The Bizarre Story
On Earth Day it's worth re-posting a bizarre story.
There are few people who haven't come across the famous speech by 'Chief Seattle,' the one that has lines like:
How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us….The rivers are our brothers….The air is precious…for all things share the same breath and This we know. The earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family.
There is even a children's book based on his speech, Brother Eagle, Sister Sky.
However, ...
Unfortunately, although Si'ahl, who was a real 19th-century Dkhw'Duw'Absh leader in the Puget Sound area, did make a speech in 1854, he never uttered these inspiring sentiments.
As with Jesus, the first documents reporting Chief Seattle's words were written years after the event. There are anachronisms in the speech as we read it today, i.e. Chief Seattle could not have seen a train, a whippoorwill, or a buffalo slaughter, but they are all in his speech. Those impossibilities and the high-fallutin' prose were all the work of a Seattle newspaperman named Henry Smith.
Chief Si'ahl (also known as Seathle, Seathl, See-ahth, and Sealth) was a baptized and catechized Catholic, not a New Age evangelist, even though his speech has been called "The Fifth Gospel" by some environmentalists.
So where did all the beautifully expressed environmental consciousness come from?
Get this: from two people at the 1970 Earth Day rally in Austin on the Main Mall at the University of Texas.
One was the Classics Professor William Arrowsmith, translator of Euripides, the other a much less well-known character, Ted Perry, an aspiring scriptwriter just starting out as an untenured junior faculty member.
Arrowsmith has said that somewhere he'd come across the 1887 version of Chief Seattle's Speech and was impressed with its classical rhetorical flourishes. Arrowsmith updated the poetic style, removing many of the Victorian embellishments, as he put it, removing "the dense patina of 19th-century literary diction and syntax," something that he had been doing professionally for his entire career as a translator of Greek and Roman classics. He read the eloquently updated speech at the UT Earth Day rally 48 years ago in Austin.
Some of you were probably there at the rally in front of the Tower.
I wasn't.
But Ted Perry was in the crowd that day. After hearing Senator Ed Muskie speak, he listened to Prof. Arrowsmith read the new version of Chief Seattle's speech and thought it would be great to include in the script he was working on for an ecology awareness documentary film that the Southern Baptist Convention (of all groups! How times have changed!) was funding. The film was called "Home," and it came out a couple of years later.
Perry needed some filler for the script. So, he went to work on Arrowsmith's version, of Henry Smith's version of Chief Seattle's speech. Obviously, he was inspired, because Perry's words were the ones that went 'viral,' to use a contemporary anachronism.
Here is Perry's account of the process:
What should be called "Ted Perry's Speech" just doesn't have the Wow! Factor that "Chief Seattle's Speech" does, and the mistaken attribution stuck.
Someone must have transcribed Chief Seattle's speech from the 1972 video, and it was this version, Ted Perry's masterpiece, that began to circulate, taking on a whole life of its own. Even today, even though the true origin of the speech is known, environmental activists and earth-loving folks continue to find inspiration in passages like:
Great stuff, right?
Poor Ted Perry, now a film professor emeritus at Middlebury: he's spent the past 40 years protesting and attempting to clarify the misunderstanding. On the one hand, Perry is can be accused of being a forger and on the other, his pious fraud has become an "inconvenient truth."
In The Confirmation Bias Age we live in, don't be surprised when you find yourself believing a plausible, but nevertheless untrue, story, one you already believed before you ever heard it.
Such is Chief Seattle's Speech. If only it were real.
Happy Earth Day.
http://www.newsweek.com/just-too-good-be-true-198926
http://www.historynet.com/chief-seattle
Phoney, Photoshopped images of Chief Seattle that are common on the Internet:
There are few people who haven't come across the famous speech by 'Chief Seattle,' the one that has lines like:
How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us….The rivers are our brothers….The air is precious…for all things share the same breath and This we know. The earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family.
There is even a children's book based on his speech, Brother Eagle, Sister Sky.
However, ...
Unfortunately, although Si'ahl, who was a real 19th-century Dkhw'Duw'Absh leader in the Puget Sound area, did make a speech in 1854, he never uttered these inspiring sentiments.
 |
| Only extant authentic photo of Chief Seattle, in the Museum of History and Industry, Seattle, WA. |
As with Jesus, the first documents reporting Chief Seattle's words were written years after the event. There are anachronisms in the speech as we read it today, i.e. Chief Seattle could not have seen a train, a whippoorwill, or a buffalo slaughter, but they are all in his speech. Those impossibilities and the high-fallutin' prose were all the work of a Seattle newspaperman named Henry Smith.
Chief Si'ahl (also known as Seathle, Seathl, See-ahth, and Sealth) was a baptized and catechized Catholic, not a New Age evangelist, even though his speech has been called "The Fifth Gospel" by some environmentalists.
So where did all the beautifully expressed environmental consciousness come from?
Get this: from two people at the 1970 Earth Day rally in Austin on the Main Mall at the University of Texas.
One was the Classics Professor William Arrowsmith, translator of Euripides, the other a much less well-known character, Ted Perry, an aspiring scriptwriter just starting out as an untenured junior faculty member.
Arrowsmith has said that somewhere he'd come across the 1887 version of Chief Seattle's Speech and was impressed with its classical rhetorical flourishes. Arrowsmith updated the poetic style, removing many of the Victorian embellishments, as he put it, removing "the dense patina of 19th-century literary diction and syntax," something that he had been doing professionally for his entire career as a translator of Greek and Roman classics. He read the eloquently updated speech at the UT Earth Day rally 48 years ago in Austin.
Some of you were probably there at the rally in front of the Tower.
I wasn't.
But Ted Perry was in the crowd that day. After hearing Senator Ed Muskie speak, he listened to Prof. Arrowsmith read the new version of Chief Seattle's speech and thought it would be great to include in the script he was working on for an ecology awareness documentary film that the Southern Baptist Convention (of all groups! How times have changed!) was funding. The film was called "Home," and it came out a couple of years later.
Perry needed some filler for the script. So, he went to work on Arrowsmith's version, of Henry Smith's version of Chief Seattle's speech. Obviously, he was inspired, because Perry's words were the ones that went 'viral,' to use a contemporary anachronism.
Here is Perry's account of the process:
I asked Professor Arrowsmith... if I might use the idea as a basis for the script; he graciously said yes... So I wrote a speech which was a fiction. I would guess that there were several sentences which were paraphrases of sentences in Professor Arrowsmith's translation but the rest was mine. In passing the script along to the Baptists, I always made clear that the work was mine. And they, of course, knew the script was original; they would surely not have paid me, as they did, for a speech which I had merely retyped.
In presenting them with a script, however, I made the mistake of using Chief Seattle's name in the body of the text. I don't remember why this was done; my guess is that it was just a mistake on my part. In writing a fictional speech I should have used a fictitious name. In any case, when next I saw the script it was the narration for a film called Home aired on ABC or NBC-TV in 1972, I believe. I was surprised when the telecast was over, because there was no 'written by' credit on the film. I was more than surprised; I was angry. So I called up the producer and he told me that he thought the text might be more authentic if there were no 'written by' credit given.
What should be called "Ted Perry's Speech" just doesn't have the Wow! Factor that "Chief Seattle's Speech" does, and the mistaken attribution stuck.
Someone must have transcribed Chief Seattle's speech from the 1972 video, and it was this version, Ted Perry's masterpiece, that began to circulate, taking on a whole life of its own. Even today, even though the true origin of the speech is known, environmental activists and earth-loving folks continue to find inspiration in passages like:
Every part of this earth is sacred to our people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing, and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.
We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man–all belong to the same family...
We know that the White Man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his fathers' graves, and his children's birthright is forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert.
This shining water that moves in the streams and the rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you this land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father...
The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also received his last sigh. And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where even the white man can go and taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow's flowers.
Great stuff, right?
Poor Ted Perry, now a film professor emeritus at Middlebury: he's spent the past 40 years protesting and attempting to clarify the misunderstanding. On the one hand, Perry is can be accused of being a forger and on the other, his pious fraud has become an "inconvenient truth."
In The Confirmation Bias Age we live in, don't be surprised when you find yourself believing a plausible, but nevertheless untrue, story, one you already believed before you ever heard it.
Such is Chief Seattle's Speech. If only it were real.
Happy Earth Day.
http://www.newsweek.com/just-too-good-be-true-198926
http://www.historynet.com/chief-seattle
Phoney, Photoshopped images of Chief Seattle that are common on the Internet:
Of course, Chief Si'ahl didn't wear the feathered headdress typical of the Plains Native Americans!
But it looks right.
This is typical of non-Native Americans' ignorance of the huge variety of indigenous North American cultures. The speech and the images, perfect examples of cultural appropriation.
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