White Lenses

review by Kent Chadwick
Free Press staff writer

On March 11, 1854 the first governor of the Washington Territory, Isaac Stevens, held a emergency meeting in the two-year-old town of Seattle with leaders of the local tribes to address some recent murders of whites and of Indians. Stevens' subordinate, George Gibbs, took notes at that meeting, which are still existent. During the meeting Stevens spoke in English, the native leaders spoke in Lushootseed Salish, and they used the Chinook trading jargon as their intermediary language of translation. Stevens named Seattle, a native leader of the Suquamish and Duwamish tribes, as the principal "chief," even though Lushootseed did not have a word for "chief," and declared Seattle responsible for the "good behavior" of the tribes. Gibbs reports that "Seattle made a great speech, declaring his good disposition toward the whites." But Gibbs gives no further details about it.

Thirty-three years later, a white pioneer named Dr. Henry A. Smith wrote a series of reminiscences for a minor local paper, the Seattle Sunday Star, and in his tenth installment (October 29, 1887) he presented the text of a speech he attributed to Chief Seattle. Smith described himself as an eyewitness and noted that his account was drawn from "scraps from a diary."

Two of the many virtues of Answering Chief Seattle are that it includes the complete and original text of Smith's article, which most of us have never seen, and that it does not reprint any of the embellished or fanciful versions that have been paraded worldwide.

According to Smith, Chief Seattle responded to Stevens' offer to buy the tribes' lands with a series of rhetorical contrasts, which may be read either as elegiac or as ironic. The offer "appears generous," Seattle says, since "the red man no longer has rights" that need to be respected. "True it is, that revenge, with our young braves, is considered gain ... but old men ... and old women ... know better." "Our great father Washington" says "he will be our father and we will be his children. But can this ever be?" "Your God loves your people and hates mine ...." "Your religion was written on tables of stone ...." "Our religion is ... written in the hearts of our people." "Your dead cease to love you .... They wander far off beyond the stars ...." "Our dead never forget the beautiful world that gave them being."

The speech itself is powerful and profound. The Suquamish nation has accepted the speech as authentic. In the Suquamish Museum's beautiful exhibition catalog, The Eyes of Chief Seattle, the speech is described as a majestic tribute to an "eloquent leader and the will of his people to survive." In fact the speech's eloquence is the strongest argument for its having originated from someone other Smith, because the rest of his published work is so mediocre.

Yet as Furtwangler methodically analyzes Smith's text, both the setting and the text's historical validity become less and less certain. Smith's diary has never been discovered and there are no other corroborating records of an important speech by Chief Seattle beyond Gibbs' brief statement. Smith did not give a date for when Chief Seattle's speech took place, beyond saying that it occurred when "Governor Stevens first arrived in Seattle." Furtwangler notes, however, that neither the official records kept by Governor Stevens nor any other existing journal mentions a speech by Chief Seattle on Stevens' first visit in January 1854. On Stevens' emergency visit two months later there was a reported speech by Chief Seattle, but the topic of discussion was murder and not the discussion of forced land sales that Smith describes. The only other council meetings that Governor Stevens held were treaty discussions in late 1854 and early 1855, and neither of them took place in Seattle, the setting for Smith's account.

Smith's tenth installment of reminiscences is his only published record of native speech, and there is no evidence that he knew very much of the Chinook jargon, let alone Lushootseed. What Smith did publish was enthusiastic, yet forgettable, public poetry. His account of Chief Seattle's speech is very much in keeping with a European and American genre he knew well - last speeches by "a noble savage distinguished by his oratory against a backdrop of doom." Furtwangler concludes that "The speech of Chief Seattle must, by now, seem barely credible as an event in history."

Through the white lenses of U.S. Cavalry General Philip Henry Sheridan, "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead." And dead, or disappearing, Indians have been good for white writers too, as literary devices who could not offer rebuttals. Frederick James Grant published a substantially accurate version of Smith's text of the speech in his 1891 History of Seattle, Washington. But since then every writer or professor who sought to reprint the speech decided to improve it as well. The tangled and farcical tale of this speech's manipulation into a 1970s ecological manifesto and a 1990s picture book should remind us that written cultures have their own traditions of taking great liberties with stories.

The real issue Furtwangler addresses in Answering Chief Seattle, is not the speech's authenticity, but the fundamental challenge the speech poses - how can "Americans here and now ... develop an honest claim or feeling for a place in the Far West?" Furtwangler pursues this question thoughtfully and creatively. But he doesn't have the answer; the Suquamish nation does. Indians are not dead. Indian cultures have survived and are gaining strength. Before non-Indians can "develop an honest claim" they have to face the issue of justice. Answering Chief Seattle affirmatively, whatever it was he said, would mean politically supporting Indian treaty rights and discovering how to learn from another culture without consuming it.

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Contents this page were published in the March/April, 1998 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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