of Puget Sound at the request of the governor and there are certainly our stories by non-Indian military men at the time that Seattle was providing them with information that would enable them to defeat the rebels. The only way that war worked was to end is not by the Army funding, Lesha, but it was by another Indian leader, finding Lesha. Isaac Stephens promised Pat Canem, who was a great war chief at that time, that he was to get Lesha and bring him to justice.

The issue is that these were acts of war, yet Lesha was treated as a murderer and hum. Lesha had spent most of his adult life in very good cooperatively relations with non-Indians. Much of his prominence had come as a result of his relations with settlers as well as other people. But he did take up arms, Seattle didn't, so they became icons of two different alternatives. Seattle's role in this whole affair is interesting because in this situation, he has been declared chief by Isaac Stephens and the people certainly regard him as a leader, but there are other leaders. There's curly in Seattle, it's a quarrel. There's William. So Seattle's effective leadership, well, it becomes very traditional. Native leaders lead by consensus.

There is no consensus. So he is only able to lead those people who will agree to leave with him, so he does. Seattle found himself in a very tenuous position. There were obviously two sides going on at this time, a bitter side of people that saw things slipping away from them, and then people like Seattle who saw opportunities and the inevitability of what was going to happen. How are we to survive? We can't fight them and win. How do we make them work with us? And that was Chief Seattle's goal. He clearly became identified in everybody's mind, Indian and non-Indian, as somebody whose strategy it was to cooperate where possible with important non-Indians. The policy of the federal government was to just totally ignore the Indian people. That's why I believe they didn't honor the treaty. Oh, we got your land.

We got your land. Now we're not going to give you anything. The treaties themselves really envision Indians in very handy little administrative boxes. If Indians will all be on this reservation, they will be easy to supervise and administer. But for native people who are used to long visits with their relatives and other villages and who are used to going out to get their food in other places, who are used to going to each other's ceremonies, these administrative categories, this sedentary life doesn't make any sense. A system of apartheid was established, that was what the reservation intended to do. It was to separate native people from quite people on almost every level. So when white people would move to an area where a native village had been reconstituted along the river valley, sometimes when the native people would be gathering food, fishing or gathering berries, they'd come back and find that their houses had been burnt down. Or else the planks of the houses had been split and used as fencing. So they had no place to live, so that they simply would have to form temporary camps

or ultimately, as many of them chose to move on to the reservations to get allotments there. And so their situation really was terrible. They became foreigners and refugees in their own land. I am not a bad man. I want you to understand what I say. I do not drink rum, nor does new interest, and we continually advise our people not to do so. I am and always have been a friend to the whites. I listen to what Mr. Page says to me, and I do not steal, nor do any of my people steal from the whites. Oh, Mr. Simmons, why do our papers not come back to us? You always say they will come back, but they do not come. I fear that we are forgotten or that we are to be cheated out of our land. Here's the chief saying, you know, I want to believe you, where are our papers? Where is the money for the lands taken? And it wasn't betrayal, but he keeps trying to ask for some consideration and some respect

and he's not getting it. Many of my people died during this cold winter, without getting their pay. When I die, my people will be very poor. They will have no property, no chief, and no one to talk for them. You must not forget them, Mr. Simmons, when I am gone. A lot of the tribes that exist today were tribes that went to war with the United States. They are the ones that have reservations and large reservations. The tribes that were cooperative with the settlers wind up with nothing. The Duamish are given nothing. They are basically forced to move into what's regarded as the Suquamish homeland, where the Suquamish fish, where they get the resources.

Now you've got two groups having to rely in the winter time on the resources of an area that belong to one of them. One of the Indian agents says, well, you know, there's bad blood between these groups that goes way back. It certainly goes back to that meeting in Seattle, where the Duamish say, fine, if Seattle and this people want to go west of the shore, let them go though, that's where they live. We'll stay here and we'll be happy to be shot down like dogs if that's what it's going to take. So there is a big split. I have been very poor and hungry all winter and I'm very sick now. In a little while I will die. I should like to be paid for my lands before I die. His latter years are, he becomes less and less of a figure that the whites had to deal with because they had pushed the Indians away from them. They were now out somewhere in a reservation, dying off or assimilating. It was their choice, the Americans like to think.

But in any case, he shows up from time to time in Seattle, where he acts as a judge in native gatherings where judgments have to be made. He tries to hue the government line as he is required to do. Then in 1865, a year before his death, the town of Seattle passes an ordinance forbidding native houses from being built within the city limits of Seattle, which means that Seattle can no longer live in the village where the whites, the Americans, first metamins, it's the Italians, the Indians have to move and so he moves. He is forced to suffer in dignities. In one particular episode, a young, ten-year-old girl, Alice Mercer, a daughter of the Mercer family, a prominent Seattle and holding family, is walking down a boardwalk, a sidewalk and sees Seattle coming up as old chief with his top hat and his coat surrounded by his attendants. She orders him off the sidewalk, a ten-year-old girl.

He doesn't move. She raises toward him, collides with him and throws him over the side of the sidewalk into the sawdust, into the ditch. He doesn't react angrily. His attendants burst out laughing and they pull him up out of the sawdust and they're brushing the sawdust after off of him. It's a terrible, I mean, you wince reading about things like that today. It was a story indicative of the dismissive attitude the whites had toward native people, even toward the person after whom they named their town. Unfortunately, what was happening at that time is he was being discarded by people. His usefulness was gone. He just became another Indian person. And that's something that nobody would want to be, especially in those times. One of the last records we have of Seattle is when David Maynard is writing a letter to his son, Back East. And Seattle comes to visit him and he essentially says, I have to cut my letter short because

the old man is putling away and should look. So here's this man approaching 80 coming to visit his erstwhile old friend in West Seattle talking to him in Chinookwell, Maynard's writing this letter, it's one of the last glimpses we have of the man. It is well, my heart is good. I have only one thing to ask and that is for my good friend, always my friend, to come to my funeral and shake hands with me before I'm laid in the ground. And he asks his friend, George Miigz, who is the owner of a sawmill at Port Madison Bay to come and shake his hand, Miigz ran a tea-todeling community by the sawmill. And it was about the only place that native people could assemble and not be assaulted by whiskey sellers, traders, charlatans, and all the other craziness of frontier life. It was a harbor of peace in this sea of chaos that had become Puget Sound for the native

people. We don't know that anybody from Seattle went to the burial. Maynard was alive, he's not recorded to have attended, yes, there didn't go, Denny didn't go. We don't know that any of these people went. All we know is that Miigz and the people that worked in his mill went. The story went unreported throughout Puget Sound and it only showed up in a San Francisco newspaper several years later. By 1866, Latino Seattle is now just beginning to get out of the doldrums so people's interests and concerns are in the usual interest or concern of any frontier community, making money, growing, improving, getting by. And that did not include the native people. Even if he wasn't particularly revered and celebrated at the time he died in 1866, his name, his image become popular again at the turn of the century when some of the early pioneers are thinking back to what they've accomplished and need to be able to say we

did this honorably. One of the most important things that she've Seattle is known for is for his speech. It's a pivotal point in his own history and the way people look at him in this area. Yonder Sky that has wept tears of compassion on our fathers for centuries and old and which to us looks eternal may change. Today it is fair, tomorrow it may be overcast with clowns. My words are like stars that never set. Chief Seattle's famous speech comes to us from the hand of Henry Smith, who publishes

it in 1887. This is more than 30 years after Seattle was purported to have given it. Henry Smith had been in the Seattle area for no more than about a year and a half. When he came he clearly didn't speak the language that Seattle spoke. So if he heard the speech in a little chute seed and it was translated to the Chinook jargon, he didn't hear anything like this eloquent speech with its Shakespearean phrases. At this period in 1879 and through the 1880s, the Northwest coast was just swarming with anthropologists who were pretty accurately recording the way that Indians actually spoke. And it's surprising that none of these literal recorders ever managed to catch a noble red man in full rhetorical flight speaking as the John Muir Indian did or the Phenomenal Cooper Indian did. This is the white man's mythology of the Indian. The uses to which Smith put his notes of Chief Seattle's purported speech are interesting

because they came at the end of a series of essays that he had published in the spring summer and fall of 1887. And what these were, these were apologias for the pioneers. There was a time when our people covered the whole land as the waves of a wind ruffled sea cover its shell-caved floor. But that time has long since passed away with the greatness of tribes now almost forgotten. It's a lament. It's a story about, speech about non-Indians being stronger than Indians destined to populate the Puget Sound. It's a plea for kindness. All of this makes sense for the late 1880s. A time when, in fact, non-Indians were far more populous than Indian communities of

Puget Sound. But this doesn't necessarily make sense for 1854. In the 1880s, the late 1880s Seattle was involved in a social class war as the old leadership of the pioneers was being challenged successfully by a new leadership made up of the business elite and professional managers. So it's most likely that Henry Smith, even if he was trying to reproduce something he thought Seattle said, was heavily influenced by what had happened in those 30 years, heavily influenced by his own culture's view of Indians as poor, doomed, noble people. A few more moons, a few more winters, and not one of all the mighty hosts that once filled this broad land, or that now roam in fragmentary bands through these vast solitudes will remain to weep over the tombs of a people once as powerful and as hopeful as your own.

He has Seattle act as this prophetic figure, saying, just as we, and we're Lord of the Manor, and we're swept away so too, you can meet a similar fate. That's obviously Smith talking. But there are a number of elements in the space in which I think we can hear Seattle's voice. Obviously, Smith bends them to his purpose, but he did so because the original struck him is so remarkable. I tend to believe that most of the history about Shes Seattle was true, that he was a great leader, a great orator, that he would have to be to be a leader of such importance to not only to amish people, but to squamish people and all built huge sound tribes. We are two distinct races and must ever remain, so there is little in common between us.

He talks about Indians and non-Indians as two very different kind of people who shouldn't or can't live together. This is not the way Seattle operated. Everything he did was designed in his adult mature life, at least, to create ties between him and the non-Indians around him. He reportedly delighted in sitting down to dinner with his non-Indian friends in Seattle. These are images that Henry Smith imbibed from his schooling in the culture that he was part of. So whether he was projecting on to Seattle something that he thought he heard in the speech or not, I don't know, but there's very little in that recorded speech that I think is literally what Seattle said. From early on in the 19th century, Indians were being represented in the American literature

as Earth's mother figures. Phenomenal Cooper virtually took out a patent on the noble Red Man and his flowery prose and made a considerable sum of money from it. And what began in fiction quickly moved into non-fiction. When whites encountered real Indians, they began to try to recast them in the Phenomenal Cooper mold of the noble Red Man. Chief Seattle became an icon of American popular culture, put the sound popular culture at the turn of the century for that reason. But for many Indian people, that was a cause of rejoicing also. I mean, if any Indian at that point was being honored for being a noble Indian, that was better than being reviled. It appeared to many Indian people to be a full list of us change in American's attitude that they could take advantage of for their own purposes. I don't think one ought to worry too much about its authenticity, about whether Chief

Seattle actually spoke the words, almost certainly he didn't. But it's a very interesting and powerful text. It continues to have resonance. I mean, it's been adopted all over the world, especially in Europe, as one of the great fundamental texts of the conservation movement. And what is most interesting about it is why the whites, instead of simply making up the speech for themselves, had to put it in the mouth of an Indian. And I think the reasons are fairly obvious. Chief Seattle was the man who had the best claim to be identified historically with the land around Puted Sound. And when Seattle, this fictional figure, speaks of the disappearance of the Indian under the weight of white development, what he's really talking about is the disappearance of nature, the disappearance of wilderness, the disappearance of the land.

All these things with which the Indian and the Indian chief is identified. I think we should all remember that all peoples across all lands have myths and legends. Not unlike Jesus Christ in the Bible, is a legend to Western society. You see, Seattle in the speech is a legend to to Amish people and to people throughout Puted Sound. I think that he said some wonderful words. I just think whoever put it in English language, I don't think they really got the essence of what he was trying to say. And the essence of his speech was, is that in the Indian way he was telling people that, you know, you got to treat my people good, and if you don't, we're still going to be here because our spirits are still going to be walking around. And when they're going to be watching you.

Our religion is the tradition of our ancestors, the dreams of our old men, given to them in the solemn hours of the night by the great spirit and the visions of our leaders. And it is written in the hearts of our people. There are a lot of parts of that speech that are very, very significant as far as religious meanings for Doamish people and Suquamish people, that he talks about journeys that the people take, visiting our dead, what happens at night in the area, that the spirits of our people are here. And that's one of the most important parts of being Doamish is that our ancestors are here with us.

That night, when the streets of your cities and villages will be silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. I think people believe in the power of the wind and the environment, the rain, the trees. He had this pristine environment that probably gave me strength and wisdom to deal with some issues at that time. Every part of this land is sacred to my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some fond memory or some sad experience of my tribe.

Even the rocks, which seem to lie dumb as they swelter in the sun along the silent seashore in Salam grandeur, through with memories of past events connected with the lives of my people. There are people that talk about him as a less than honorable man. I don't think that anybody could have predicted what was going to happen in the future and that looking at the past now is an easy thing to look at somebody like Seattle and find out that, well, he could have done other things. He did the best that he could. I would say that his legacy is more strong because of what he did. My family is still here and I'm still proud to be Thomas. I just think that Chusiel had vision that his people would be treated in a kind way. He gave of himself by sign the treaty and he felt that he would get the same treatment

in return that did not happen. At night, when the streets of your cities and villages will be silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land, the white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people for the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people for the dead.

Let him be just and deal kindly with my people for the dead.