Chief Seattle's Speech Revisited
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Transcript of Chief Seattle's Speech Revisited
Access Provided by Southern New Hampshire University at 09/21/11 4:03AM GMT
Chief Seattle’s Speech Revisited
arnold krupat
i
Indian orators have been saying good-bye for more than three hundred
years. John Eliot’s Dying Speeches of Several Indians (1685), as David
Murray notes, inaugurates a long textual history in which “Indians . . .
are most useful dying,” or, as in a number of speeches, among them the
one I will consider here, bidding the world farewell as they embrace an
undesired but apparently inevitable exile or demise.1 Unlike traditional
condolence oratory as, for example, performed by Iroquois and Tlingit
people, these elegiac speeches are responses to specifi c occasions, usu-
ally demands for land; they have been addressed not so much to other
Indians as to whites who have shown themselves keenly interested in
preserving and circulating them.
Whereas the speeches of dying Indians were useful in the seventeenth
century for the purpose of advancing the gospel, by the eighteenth cen-
tury, as Murray writes, “dying Indians offered comfort within a differ-
ent frame of reference, that of inevitably doomed nobility. The focus,
therefore changes from ordinary Indians to Indian leaders” to “chiefs”
or, as J. B. Paterson insisted in his preface to Black Hawk’s autobiog-
raphy of 1833, to Native American “heroes.” Murray goes on to show
how, after the American Revolution, “in an increasingly bourgeois soci-
ety,” the “popularity of surrender . . . speeches by Indians” is “acted out
[as] the renunciation of power by a nobility.”2 By the mid-nineteenth
century, this confl ict of classes is largely overridden by the discourses
of “scientifi c racism” and “manifest destiny.”3 These discourses instan-
tiate a national narrative of progress in the comic mode.4 “Noble” or
not, the “savage,” comically or, from his perspective, tragically, had to go.
Krupat: Chief Seattle’s Speech Revisited 193
These farewell speeches (those of Black Hawk, Cochise, Chief Joseph,
and Chief Sealth), like the protest speeches referenced by Murray, are
also “contextually over-determined,” with the various contexts perceived
very differently by whites and Indians producing an oratorical discourse
of considerable complexity.5
ii
Chief Sealth or Seattle was born about 1786 at Old Man House, the win-
ter village of his Suquamish (the name means “people of the sheltered
salt water”) nation, on Bainbridge Island in what is now Washington
State.6 His father, Schweabe, was Suquamish, and his mother, Scholitza,
was a Duwamish woman from the area of present-day Kent, Washington.
Sealth is said to have attained chiefl y status as a result of his initiative
in defending his people against an attack from upriver tribes, the sort
of career success expected at one time or another for a young man of
his noble lineage.7 There are various monuments to him in Seattle and
the state of Washington, but his national and international renown de-
rives from a speech he is usually said to have given in 1854 or 1855. This
speech was not published until October 29, 1887, when it appeared in the
Seattle Sunday Star in a translation version by Dr. Henry A. Smith. It was
reprinted a few years later in Frederic Grant’s History of Seattle, Washing-
ton (1891), then reproduced in publications by Clarence Bagley and Ro-
berta Frye Watt in 1931 and by John Rich in 1932. Bagley, Watt, and Rich
all added a thirteen-word conclusion to the speech as it had originally
been printed in 1887: “Dead did I say? There is no death, only a change
of worlds.”8 Sealth’s speech was later “retranslated” “from the Victorian
English of Dr. Henry Smith” by William Arrowsmith in 1969 and subse-
quently rewritten and expanded by Ted Perry in the early seventies for
a fi lm he had been commissioned to produce for the Southern Baptist
Convention.9 The speech was once again altered for the Spokane Expo of
1974.10 It is only the 1887 text that is relevant to the present study.11
Sealth’s speech, as I’ve noted, is frequently said to have been deliv-
ered either in 1854 or 1855 during meetings convened by Isaac Ingalls
Stevens, the newly appointed governor of Washington Territory, with
the aim of persuading the Puget Sound Indians to give up most of their
lands in Kitsap County for a reservation at Port Madison. As the histo-
rian Carole Seeman explains, “Between Christmas Day, 1854 and Janu-
194 american indian quarterly/spring 2011/vol. 35, no. 2
ary 26, 1855, Governor Stevens . . . made three treaties [Medicine Creek,
Point Elliott, and Point No Point] with representatives of some of the
six thousand or more Indians who inhabited Puget Sound.”12 Stevens
began negotiations with the Indians at Point Elliott on January 22, 1855,
and a treaty was signed the following day.13 Sealth was in attendance at
the Point Elliott meeting; indeed, his is the fi rst signature to appear on
the treaty. If the famous speech had been delivered at Point Elliott, it
would have been on one of these January days in 1855. But there is no
one on record who claims actually to have heard Sealth deliver a lengthy
address at Point Elliott.14 Clarence Bagley’s 1931 essay asserted that Dr.
Henry Smith was present at Point Elliott, although other sources dis-
pute Smith’s presence (e.g., Jerry Clark: “The name of Dr. Smith does
not appear among those listed as witnessing the Point Elliott discus-
sions”), and I tend to think he was not at Point Elliott.15
But so far as Sealth’s speech is concerned, speculations about Dr.
Smith’s presence or absence at Point Elliott are pointless because Dr.
Smith himself stated very clearly that he did not hear the speech at Point
Elliott. In the prefatory remarks to his reconstruction of the speech,
Smith wrote: “When Governor Stevens fi rst arrived in Seattle, and told
the natives he had been appointed commissioner of Indian affairs for
Washington Territory, they gave him a demonstrative reception in front
of Dr. Maynard’s offi ce, near the water front on Main Street.”16 On that
occasion, Dr. Smith tells us, Dr. Maynard introduced Stevens to those
assembled, after which introduction Stevens gave a brief speech. Then,
Smith writes, “Chief Seattle arose . . . [and] commenced his memorable
address in solemn and impressive tones.”17
Stevens assumed his position as governor of Washington Territory
and commissioner of Indian Affairs in November 1853.18 According to
Rudolf Kaiser, he visited Puget Sound after he “returned from a trip to
the East” in December 1854. Kaiser believes that that is the “most likely
date for the address.”19 It is also the date earlier given by the historian of
Seattle, Roberta Frye Watt.20 The Lushootseed linguist Vi Hilbert, citing
Kaiser, accepts this date, although David Buerge believes that Stevens
fi rst met with Chief Sealth at a large public gathering attended by most
of the city’s residents and a great many Indians almost a year earlier,
specifi cally on January 12, 1854, a date much closer to Stevens’s arrival.21
Dr. Smith gave no date for Sealth’s speech, and I tend toward Buerge’s
rather than Kaiser’s guess—January 1854 rather than December 1854.
Krupat: Chief Seattle’s Speech Revisited 195
But the important thing to note is that whatever the exact date of the
speech, it was not delivered at Point Elliott but in Seattle, on Main Street,
on an occasion when Stevens would have announced his intention to
negotiate for Indian lands—negotiations that did not actually take place
until approximately a year (or, it is possible, only a month) later.22
Why, then, in view of Dr. Smith’s clear statement of (roughly) when
and (exactly) where he heard the speech, have some scholars contin-
ued to set the speech at the Point Elliott treaty convention?23 Apart
from the possibility of confusion (and the many publications dealing
with Sealth’s speech, as should already be apparent, do not agree on
some very basic facts), the reason is surely because Sealth’s speech of-
fers a number of specifi c responses to proposals made by Stevens for
the sale or exchange of Indian lands—proposals, to repeat, that were not
made when Stevens fi rst met with the Indians of Puget Sound a year (or,
again, possibly only several weeks) earlier, the time when Dr. Smith says
he heard Sealth speak.
Briefl y to recapitulate before moving forward: Dr. Henry Smith said
that Sealth’s great speech was delivered on Seattle’s Main Street, in front
of Dr. Maynard’s offi ce, near the waterfront, on the occasion of Gov-
ernor Isaac Stevens’s fi rst introducing himself to the Indian peoples of
Puget Sound. Smith gives no date for this occasion, but it had to have
been either in January 1854 (my best guess, as I have said) or, at the lat-
est, in December of that year. No actual negotiations for Indian land
took place at that time, although Sealth’s speech responds explicitly to
propositions put forth by Stevens, propositions that were not offered
until the Point Elliott or Mukilteo treaty meetings, which took place
from January 21 to January 23, 1855.
Sealth was present at the Point Elliott talks, and he signed the treaty
agreeing to a reservation for his people. But Smith was almost surely
not present at those talks. Smith stated clearly that he produced Sealth’s
speech from notes he took at the meeting in Seattle in front of Dr. May-
nard’s offi ce. But those notes cannot have included matters that Sealth
could only have raised at a later time. It’s my sense that Smith did in-
deed hear Sealth speak in January 1854 (or, again, possibly in Decem-
ber of that year); that he was impressed by Sealth’s oratorical powers;
that he took notes on what he heard; and, later, that he made further
notes from hearsay or from the local papers reporting Sealth’s remarks
at Point Elliott, some of which, as I have said, are on record but others
196 american indian quarterly/spring 2011/vol. 35, no. 2
of which may have been lost. It is not hard to imagine that with the pas-
sage of more than thirty years, Smith might have consciously or uncon-
sciously confl ated his notes from different occasions, collapsing them
into one grand speech.
It is also worth remarking that by 1887, Dr. Smith would have been
aware of the considerable attention paid to the “farewell” speech as-
cribed to Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce earlier, in 1877. It’s also surely the
case that Smith would have followed the ongoing congressional debate
over the Dawes, or General Allotment, Act that was eventually passed
into law on the second of February 1887. Dawes was explicitly intended
to destroy the tribally held Indian landbase and to turn American Indi-
ans into Indian Americans who valued private property and a dollar in
their trousers’ pocket. An elegiac lament for a vanishing race may well
have come from Sealth’s perception of his people’s prospects in 1854–55,
but it may also be “contextually overdetermined,” in Murray’s sense, tak-
ing some of its tone from Dr. Smith’s understanding of the events of
1887, a time when prospects for the continued tribal life of Indian peo-
ples seemed dim.
A further element of its overdetermination comes from the fact that
some measure of the fatalism voiced by Sealth may derive from Dr.
Smith’s sense of his own situation in the 1880s. David Buerge notes that
although “Smith and his pioneer compatriots had done very well, be-
coming middle-class landowners, a propertied elite that liked to call
itself ‘Old Seattle,’” nonetheless, “by the mid-1880’s they were losing
power to a growing working class and to a class of urbane professionals
and entrepreneurs who styled themselves as ‘New Seattle.’” Ironically, as
Buerge speculates, it is possible that “Smith and his pioneer colleagues
felt themselves to be in much the same situation as the one they had
put the Indians in in the 1850s.”24 This may further help us understand
why Dr. Smith decided to construct and publish a valedictory speech by
Sealth in 1887.
In much the same way, we may contextualize Roberta Watt’s 1931
description of Sealth’s speech as “the swan song of a dying race” and
John Rich’s 1932 description of it as a “Funeral Oration of the Great In-
dian Race” with another of Buerge’s insights.25 He reminds us that these
grandiose and mistaken pronouncements were made in “the depths of
the Great Depression . . . as a possible prophecy of [American] social
collapse,” yet another example of the projection of the settler-society’s
Krupat: Chief Seattle’s Speech Revisited 197
anxieties on to the Indians.26 But the Great Depression was also the na-
dir of the Dawes period, when the dire results of Dawes—its destruc-
tiveness to Native tribal nations—had become generally apparent. Just
as Dr. Smith in 1887 might have imagined the end of tribal life and also
an end to the dominance of his class, so too might Watt and Rich in
the early 1930s have confl ated Indian demise with American economic
collapse and consciously or not have reprinted Sealth’s speech in order
to speak to their own situation. They could not have been aware that
in just a very few years the Indian Reorganization Act (1934) would be
passed precisely to enable the continued vitality of “the Great Indian
Race” (although by less than fortunate means).
Before we consider Sealth’s “farewell” speech as a formal statement
of exile and ending, we must fi rst determine whether it does in some
substantial measure represent things Sealth might have said or whether
it is largely a fabrication. This is especially important in that, as we have
noted, there are three versions of Sealth’s speech that were indeed fab-
ricated to serve various environmental and ecological ends. Let me
state as clearly as I can that it will not be possible to determine with any
certainty exactly what may have come from Sealth and what from Dr.
Smith.
iii
If we were to judge the accuracy of Dr. Smith’s rendition of Sealth’s
address strictly on the basis of his setting for it, the verdict would be
mixed. In his comments framing the speech, Dr. Smith says that Sealth
“was the largest Indian I ever saw, and by far the noblest looking. He
stood nearly six feet in his moccasins, was broad shouldered, deep
chested and fi nely proportioned.”27 Others have also described Sealth as
a tall and noble red man.28 But Fredric Grant, publishing only four years
later than Smith, writes that “Seattle was short and heavy, weighing as
much as 180 pounds. He was round-shouldered. . . . His face was refi ned
and benevolent but not particularly strong.”29 Smith wrote that when
Sealth spoke, “deep-toned, sonorous and eloquent sentences rolled from
his lips like the ceaseless thunders of cataracts fl owing from exhaustless
fountains.”30 Sealth almost surely had a powerful voice, one that—it has
often been written—“could be heard a distance of half a mile.” That es-
timate probably derives from remarks made to Frank Carlson early in
198 american indian quarterly/spring 2011/vol. 35, no. 2
the twentieth century by D. T. Denny, “who arrived at Alki point [Wash-
ington Territory] in 1851.”31 Smith would probably have known Denny,
although his sense of the matter—expressed, to be sure, in fl orid, Vic-
torian language—might well be based upon his personal experience of
Sealth’s vocal power. Jay Miller has made the point that “most [Puget
Sound] chiefs had inherited power from Thunder and passed it along to
their heirs for generations, giving each a booming voice and eye-catch-
ing fl air.”32 We know that Sealth had Thunder power and thus a power-
ful voice—and, perhaps, an impressive fi gure as well.33 Smith’s estimate
both of Sealth’s booming voice and of his physical stature may, fi nally,
be accurate.
I suspect Smith is less accurate in stating that when “Governor Ste-
vens sat down, Chief Seattle arose with all the dignity of a senator, who
carries the responsibilities of a great nation on his shoulders. Placing
one hand on the governor’s head, and slowly pointing heaven-ward
Fig. 1. Untitled portrait of Chief Seattle by Joseph Thwaites, ca. 1865. Photograph
from the Washington State Historical Society.
Krupat: Chief Seattle’s Speech Revisited 199
with the index fi nger of the other, he commenced his memorable ad-
dress in solemn and impressive tones.”34 First, it seems to me extremely
unlikely that Sealth would have put his hand upon the head of any white
man (or any Indian, for that matter), especially the head of an impor-
tant government offi cial whom he had probably never before met.35 I
also suspect that Stevens’s head in rainy Seattle by the water—and this
was in winter, the rainiest season of the year—would have been cov-
ered by a hat. The “senator” reference invokes classical Rome, and per-
haps it has something to do with Smith recalling Jefferson’s references to
Chief Logan, whom he compared favorably to Greek and Roman ora-
tors.36 Jefferson’s publication of Logan’s speech has the Mingo leader say
that other Indians had pointed at him as a friend of the white man. The
contemporary Mingo scholar Thomas McElwain notes, however, that
pointing in the sense of “throwing up a fi nger”—exactly what Sealth is
said to do here—is a “non-Native behavior. . . . A Native person indicates
with eyes or pursed lips.”37 Smith has painted a portrait of Sealth as both
a classical orator and a biblical patriarch, hand on the head in blessing,
fi nger pointed to the heavens, one that is easy to imagine in an ornate
frame, hung upon a museum wall. This portrait is at the least highly
suspect and perhaps historically and culturally impossible. What of the
speech itself?
Sealth spoke in Lushootseed, the central coastal Salishan language of
his Suquamish/Duwamish people.38 His words would have been trans-
lated by one of the Indians into Chinook Jargon, which Dr. Smith may
well have understood. David Buerge and Crisca Bierwert suggest that
George Gibbs, a surveyor for Stevens’s party who sometimes served as
his interpreter, might have been the one who translated the jargon into
English for Governor Stevens and other white settlers of Seattle.39 Bi-
erwert sensibly concludes that “the language translation process puts
whatever Smith heard at considerable remove from its literal origins, al-
though not, perhaps, its oratorical qualities.”40 On the basis of his exami-
nation of Dr. Smith’s other writings, Buerge concludes that “Chief Seat-
tle’s speech [is] easily the best thing Smith ever ‘wrote.’” It is his estimate
that “its strength and imagery derive from what Smith heard rather than
from his own talent,” that is, from the “oratorical qualities” of Sealth’s
actual address.41 Vi Hilbert similarly put the matter both generously and
usefully in her estimate that Dr. Smith “sensed the beauty of [Sealth’s]
speech. . . . He took notes of this impressive speech and from them wrote
200 american indian quarterly/spring 2011/vol. 35, no. 2
the English version published some thirty-three years later.”42 I believe
that the speech Dr. Smith published in 1887 does derive substantially,
if not entirely, from Sealth’s performance on that January day in 1854.43
It was supplemented by responses the chief would later have made to
propositions offered by Governor Stevens at Point Elliott.44 If much of
the speech might well refl ect Sealth’s views, what can we say of it as an
Indian farewell?
iv
Sealth begins his speech with a strong fatalism in regard to the social
and political future of his people, a fatalism that carries through to the
end of his address. Responding to the fact that the “white chief sends us
word that he wants to buy our lands but is willing to allow us to reserve
enough to live on comfortably,” Sealth says that this “indeed appears
just, even generous, for the Red Man no longer has rights that he need
respect, and the offer may be wise also, as we are no longer in need of
an extensive country.”45 There is a strong temptation today to read these
words ironically, but it is a temptation that is probably best resisted.
Sealth’s people had suffered considerable depopulation as a result of the
introduction of Western diseases to which they had not developed any
immunity, and Isaac Stevens was clearly determined to get lands for the
railroad and expand white settlement exponentially.46 Acquiescence to
Stevens’s demands could well have seemed the best option so that the
people might live. And yet, as we will see further, Sealth fully engages the
possibility that the people might not live.
Tulalip elder “Gram” Ruth Sehome Shelton, born sometime between
1855 and 1859 and who heard of these matters directly from her rela-
tives, tells us that Stevens was known as “the changer.”47 This does not
simply indicate an awareness among the Indians that with his arrival
things would change. Rather, we must note that “Southern Coast Salish
myths tell of a myth age when there were beings with both human and
animal qualities. This age ended with the coming of the Transformer
. . . who changed many of the myth age beings into animals, changed
some dangerous creatures into stone, and gave human beings the ru-
diments of culture.”48 As Crisca Bierwert notes, in “Lushootseed, as in
other Northwest Coast literatures, stories about the Changer”—or
Transformer—“constitute a genre” akin to Trickster stories. As Bierwert
Krupat: Chief Seattle’s Speech Revisited 201
describes it, “At some point in Lushootseed time, the Changer appeared,
stalking through the world and asking everyone, ‘What are you doing?’
Depending on their responses, he then decided for them what their fu-
ture characteristic activity in the world would be.”49 Thus, to refer to
Stevens as the Changer is to suggest that he might well have the power to
decide for Puget Sound peoples “what their future characteristic activity
in the world would be.” For Christian Indians like Sealth (as we will see
further), Stevens’s arrival might then represent something like a Second
Coming—not of Christ, to be sure, but of the Changer/Transformer,
one who would not resurrect the Indians’ old traditional life but, rather,
see to it that their “future . . . activity in the world” would be to become
like white people!
But Sealth already had a substantial reputation as a friend of the
whites prior to the time of Stevens’s arrival. He had claimed to have wit-
nessed his people’s fi rst contact with Europeans when, as a boy of about
six, he saw “the British ship HMS Discovery, captained by George Van-
couver, anchored off Bainbridge Island on May 20, 1792.”50 Although he
grew up in a traditional manner, engaging in a successful vision quest,
gaining Thunder power, taking two wives, and participating in a num-
ber of military actions, one of which we have already noted, after the
death of one of his sons in battle, he “sought and received baptism into
the Catholic Church, taking the prophet Noah as his spiritual interces-
sor . . . and he appears as Noe Siattle in the Oblate Sacramental Register.
His children were also baptized . . . and his conversion marked the end
of his fi ghting days and his emergence as a leader seeking cooperation
with incoming American settlers.”51 Carole Seeman has noted of Isaac
Stevens that “in spite of [his] professed objectives to incorporate the na-
tives into white society, he was not much committed to this ideal. He
and his followers found themselves, however, confronted with native
people who approved of the idea.”52 Sealth seems to have been one of
these people.
Ruth Shelton noted that the treaty at Mukilteo was known as the
“hooraying” treaty and that what those who cheered were approving
was indeed the fact that the Indians “will be taught to become like white
people.” She also makes clear, however, that, unlike Sealth, “there were
lots of them [Indians at Mukilteo], there were more of them who said
‘No’ to the selling of their lands.” One of these was the Nisqually leader,
Leschi. His X mark had appeared on the earlier Medicine Creek Treaty,
202 american indian quarterly/spring 2011/vol. 35, no. 2
but there is good reason to believe that it was forged. He was a leader
in the Puget Sound War of 1855–56, “planning to sneak up on the white
people at Seattle in order to kill them.” But Sealth had sent a Duwamish
man named Kelly to eavesdrop on Leschi’s deliberations. Upon Kelly’s
return, Sealth informed the whites at Seattle of Leschi’s plans, allowing
them to escape by boat. Ruth Shelton states that “this is why (Chief Se-
attle) was so highly honored by the white people at Seattle because he
saved them from being killed.” As she understands it, “it was not because
he was a leader that you folks know about him. He was greatly honored
by the white people at Seattle for saving their lives.”53
Thus it seems clear that Sealth was a “progressive” rather than a “con-
servative” leader as these terms have been applied to prominent Native
persons who, for a variety of reasons, made the decision to accommo-
date the aggressive whites or even to try to become like them rather than
to offer obdurate resistance, as Leschi did. It is important here not to
equate “progressive” with terms like bad, traitorous, or inauthentic, tak-
ing “conservative” or “traditional” to mean good or authentic. The situ-
ation historically is far too complicated for such reductively facile judg-
ments. Further, when we consider the testimony of such very different
writers as the anthropologist Jay Miller, the Acoma poet Simon Ortiz,
and the Muscogee critic and novelist Craig Womack (among others), to
the effect that “traditional” broadly means “‘anything that supports the
continuity of the community,’” Sealth’s “progressivism” may be seen as
entirely a “traditional” and even a “nationalistic” response to the condi-
tions facing his people.54 I say this recognizing fully that Sealth’s elegiac
farewell ultimately sees no response available to his people that will per-
mit the “continuity of the community”—at least, as we will see further,
as a living community of Indians. This fatalism, as I have tried to show,
may in itself be the consequence of a modern twist to tradition, Sealth’s
recognition of what I have called the Second Coming of the Changer.
And of course Dr. Smith’s own fatalism in regard to both the Indians’
future and the future of his own “old Seattle” class may have helped to
accentuate Sealth’s. Nonetheless, the speech’s detailed cultural and his-
torical contexts strongly suggest, I will repeat, that a great deal of it does
indeed come from Sealth.
Having accepted the practical reasonableness of the white man’s
proposition to his people, Sealth next offers the hope that “hostilities
between the red man and his pale face brothers may never return,” be-
Krupat: Chief Seattle’s Speech Revisited 203
cause the Indians “would have everything to lose and nothing to gain.”
Continuing the language of fathers and children that had become com-
mon in treaty negotiations since the eighteenth century, he notes that if
the Indians accept Stevens’s offer, “the great father Washington” will “be
our father as well as yours.” But Sealth then makes a quite extraordinary
turn with the statement to Stevens that “your God loves your people
and hates mine. . . . [H]e makes your people wax strong every day, and
soon they will fi ll the land; while our people are ebbing away like a fast-
receding tide, that will never fl ow again.” If this is so, “how,” asks Sealth,
“can your father become our father and bring us prosperity and awaken
in us dreams of returning greatness?” “No,” says Sealth, “we are two dis-
tinct races and must ever remain so. There is little in common between
us.”55 He then proceeds to illustrate the difference between the Indians
and the European Americans with reference to relations between the
dead and the living.
v
Sealth remarks that while the “ashes of our ancestors are sacred and
their fi nal resting place is hallowed ground,” the whites, to the contrary,
“wander away from the tombs of [their] fathers seemingly without re-
gret.”56 Denise Low has observed that “the central purpose of [Sealth’s]
speech was the preliminary negotiations for rights of Suquamish and
Duwamish people to visit their burial grounds, a prerequisite for prac-
tice of their religion.”57 Or, as Sealth himself put it to Stevens in Dr.
Smith’s publication, “We will ponder your proposition. . . . But should
we accept it, I here and now make this the fi rst condition: That we will
not be denied the privilege without molestation, of visiting at will the
graves of our ancestors and friends.”58 This “fi rst condition” comes
rather late in Dr. Smith’s version of the speech, but it is, as Low has ob-
served, central nonetheless—all the more so in that Governor Stevens’s
meetings with the Puget Sound people that “forced the series of treaties
‘legally’ ceding land from Idaho to the Pacifi c . . . were held in January,
at the time of the year natives devoted to their religious ceremonies.”59
These ceremonies included potlatch ceremonies that might or might
not have reference to the dead; they did, however, have much to do with
what Jay Miller has called the “shamanic odyssey” to the land of the
dead.60 Miller writes that “the dead remain more signifi cant in the lives
204 american indian quarterly/spring 2011/vol. 35, no. 2
of Lushootseed people than anything else except the spirits. For people living in close and caring communities, the bonds of the fl esh, like those of the spirit, continued far beyond the grave.” Indeed, “most spirits . . . visited their human partner in the winter months. During these long rainy winters, people gathered to welcome back their spirits by singing and dancing.”61 In view of the season and the context of its production, this sense of the relation between the living and the dead may go a long way toward explaining the conclusion of Sealth’s speech.
The whites’ relation to the dead, Sealth says, is very different from his
people’s. “Your dead,” he says,
cease to love you and the homes of their nativity, as soon as they
pass the portals of the tomb. They wander far off beyond the stars,
are soon forgotten and never return. Our dead never forget the
beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its winding
rivers, its great mountains and its sequestered vales, and they ever
yearn in tenderest affection over the lonely hearted living and of-
ten return to visit and comfort them.62
These complex relations between the dead and the living, Sealth in-sists, must continue, but their continuance, as he expresses it, will still not be suffi cient to secure the people’s survivance, neither as Indians nor even as some facsimile of white people. “The Indian’s night prom-ises to be dark,” Sealth is represented as saying. “A few more moons, a few more winters and not one of all the mighty hosts that once fi lled this broad land . . . will remain to weep over the tombs of a people once as powerful and as hopeful as your own.”63 In this manner he works to-ward his grand but grim conclusion. I will quote him at some length:
And when the last red man shall have perished from the earth and
his memory among white men shall have become a myth, these
shores shall swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when
your children’s children shall think themselves alone in the fi eld,
the store, the shop, upon the highway or in the silence of the woods
they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to
solitude. At night, when the streets of your cities and villages shall
be silent, and you think them deserted, they will throng with the
returning hosts that once fi lled 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 altogether powerless.64
Krupat: Chief Seattle’s Speech Revisited 205
The warning here is not strictly rhetorical. The dead, after all, might
kill the living so that the dead would be less lonely in the land of the
dead. Also dangerous to the living was the power of the dead to cause
illness by stealing a person’s soul or some portion of it. A cure could be
achieved by what Jay Miller, as I’ve noted, has called the “shamanic od-
yssey,” or “soul-recovery” ceremony, in which shamans or other persons
of power prepared for and undertook, during the rainy winter months,
a trip to the land of the dead to bring back the missing soul and re-
store it to the person from whom it had been taken, thus curing his or
her illness.65 Sealth would have been quite certain that the whites did
not have the capacity to undertake such cures, so that the power of the
dead could indeed be very great among them and very dangerous to
them. (But he also would, of course, have been aware of Catholic views
of these matters.) If Dr. Smith’s version of the speech, as I have come to
believe, does represent much that Sealth said, then Sealth’s farewell does
not articulate a vision of the continued life of the people, except as a na-
tion of powerful ghosts. This would be a stance that differs considerably
from most Native American elegiac expression.
Although Sealth may at some time have “progressively” believed that
his people could survive by becoming like the whites, although he may
have spoken to that effect and drawn “hoorays” by many at Mukilteo,
his speech as published by Dr. Smith strongly expresses an understand-
ing that there was nothing he and his people could do to ensure their
continuance and survivance.66 Although Dr. Smith’s own pessimism may
have played a part in all this, the rich and specifi c cultural detail must
surely have come from Sealth. He sadly concludes that apart from their
power to visit their homelands after death and engage in detrimental
relations to the living, his people will not live.
notes
1. David Murray, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in
North American Indian Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 35.
2. Murray, Forked Tongues, 35, 36, emphasis added; Black Hawk, Black Hawk:
An Autobiography, ed. Donald Jackson (1955; Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1964). Murray’s full sentence refers not only to surrender speeches but
also to “protest speeches by Indians.” He suggests that the “often devastating
criticism of white actions” contained in many of the latter is part of an “already
206 american indian quarterly/spring 2011/vol. 35, no. 2
overdetermined” context in which “what [the Indians] are saying is actually less
important than the fact and manner of their saying it” (emphasis added, 36).
3. With some important exceptions. As John M. Coward has shown, between
1820 and 1890 naturally “wild” Indians could be presented as analogous to so-
cially “wild” groups. For the New York Herald, a staunchly Democratic paper,
“Indians, African Americans, radicals, Catholics, foreigners, and lower-class
whites were all connected in [the paper’s] rehash of Custer and the Little Big-
horn, so much so that Sitting Bull’s persona became a part of the paper’s ongo-
ing explanation of election year issues!” (The Newspaper Indian: Native Amer-
ican Identity in the Press, 1820–90 [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999],
166). Coward properly credits Richard Slotkin’s The Fatal Environment for ear-
lier work on these connections.
4. The progress of civilization is narrated as a comic story that implies a
corollary tragic narrative from the perspective of the Indians. “We” rise to the
heights of civilization, while “they” must tragically fall, the victims of their own
“savagery.” See my “Representing Indians in American Literature, 1820–1870,” in
All that Remains: Varieties of Indigenous Expression (Lincoln: University of Ne-
braska Press, 2009), 27–71 for a fuller account.
5. The Illinois Galenian for September 5, 1832, paraphrases a speech Black
Hawk is said to have made to Winnebago agent Gen. Joseph Street, to whom
he formally had surrendered two days earlier. A full text of the speech fi rst ap-
pears in the second edition of Samuel Drake’s Biography and history of the In-
dians of North America from its fi rst discovery (1834); Drake gives no source for
his text. The speech has been reprinted many times with no one of those who
have reprinted it giving any source other than Drake. There are two different
surrender speeches attributed to Cochise. Dr. Anderson Nelson Ellis heard Co-
chise speak in September 1871, but he did not publish that speech until 1913,
when it appeared under the title of “Recollections of an Interview with Coch-
ise,” in Kansas State Historical Society, Collections, vol. 13, 1913–14, 387–92. Henry
Stuart Turrill probably heard Cochise speak in March 1872, but he did not
publish that speech until 1907 under the title “A Vanished Race of Aboriginal
Founders.” Chief Joseph is said to have given a “farewell” address on his sur-
render to Gen. Nelson Miles at the end of the “Nez Perce War” in 1877. It has
been reprinted many times, but there are serious questions concerning its accu-
racy. See Haruo Aoki, “Chief Joseph’s Words,” in Idaho Yesterdays (Boise: Idaho
Historical Society, 1957), 16–21; and George Venn, “Chief Joseph’s ‘Surrender
Speech’ as a Literary Text,” Oregon English Journal 20 (1998): 69–73.
6. The spelling, Sealth, means to suggest the way the name would be pro-
nounced in Lushootseed, the central coast Salishan language of Sealth’s peo-
ple. The late Vi Hilbert, a Lushootseed elder and linguist, notes that a “phonetic
spelling that approximates the correct pronunciation is See-ahth, with the ac-
Krupat: Chief Seattle’s Speech Revisited 207
cent on the fi rst syllable” (“When Chief Seattle [Si AL] Spoke,” in A Time of
Gathering: Native Heritage in Washington State, ed. Robin K. Wright [Seattle:
Burke Museum/University of Washington Press, 1991], 259–66, quote at 259).
Old Man House “was the old potlatch house. . . . on the Indian reservation at
Suquamish, across from Point Agate on Bainbridge Island” (Clarence Bagley,
“Chief Seattle and Angeline,” Washington Historical Quarterly 22 [1931]: 243–75,
quote at 256; see also Wayne Suttles, “The Shed-Roof House,” in Wright, A Time
of Gathering, 212–22, quote at 219). Unlike the practice among the more north-
erly Tlingit people, for whom the potlatch functioned importantly to console
the clan that had suffered a death, potlatches among the Puget Sound tribes
could also be held to “transfer names to children, announce a daughter’s com-
ing-of-age” (Suttles, “The Shed-Roof House,” 219), or even to wipe out an em-
barrassment. Potlatch is a Chinook Jargon (the trade language of the northwest
coast) word originally from Nootka.
7. Compare Bagley: “[When] Seattle was twenty or twenty-two years old,
news reached the various tribes in this vicinity that a large number of mountain
or Upper Green and White Rivers Indians were preparing to make a raid upon
the saltwater tribes.” Sealth presented a plan for defense. He “was victorious
and . . . was chosen head chief of the six tribes” (“Chief Seattle and Angeline,”
246, 247). Frank Carlson identifi es these tribes as the Duwamish, Suquamish,
Samahmish, Skopahmish, Stakahmish, and Sktahhmish, although he some-
times gives different spellings for all of these tribal nations (Chief Sealth, Bul-
letin of the University of Washington, series 3, no. 2, 1903, preface, n.p. 11).
David Buerge writes that it was Sealth’s uncle Kitsap who was in charge “of Puget
Sound forces against the powerful Cowichans of Vancouver Island,” although
it was indeed Seattle who “succeeded in ambushing and destroying a party of
raiders coming down the Green River” (“Chief Seattle and Chief Joseph: From
Indians to Icons,” http://content.lib.washington.edu/aipnw/buerge2.html, 2).
Northwest Coast tribal Nations are very much concerned with rank and status.
They are not “egalitarian” in the way most Native nations are considered to be
in the American imagination.
8. Bagley’s 1931 reprinting of Sealth’s speech is generally said to be the fi rst to
have added this ending; Bagley gives no indication to the reader that these fi nal
words are his, not Sealth’s (see “Chief Seattle and Angeline”). Roberta Frye Watt,
who is rarely cited (e.g., Rudolph Kaiser, “Chief Seattle’s Speech[es]: American
Origins and European Reception,” in Recovering the Word: Essays on Native
American Literature, ed. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat [Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1987], 497–536, does not include her in his extensive bibli-
ography), in her Four Wagons West, published the same year as Bagley’s essay,
also has these words as the conclusion to her reprinting of Sealth’s speech (Four
Wagons West: The Story of Seattle [Portland, OR: Binfords and Mort, 1931], 182).
208 american indian quarterly/spring 2011/vol. 35, no. 2
It is possible that Watt’s book preceded the publication of Bagley’s essay, so she
may in fact have been the “fi rst” to introduce them. In 1932 John Rich also used
those thirteen words at the conclusion of his reprinting of the speech (Chief Se-
attle’s Unanswered Challenge [1932; Fairfi eld, WA: Ye Galleon Press, 1977], 41). It
is more than possible that these three Washington writers were in contact with
one another.
9. Kaiser, “Chief Seattle’s Speech(es),” 509, 513–15; David Buerge, “Seattle’s
King Arthur,” Seattle Weekly, July 17, 1991, 27.
10. Kaiser, “Chief Seattle’s Speech(es),” 530–32. Kaiser’s work is still the full-
est account of these matters. Appearing just before Kaiser’s work, “Thus Spoke
Chief Seattle: The Story of an Undocumented Speech,” Prologue Magazine 18
(1985): 58–65 by Jerry L. Clark of the National Archives and Records Admin-
istration also gives a detailed account of the speech. Denise Low’s essay, “Con-
temporary Reinvention of Chief Seattle: Variant Texts of Chief Seattle’s 1854
Speech,” American Indian Quarterly 19 (1995): 407–21, and Albert Furtwangler’s
Answering Chief Seattle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997) are also
useful.
11. Kaiser’s essay (“Chief Seattle’s Speech[es]”) prints and compares all four
versions. Albert Furtwangler writes that “there is only one surviving copy of the
[October 29, 1887, Seattle Sunday] Star, and it is a damaged sheet with missing
or half-legible lines in some places” (Answering Chief Seattle, 12). Furtwangler
gives the text “as it appears in the Star, with phrases in brackets from the reprint
in Grant’s History,” and I cite his version in my discussion. Sealth’s speech in
Grant appears on pp. 433–36.
12. Carole Seeman, “The Treaties of Puget Sound,” in Indians, Superinten-
dents, and Councils: Northwestern Indian Policy, 1850–1855, ed. Clifford Trafzer
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986), 19–36, quote at 24.
13. Roberta Frye Watt had written that “the second treaty arranged by Gov-
ernor Stevens—the Treaty of Point Elliott—was attended with great pomp and
ceremony. It was made in January, 21–3, 1855, at Mukilteo” (Four Wagons West,
183). Mukilteo, a name that occurs in the records with various spellings, was
the Native term for Point Elliott. Watt considers this “a spectacle of savage pag-
eantry” (Four Wagons West, 184). But as Seeman writes, “The effect of these trea-
ties was the decimation of the Northwest Indian tribes” (“The Treaties,” 19).
14. Vi Hilbert noted that “there is a record of two short speeches delivered by
[Sealth] at Mukilteo in 1855 on the occasion of the signing of the Treaty of Point
Elliot” (“When Chief Seattle [Si AL] Spoke,” 259). These exist in the National
Archives in Washington, DC, and they have been reprinted by Kaiser (“Chief
Seattle’s Speech[es]”) and Clark (“Thus Spoke Chief Seattle”), among others.
Hilbert presents one of these speeches “as remembered by a Suquamish elder,
Amelia Sneatlum,” who was recorded on tape in 1955 in Lushootseed with a lit-
Krupat: Chief Seattle’s Speech Revisited 209
eral translation (“When Chief Seattle [Si AL] Spoke,” 259, 261, 262). “Only two
other speeches by [Sealth] are known, a fragment of a speech recorded by B. F.
Shaw in 1850, and a lament . . . in May 1858 that the Treaty of Point Elliott had
not been ratifi ed by the U. S. Senate” (“When Chief Seattle [Si AL] Spoke,” 259).
Carlson (Chief Sealth, 21) and Kaiser (“Chief Seattle’s Speech[es],” 525) print the
latter.
15. Bagley, “Chief Seattle and Angeline,” 247; Clark, “Thus Spoke Chief Se-
attle,” 4.
16. Smith quoted in Furtwangler, Answering Chief Seattle, 11.
17. In Furtwangler, Answering Chief Seattle, 11.
18. Jerry Clark (“Thus Spoke Chief Seattle”) has him arriving in October, not
November.
19. Kaiser, “Chief Seattle’s Speech(es),” 504.
20. Watt, Four Wagons West, 178.
21. Hilbert, “When Chief Seattle (Si AL) Spoke,” 259; Buerge, “Seattle’s King
Arthur,” 28. Buerge estimates the total number of white residents at the time
to have been no more than 120, while the Puget Sound Indians in attendance
numbered some 1,200! (“Seattle’s King Arthur,” 28). Carlson writes that there
were “about two thousand three hundred Indians” assembled at Mukilteo in
January 1855 (Chief Sealth, 18).
22. Watt makes clear that Governor Stevens’s fi rst meeting with the Puget
Sound Indians—she dates it, as I have noted, in December 1854—was very
much intended to “prepare the way for the treaty making” (Four Wagons West,
178), and Buerge, who uses the January 1854 date, concurs (“Seattle’s King Ar-
thur,” 28). Main Street is presently blocked off from the waterfront, but it did
continue down to the water in Sealth’s time. Point Elliott is north of Seattle and
almost to Everett, on Puget Sound. Port Madison is also on Bainbridge Island,
northwest of Seattle. I am grateful to Duane Niatum for help with these matters.
23. Among these are Clark and Seeman, both of whom confl ate the brief re-
marks on record and sections of Dr. Smith’s published speech (“The Treaties,”
28ff.). Just as some of Sealth’s remarks from Point Elliott have been back-trans-
lated into Lushootseed by the Suquamish elder Amelia Sneatlum, so, too, have
“excerpts” from Dr. Smith’s version been “transcribed into Northern Lushoot-
seed” by Vi Hilbert.
24. Buerge, “Seattle’s King Arthur,” 28, 29.
25. Watt, Four Wagons West, 179; Rich, Chief Seattle’s Unanswered Challenge, 10.
26. Buerge, “Seattle’s King Arthur,” 29.
27. Smith in Furtwangler, Answering Chief Seattle, 10.
28. Compare an entry from the diary of William Fraser Tolmie, Hudson’s
Bay Company surgeon, in 1833: “Sialth was a brawny Suquamish with a Roman
countenance and black curley hair, the handsomest Indian I have ever seen”
210 american indian quarterly/spring 2011/vol. 35, no. 2
(quoted in Davie Buerge, Chief Seattle [Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 1992], n.p.).
In the only known photograph of Sealth (see fi g. 1), his hair appears to be more
nearly straight than “curley.” The photograph is by Joseph Thwaites, “circa 1865,”
although it has also several times been attributed to E. M. Sammis and dated
1864. Google Images has a number of variations on the Thwaites photograph,
all of which are inventions.
29. Frederic Grant, History of Seattle, Washington (New York: American Pub-
lishing and Engraving, 1891), 62.
30. Smith in Furtwangler, Answering Chief Seattle, 10.
31. Carlson, Chief Sealth, 7.
32. Jay Miller, Lushootseed Culture and the Shamanic Odyssey: An Anchored
Radiance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 31.
33. Compare Amelia Sneatlum: “Chief Seattle had Thunderbird power. . . .
Thunderbird was the power of Seattle. Thunderbird was the greatest power.
When Seattle would be angry at someone, he would shout angrily at him. The
one he was angry at would shake” (in Buerge, Chief Seattle, n.p.).
34. Smith in Furtwangler, Answering Chief Seattle, 11.
35. Since Sealth in Dr. Smith’s description (and that of some others) is about
six feet tall, and Isaac Stevens has consistently been described as of consider-
ably less than average height—perhaps not quite fi ve feet tall—the hand-on-
the-head business might produce a rather comic portrait—were it true (as I
think it is not).
36. Compare Thomas Jefferson: “I may challenge the whole orations of De-
mosthenes and Cicero, and of any more eminent orator, if Europe has furnished
more eminent, to produce a single passage, superior to the speech of Logan, a
Mingo chief, to Lord Dunmore” (“Chief Logan’s Speech from Notes on the State
of Virginia,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 7th ed., vol. A, ed.
Nina Baym, Wayne Franklin, Philip Gura, and Arnold Krupat [New York: W. W.
Norton, 2007], 444).
37. Thomas McElwain, “‘Then I Thought I Must Kill Too’: Logan’s Lament:
A Mingo Perspective,” in Native American Speakers of the Eastern Woodlands:
Selected Speeches and Critical Analyses, ed. Barbara Mann (Westport, CT: Green-
wood Press, 2001), 107–21, quote at 115.
38. W. C. Vanderwerth, who mistakenly dates Sealth’s speech as having been
delivered in 1853, writes that Dr. Smith had “mastered the Duwamish language
in about two years” (Indian Oratory: Famous Speeches by Noted Indian Chief-
tains [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971], 117), something earlier
attested to by Roberta Frye Watt, who wrote that Seattle “spoke in his native
Duwamish” and that “Dr. Smith had learned this tongue and was able to take
notes” (Four Wagons West, 179). The language Sealth spoke, as I have several
times noted, was coastal Salish or Lushootseed, formerly referred to as Puget
Krupat: Chief Seattle’s Speech Revisited 211
Salish. There is no “Duwamish language,” and I am certain that Dr. Smith did
not understand Lushootseed. There is, however, a considerable likelihood that
he had a fair grasp of Chinook Jargon.
39. David Buerge, “Seattle’s King Arthur,” 28; and Crisca Bierwert, “Remem-
bering Chief Seattle: Reversing Cultural Studies of a Vanishing Native Ameri-
can Author(s),” American Indian Quarterly 22 (1998): 280–304, quote at 284. We
know from Tulalip elder “Gram” Ruth Sehome Shelton that at Mukilteo it was
“a white man named Simmons . . . who was brought . . . by Governor Stevens
to interpret for him,” translating Stevens’s English into Chinook Jargon. It was
a man named John Taylor “who interpreted for the people (Native Americans),”
translating the “Chinook Jargon to Lushootseed” (Gram Ruth Sehome Shelton:
The Wisdom of a Tulalip Elder, transcribed by Vi Hilbert, translated by Vi Hilbert
and Jay Miller, recorded by Leon Metcalf [Seattle: Lushootseed Press, 1995], 19).
40. Bierwert, “Remembering Chief Seattle,” 284, emphasis added.
41. Buerge, “Seattle’s King Arthur,” 28, 29, emphasis added.
42. Hilbert, “When Chief Seattle (Si AL) Spoke,” 262, emphasis added.
43. This is not to say that it provides a close or literal translation. Dr. Smith
has Sealth begin, for example, by saying: “Yond[er] sky that has wep[t] tears
of compassion on our fathers for centuries untold, and which, to us, looks
et[erna]l, may change” (in Furtwangler, Answering Chief Seattle, 12). Rather
than “yonder,” I suspect Sealth simply said, “The sky.” “[T]ears of compassion”
is an abstraction unlikely to have an equivalent in an oral performance. Further
along, Sealth says, “When our young men grow angry at some real or imaginary
wrong, and disfi gure their faces with black, their hearts, also, are disfi gured and
turn black.” Black was the face paint for war; red was for more peaceful endeav-
ors. But it is unlikely Sealth would have described either color as “disfi guring”—
although speaking for peace, as he now does, black face paint would not please
him. There are many other places in the speech where Dr. Smith’s language
probably does not very literally reproduce Sealth’s actual words, and although,
as I have said, I have come to believe that Dr. Smith’s rendition is substantially
based on things Sealth may well have said on the two occasions noted, it is im-
possible to be certain exactly what is Sealth’s and what is Dr. Smith’s.
44. Such a collation might explain the rather loose structure of Sealth’s
lengthy speech. But this looseness of structure may also serve as evidence of a
certain faithfulness in Dr. Smith’s reconstruction of the speech. Toby Langen,
for example, has noted that “recursive structures of discourse” that operate in
Lushootseed narrative—“conversations that repeatedly leave and return to a
topic”—may also “operate as a successful process for consensus decision-mak-
ing” (Toby Langen and Marya Moses, “Reading Martha Lamont’s Crow Story
Today,” in Native American Oral Traditions: Collaboration and Interpretation, ed.
Larry Evers and Barre Toelken [Logan: University of Utah Press, 2001], 92–129,
212 american indian quarterly/spring 2011/vol. 35, no. 2
quotes at 124, 123). Although Langen’s Tulalip Lushootseed-speaking consultant,
Marya Moses, felt strongly that “repetition” and “business” did not go together,
they may well have done that “recursively” in Chief Sealth’s speech. Ruth Shel-
ton’s narrative (Gram Ruth Sehome Shelton), while not concerned with decision
making, most certainly “repeatedly leave[s] and return[s] to a topic” (Langen
and Moses, “Reading,” 123).
45. In Furtwangler, Answering Chief Seattle, 13. Sealth’s language here uncan-
nily reproduces Chief Justice Roger Taney’s decision in the Dred Scott case of
1857, for example, that blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound
to respect.” Taney’s opinion was delivered after Sealth spoke but well before
Smith’s publication of his speech.
46. Compare Marino: “A believer in Manifest Destiny and a strong propo-
nent of westward expansion . . . Governor Stevens regarded the tribes under his
jurisdiction as an impediment to civilization” (“History of Western Washington
since 1846,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 7, ed. Wayne Suttles
[Washington, DC: US Government Printing Offi ce, 1990], 169–85, quote at 169).
47. Shelton, Gram Ruth Sehome Shelton, 55.
48. Wayne Suttles and Barbara Lane, “Southern Coast Salish,” in Suttles,
Handbook, 7:485–502, quote at 496.
49. Crisca Bierwert, Brushed by Cedar, Living by the River: Coast Salish Fig-
ures of Power (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 63.
50. Buerge, “Chief Seattle and Chief Joseph.” Roberta Frye Watt speaks of
Sealth as “among the white people whom he loved,” and she ascribes this “love”
to Sealth’s having, as a boy of six, “gazed with wonder upon Captain Vancou-
ver’s great ‘bird-ship,’ the Discovery,” and then being shown “kindness” by Van-
couver and his men (Four Wagons West, 178). Watt’s account of these matters
is paternalistic, “savagist,” and from our current perspectives quite thoroughly
obnoxious (as is that of John Rich). It would nonetheless be unwise, I think, to
reject out of hand everything she (and he) says.
51. Buerge, “Chief Seattle and Chief Joseph.”
52. Seeman, “The Treaties,” 26.
53. Shelton, Gram Ruth Sehome Shelton, 17, 22, 26ff., 20, 19, 28, 29. For further
information on Leschi, his armed resistance, and his execution in 1858, see the
Nisqually historian Cecilia Svinth Carpenter, Tears of Internment: The Indian
History of Fox Island and the Puget Sound Indian War (Tacoma, WA: Tahoma
Research Service, 1996), and the early pioneer Ezra Meeker, Pioneer Reminis-
cences of Puget Sound and the Tragedy of Leschi (Seattle: Lowman and Hanford,
1905).
54. Miller, Lushootseed Culture, 1. Compare Craig Womack: “I wish to posit
an alternative defi nition of traditionalism as anything that is useful to Indian
people in retaining their values and worldviews, no matter how much it devi-
Krupat: Chief Seattle’s Speech Revisited 213
ates from what people did one or two hundred years ago” (Red on Red: Na-
tive American Literary Separatism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999], 42). See also Simon Ortiz: “In every case where European culture was cast
upon Indian people . . . there was similar creative response and development, . . .
a nationalistic impulse to make use of foreign ritual, ideas, and material in their
own—Indian—sense” (“Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Au-
thenticity in Nationalism,” in American Indian Literary Nationalism, ed. Jace
Weaver, Craig Womack, and Robert Warrior [1981; Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 2006], 253–60, quote at 254). There is, however, a tipping
point: once “anything” “deviates” too greatly “from what people did one hun-
dred or two hundred years ago,” we are going to need a term other than “tradi-
tional” to describe it. In the same way, Native people can indeed “make use of
foreign ritual, ideas, and material” to fortify their Indian sense of themselves:
but only up to a point, beyond which it’s not clear how best to describe them.
55. In Furtwangler, Answering Chief Seattle, 14.
56. “Ashes” is probably not a word Sealth would have used in that his people
did not cremate the dead. I’d guess he said something like their “remains”—but
his Catholicism may indeed have caused him to use a word like “ashes.” From
a traditional Lushootseed perspective, the notion that the remains of the dead
were “sacred” or that their resting place “is hallowed ground” is unlikely. But,
again, Sealth was a Catholic convert at this point in time, and he may well have
spoken of ashes.
57. Low, “Contemporary Reinvention,” 408.
58. Furtwangler, Answering Chief Seattle, 16.
59. Miller, Lushootseed Culture, 42.
60. Miller has written at great length about this ceremony, although his use
of the term “odyssey” introduces an alien cultural perspective. Suttles and Lane
simply refer to the “soul-recovery ceremony” and make the point that it was per-
formed “often by shamans but not necessarily so” (“Southern Coast Salish,” 498).
61. Miller, Lushootseed Culture, 36, 31.
62. In Furtwangler, Answering Chief Seattle, 15. Watt’s 1931 reprinting of
Sealth’s speech makes some unacknowledged additions to Dr. Smith’s origi-
nal at this point. Watt adds to what I have quoted that the dead also love their
homelands’ “verdant lined lakes and bays”; as for their yearning for the living,
she has them “often return from the Happy Hunting Ground to visit, guide, con-
sole, and comfort” them (Four Wagons West, 181, emphasis added). She seems
unaware of the fact that these amiable revenants might often kill their descen-
dants because the dead were lonely in the land of the dead and wished for the
company of the living. See Jay Miller, Shamanic Odyssey: The Lushootseed Sal-
ish Journey to the Land of the Dead (Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press, 1988), and
Miller, Lushootseed Culture.
214 american indian quarterly/spring 2011/vol. 35, no. 2
63. In Furtwangler, Answering Chief Seattle, 16.
64. In Furtwangler, Answering Chief Seattle, 17.
65. Miller, Shamanic Odyssey; Miller, Lushootseed Culture. For a description
of this ceremony, see Suttles and Lane, “Southern Coast Salish,” 498.
66. Continuance and survivance are terms used in several texts by Gerald
Vizenor as a set of values instantiated to contest the West’s commitment to
the values of progress and dominance. For Vizenor’s most recent thoughts on
these matters, see his introduction, “Esthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory
and Practice,” in Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, ed. Gerald Vizenor
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1–23. A fuller account of these
matters appears in my essay, “‘That the People Might Live’: Toward a Theory
of Native American Elegiac Expression,” in The Oxford Handbook of Elegy, ed.
Karen Weisman (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). A book-
length study is in progress. The quoted phrase is the title of a book published by
Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native
American Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).