Chief Seattle's Speech Revisited

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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.


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


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


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


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.


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


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


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,


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-


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


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


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


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-


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).


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-


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”


(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.


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.).


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


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,


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-


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.


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.




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).

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