Chief Seattle's Speech Revisited

Abstract

Chief Seattle's Speech Revisited Arnold Krupat (bio) 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 specific occasions, usually 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 century, as Murray writes, "dying Indians offered comfort within a different 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 autobiography of 1833, to Native American "heroes." Murray goes on to show how, after the American Revolution, "in an increasingly bourgeois society," 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 conflict of classes is largely overridden by the discourses of "scientific racism" and "manifest destiny."3 These discourses instantiate a national narrative of progress in the comic mode.4 "Noble" or not, the "savage," comically or, from his perspective, tragically, had to go. [End Page 192] 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 winter 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 chiefly 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 derives 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, Washington (1891), then reproduced in publications by Clarence Bagley and Roberta 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 subsequently rewritten and expanded by Ted Perry in the early seventies for a film 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 delivered 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 historian Carole Seeman...