Chief Seattle Quotes

By Peter Stekel

Among the Natives of the Pacific Northwest, perhaps none is as well known as Chief Seattle, who left the earth 130 years ago. Called Sealth by his native Suquamish tribe, the chief’s fame largely rests upon a speech made popular during the heady days of the 1970s. It includes such inspiring lines as: ‘Man did not weave the web of life -- he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."

As early as 1975, the authenticity of these words was questioned. Although Sealth was an eloquent speaker, could his famous words belong to someone else?

Until the 1970s, the story of Sealth (Chief Seattle) belonged to the city that bears his name. Then, with the environmental movement in full swing, the speech Sealth made to Governor Stevens in 1854 was resurrected into the consciousness of Americans. It is not difficult to find people who consider the speech to be on almost the same level as the Gospel. The modern versions of the speech, which has been called the embodiment of all environmental ideas, have references to things Sealth would have never seen or known about, such as trains, whippoorwills, and the slaughter of the buffalo (which occurred long after the tyee‘s death) are included. Comparisons between known versions of the text have turned up four main variants, each with its own phrasing, wording and sometimes contradictory content.

The first version of the speech has been traced to a transcription made by Dr. Henry Smith more than 30 years after the actual event. Smith’s is the original on which all others are based -- it appeared in the October 29, 1887, issue of the Seattle Sunday Star under the title "Scraps From A Diary." The article begins with a favorable description of Old Chief Seattle and segues into what is more than likely Dr. Smith’s poetic impression of what the tyee said, based upon notes Smith had made at the time. Smith concludes with the comment, The above is but a fragment of his speech, and lacks all the charm lent by the grace and earnestness of the sable old orator, and the occasion. Dr. Smith’s diary cannot be found, so it is impossible to know just how closely his notes followed what Sealth had to say. Moreover, Sealth was a prideful man, and though he embraced the white man’s commercial products, he refused to learn his ways or speak his language. Hence, it is safe to say that what Smith heard was a translation. It was probably made from Sealth’s Lushotseed language into the Chinook jargon and then into English, with each transliteration losing or embellishing something of the original.

In 1931, Clarence B. Bagley published an article and reproduced the Chief Seattle speech with his own additions. In 1932, John M. Rich published a booklet called Chief Seattle’s Unanswered Challenge, which follows the Smith text but with some minor changes. A 1971 version by W. C. Vanderworth in Indian Oratory: Famous Speeches by Noted Indian Chieftains is essentially the same as these two.

The third major revision of the speech was done in 1969 by poet William Arrowsmith, who translated from the Victorian English of Dr. Henry Smith an interpretation that retains the tyee‘s meaning, if not the wording and phrasing. A fourth version displayed at the 1974 Spokane Expo, a shorter "Letter to President Franklin Pierce," and many other variations at about that time have a familial resemblance to the Smith text but begin to adopt an ecological view. In Smith’s 1887 version, the natural world is the canvas upon which Chief Seattle’s words are drawn. In the 1970s, the environment is the entire painting.

The differences between the Smith version and the fourth version are striking, including the line, "Your God loves your people and hates mine," vs. "Our God is the same God." There are inspiring phrases, in the newer version, that the Smith transcription lacks: "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."

For many years this fourth variant has been the accepted version of Chief Seattle’s speech. So it came as some surprise when this last rendering was traced to a screenwriter, Ted Perry, for the 1972 movie Home, a production of the Southern Baptist Radio and Television Commission. Perry heard Arrowsmith read his 1969 version and with permission, used the text as the basis for a new, fictitious speech for a film on pollution and ecology. The film’s producers revised Perry’s script without his knowledge, removed his name from the film credits, sent off 18,000 posters with the speech to viewers who requested it, and glibly began the confusion we have today. Perry was not pleased.

Ted Perry is now a professor at Middlebury College in Vermont and has tried to set the record straight, but with little result. In a Newsweek article in 1992, Perry mused, Why are we so willing to accept a text like this if it’s attributed to a Native American, and not to a Caucasian? Over the years, he has been embarrassed by his role in putting words in the mouth of Chief Seattle. "I would never have allowed anyone to believe that it was anything but a fictitious item written by me," he has said. Yet, Perry has also been pleased that his words have served as a powerful inspiration for so many others. "Would that this stimulus had not come at the expense of more distancing and romanticizing the Native American," he adds.

The legend of Chief Seattle’s speech may never die. Undoubtedly there will be many who refuse to believe that such fine and noble words and sentiments could have been made by a non-Native during the 20th century -- and for a television show at that. To allow any version of the speech to pass away would be to deny the magic and power of the words and their meaning. If something is true, it shouldn’t matter who said it and when it was said as long as we recognize the source. What matters most is that the Chief Seattle Speech has something to teach us all: "So if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it as we have cared for it. We may be brothers after all."

Edwin W. Deming

Edwin W. Deming

Edwin W. Deming

Edwin W. Deming

When he was still an infant, Edwin Willard Deming's family moved from his birthplace in Ashland, Ohio, to western Illinois, an area that during those pre-and post-Civil War years retained a frontier character, and where roaming Winnebago Native Americans were sometimes neighbors. While still in his teens, Deming traveled to Indian territory in Oklahoma and sketched extensively. 

Determined to become a painter of Native Americans, he enrolled at the Art Students League, then spent a year at the Académie Julian in Paris (1884-85), studying under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre. Back in the United States, he worked the next two years painting cycloramas. 

In 1887 Deming first visited and painted the Apaches and Pueblos of the Southwest. His active career of painting and illustrating took him repeatedly to the lands of the Blackfoot, Crow, and Sioux, as well as to Arizona and New Mexico. 

After the turn of the century, Deming devoted more time to sculpture but also began work on a series of romantic murals of Native American life, which were subsequently installed in the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of the American Indian in New York.

Two Charles Loloma Rings

Indian Symbols Postcards

Healers

From the American Cancer Society website:

From the Native American perspective, medicine is more about healing the person than curing a disease. Traditional healers aim to “make whole” by restoring well-being and harmonious relationships with the community and the spirit of nature, which is sometimes called God or the Great Mystery. Native American healing is based on the belief that everyone and everything on earth is interconnected, and every person, animal, and plant has a spirit or essence. Even an object, such as a river or rock, and even the earth itself, may be considered to have this kind of spirit.

Native Americans traditionally believe that illness stems from spiritual problems. They also say that diseases are more likely to invade the body of a person who is imbalanced, has negative thinking, or lives an unhealthy lifestyle. Some Native American healers believe that inherited conditions, such as birth defects, are caused by the parents’ immoral lifestyles and are not easily treated. Others believe that such conditions reflect a touch from the Creator and may consider them a kind of gift. Native American healing practices aim to find and restore balance and wholeness in a person to restore one to a healthy and spiritually pure state.

Some people believe Native American medicine can help cure physical diseases, injuries, and emotional problems. Some healers claim to have cured conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, thyroid problems, skin rashes, asthma, and cancer. Available scientific studies do not support these claims.

There are many types of Native American healing practices, and they are promoted to help with a variety of ills. Some of the most common aspects of Native American healing include the use of herbal remedies, purifying rituals, shamanism, and symbolic healing rituals to treat illnesses of both the body and spirit. Herbal remedies are used to treat many physical conditions. Practitioners use purifying rituals to cleanse the body and prepare the person for healing. Shamanism is based on the idea that spirits cause illness, and a Native American healer called a shaman focuses on using spiritual healing powers to treat people. Symbolic healing rituals, which can involve family and friends of the sick person, are used to invoke the spirits to help heal the sick person.

Healers may include shamans, herbalists, spiritual healers, and medicine men or women. Many Native Americans see their healers for spiritual reasons, such as to seek guidance, truth, balance, reassurance, and spiritual well-being, while still using conventional medicine to deal with “white man’s illness.” However, they believe that the spirit is an inseparable element of healing.

Chase These Blues Away: Alaskan Totem Poles

From yee Wiki:

Totem poles are monumental sculptures carved from large trees, mostly Western Red Cedar, by cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. The word totem is derived from the Algonquian (most likely Ojibwe) word odoodem [oˈtuːtɛm], "his kinship group".

Totem poles are typically carved from the trunks of Thuja plicata trees (popularly called "giant cedar" or "western red cedar"), which decay eventually in the rainforest environment of the Northwest Coast. Thus, few examples of poles carved before 1900 exist. Noteworthy examples include those at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria and the Museum of Anthropology at UBC in Vancouver, dating as far back as 1880. While 18th-century accounts of European explorers along the coast indicate that poles existed prior to 1800, they were smaller and fewer in number than in subsequent decades.

The Maritime Fur Trade gave rise to a tremendous accumulation of wealth among the coastal peoples, and much of this wealth was spent and distributed in lavish potlatches frequently associated with the construction and erection of totem poles. Poles were commissioned by many wealthy leaders to represent their social status and the importance of their families and clans. By the 19th century, certain Christian missionaries reviled the totem pole as an object of heathen worship; they urged converts to cease production and destroy existing poles.

Totem poles were never objects of worship. Very early European explorers thought they were worshipped, but later explorers such as Jean-François de La Pérouse noted that totem poles were never treated reverently; they seemed only occasionally to generate allusions or illustrate stories, and were usually left to rot in place when people abandoned a village. The association with "idol worship" was an idea from local Christian missionaries of the 19th century, who considered their association with Shamanism as an occult practice.

The meanings of the designs on totem poles are as varied as the cultures that make them. Totem poles may recount familiar legends, clan lineages, or notable events. Some poles celebrate cultural beliefs while others are mostly artistic. Certain types of totem poles are part of mortuary structures, and incorporate grave boxes with carved supporting poles, or recessed backs for grave boxes. Poles illustrate stories that commemorate historic persons, represent shamanic powers, or provide objects of public ridicule.

"Some of the figures on the poles constitute symbolic reminders of quarrels, murders, debts, and other unpleasant occurrences about which the Native Americans prefer to remain silent... The most widely known tales, like those of the exploits of Raven and of Kats who married the bear woman, are familiar to almost every native of the area. Carvings which symbolize these tales are sufficiently conventionalized to be readily recognizable even by persons whose lineage did not recount them as their own legendary history." (Reed 2003).

Larry Golsh Jewelry

An artist is a person who creates beauty for all the world. This perfectly describes Larry Golsh, Native America artist, jeweler, sculptor, and architectural designer, whose work has won international acclaim.  All of his jewelry is exclusively designed, entirely hand fabricated, crafted with the rich color of high-karat gold, silver, and rare stones.

Golsh is a nationally recognized contemporary Native American jeweler. He is best known for his tufa-cast jewelry and his use of gold in his Native American inspired designs. Golsh was born in Phoenix to Native American parents -- his father was a California Pala Mission Indian and his mother was Cherokee. He attended Arizona State University studying engineering, architecture, getting his degree in the art with an emphasis in sculpture. From 1968 to 1972 he apprenticed with architect Paolo Soleri. In 1972 he first learned silversmithing and spent the next 12 years working as a jeweler with French jeweler Pierre Touraine. He also became the first Native American to study at the Gemological Institute of America.

Allan Houser Art

Allan Capron Houser or Haozous (1914-1994) was a Chiricahua Apache sculptor, painter and book illustrator born in Oklahoma. He is one of the most renowned Native American painters and Modernist sculptors of the 20th century.

Houser's work can be found at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. and in numerous major museum collections throughout the North America, Europe, and Japan. Additionally, Houser's Offering of the Sacred Pipe is on display at United States Mission to the United Nations in New York City.

Born in 1914 to Sam and Blossom Haozous on the family farm near Apache, Oklahoma and Fort Sill, Native American artist Allan Houser was the first member of his family from the Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache tribe born outside of captivity since Geronimo’s 1886 surrender and the tribe's imprisonment by the U.S. government. The tribe had been led in battle by the legendary spiritual leader Geronimo, who would later rely on his grandnephew Sam Haozous, Allan’s father, to serve as his translator.

In 1934, Houser left Oklahoma at the age of 20 to study at Dorothy Dunn's Art Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Dunn's method encouraged working from personal memory, avoiding techniques of perspective or modeling, and stylization of Native iconography. For the latter, Houser made hundreds of drawings and canvasses in Santa Fe and was one of Dunn's top students, but he found the program too constricting.

While Houser's early career was marked by his drawings and paintings, it was for sculpture that he eventually became a world-renowned artist. Beginning in 1940 with simple wood carvings, Houser created his first monumental work in stone in 1949, the iconic piece Comrades in Mourning at the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. But it would be quite some time before he had the time and resources to produce his remarkable bronzes.

In 1985, Houser’s monumental bronze, Offering of the Sacred Pipe, was dedicated at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York City A year later, he made a bronze bust of Geronimo to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the surrender of the Chiricuhua Apaches. A cast of the bust was later presented to the National Portrait Gallery, where it remains in the permanent collection.