In article , "madgardener" wrote:

--
Humankind has not woven the web of life.
We are but one thread within it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.
All things are bound together.
All things connect." Chief Seattle

Eeech. As I pointed out before, the Suquamish have asked many times,
humbly & politely, that this fabrication not be fobbed off on Chief
Sealth. Why persist in the insult? It's fine if this piece of white
christian fabrication speaks to you personally, but for god sake at least
credit it to the Jesus freak scriptwriter who wrote it. The correct
attribution would be "Ted Perry, 1972."

I can see you don't want to credit it honestly, because much as people
pretend it's great writing, only the name of Sealth is great, & in
admitting it's from a christian telefilm script for the Southern Baptist
Convention's Radio & Television Commission, well, being HONEST would
require this honkified fabrication to stand on its own merits, which are
equal to the merits of Ashleigh Brilliant, not Chief Sealth. But gosh darn
it, do TRY to have some respect for Sealth and stop crediting him for this
Southern Baptist invention.

Perry has generally avoided public statements because he is justifiably
humiliated to have been responsible for this great insult to Chief Sealth.
Linda Marsa reached him in 1992, & obtained the closest thing we will ever
have from him of an apology, though it is not apology enough to forgive
him. It was the film producer who fobbed off the quote as Sealth's & Perry
claims to have protested at the time. To quote Marsa's article: "I'm
embarrassed now when I'm seen as someone who put words in Chief Seattle's
mouth," says Ted Perry, a tweedy professorial type who teaches film at
Vermont's Middlebury College. "That was never my intention."

Marsa continued: Of course, most people are puzzled by the raging
controversy. After all, Chief Seattle is a revered icon. So no harm, no
foul. Right? Wrong, say scholars. "Native American culture is constantly
being exploited and appropriated as illustrations of whatever European
theory is in fashion," says Jack D. Forbes, a professor of Native American
studies at the University of California at Davis. These range from the
extreme individualism of the 1983 novel Hanta Yo to the New Age
spiritualism of Lynn Andrews. "When," asks Forbes, echoing the
frustrations of other Native Americans, "will the thefts of our spiritual
traditions end?"

For whoever actually respects Sealth I'll repost the correction previously
provided:
---------

Si'alh (Chief Sealth) never spoke those words, which are
a romantic invention concocted by screenwriter Ted Perry, who had looked
up Chief Sealth's speech & assessed it as "simply not very inspiring or
significant" which reveals the depth of disprespect Perry had)
so made up a speech he liked better, for the 1972 telefilm "Home,"
which was somewhat hippy oriented, & aimed at ecology-minded christian
whites & completely unconcerned with Native Americans.

The fake speech includes such moronic impositions as "I have seen a
thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot
them from a passing train" when Chief Sealth's stomping grounds were the
east & west side of Puget Sound, & he neither saw prairies of dead
buffalos nor pretended he had, nor in 1854 could he have seen a train; nor
did Sealth know the "web of life" myth which is Greek, though had that
been the only absurdity it could've been chalked up to a translator's
imposition, though in fact it is just Ted Perry writing from a white
cultural basis. Even the fake speech's reference to "the lovely cry of a
whippoorwill" is a bird Sealth never could have heard.

Every line of the fake speech is either historically
ridiculously, or portrays Chief Sealth as some kind of Saint Frances idiot
savant, if not merely a third-rate poet suited to one more bad song from
Paint Your Wagon, "I talk to the trees." This fake speech insults
Northwest native peoples, who've tried to no avail to squelch this fake,
but most whites want no part of the real deal, because history is painful
& seriously indicts white culture as harmful to the degree of psychosis --
the fake version is Popular Romance for a feel-good Par-Tay.

What is preserved of his actual speech can be read he
http://www.suquamish.nsn.us/chief.htm
It was imperfectly recorded, & he gave his speech in Salish, so the speech
as we have it is a witness's after-the-fact reconstruction from notes
taken through a translator. Some historians have complained that even this
"authentic" speech is poorly attested, but it has enough actual
touchstones to the 1850s that it can probably be accepted as being as
close as we'll ever have to hearing Sealth's considerable oratorial powers.

It is horrifying that whites hugely prefer their own modern version which has
been turned into t-shirts, environmentalist posters, greeting cards,
persistantly misattributed for the three decades since it was written,
while Sealth's actual words of peace & sorrow receed from public
knowledge. Why is that awful Ashleigh Brilliant-style fake speech so
well known, loved, & persistantly quoted, but the disturbingly beautiful
original is not:

"At night, when the streets of your cities & villages shall be silent &
you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that
once filled & still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be
alone. Let him be just & deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not
altogether powerless."

Even this moving statement is altered by white interpolations, an
anonymous christian editor adding to a later, revised version the
ridiculous afterthought "Dead did I say? There is no death, only a change
of worlds," completely reversing Sealth's persistant "comparisons" of
conqureror vs native beliefs; one of Sealth's beliefs was that the spirits
of the dead linger in THIS world, not some distant paradise, & this
difference of belief was signal to his 1854 explanation of why these two
cultures had such turmoil between them.

The actual speech speaks to real injustices & inevitabilities & is very
moving in its historical context, permitting a glimpse of a good man who
lived through a challenging time of sorry changes for his people, & still
hoped room might be preserved for his people, & for peace between native
and immigrant races.

The fake speech plays into a broad liberal white guilt & is the exact same
kind of (ultimately racist) Romanticism of the Noble Savage that caused
photographer Edward Curtis to make up his own Indian costumes & require
Indians to wear them before he would photograph them, having absolutely no
interest in their actual lives. The fake speech is a nice paean for the
Sierra Club; the real speech is an unembittered plea for peaceful
co-exsistance with conquerors who had been killing off Sealth's relatives
for several years, for he knew his people could not survive through
rebellion.

When he graciously accepts the offer of reservation life because his
people "are no longer in need of a great country" there is a bit of a
backhanded compliment imbedded in there; when he accepts the alleged
"friendship" of the Great White Father back east (who he thought was still
Geotge Washington), he says how generous this offer of friendship must be
since the Great White Father has so "little need of our friendship." These
are such obviously veiled criticisms of further injustice he is about to
cave in to in order that some of his people might survive, even if only as
"broken bands" grieving over their peoples' burial places. Understanding
Sealth's position gives beauty & weight to his words -- though the author
of the fake speech found it "uninspiring or insignificant" making it all
the more horrifying that Rev. Parry's white christian version would be so
much better liked by white christians. The fake speech is suited primarily
to quotation in Hallmark Cards or as captions in National Park picture
books & tourist pamphlets, but being written by & for white christians it
evidently sounds more important to same.

As a great man of peace, Sealth deserves far better than forever to be
quoted for things he never said, that had nothing to do with his life &
the storm he had to bring his people through. His words were prophetic, &
concern the ecology insofar as he saw that not only his people, but also
the very land, were decaying beneath the tread of white conquest, a
madness he blamed on whites' belief that the dead go away to a far
paradise, whereas his own ancestors dwelt in the wild places that were
already in Sealth's day being decimated, the whites permitting nowhere on
earth "dedicated to solitude."

Sealth was liked by whites because he was always placating whites & joined
no rebellions. He was nevertheless brave to stand up for peace in an age
where even peace negotiators were killed by whites. It was bold to give
the actual speech he gave, considering how Quiemuth was stabbed to death
in Governor Stevens' office for attempting peacefully to turn himself over
to conquerors, &when Chief Leschi sued for peaceful negotiations, he was
summarily hung
for an invented crime, in a public display of white barbarity the purpose
of which would today be called pure terrorism in both its intent & its
effect. The only good that can be said of white response at that time is
that the white soldiers at Ft Steilacom so respected Leschi as a just
warrior, & knowing that he was not guilty of the crime alleged, would not
permit the territorial governor to have Leschi hanged in the fort,
blocking the gallows to being placed there. It was otherwise an
unitertupted legacy of conquerors' merciless cruelty that Sealth stood
before, accepting humiliation while begging for co-existence, NOT for an
Arbor Day celebration or donations to the Audobon Society.

Visit Chief Sealth's own tribe on the web:
http://www.suquamish.nsn.us/

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
Visit the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com