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Chief Seattle Speaks — Or Does He?
It isn’t what the Chief had in mind,
we’re sure, but over the years he’s acquired a
couple of ghost writers (in the sky?).
The gorgeous environmental speech that
is everywhere attributed to the nineteenth-century tribal
leader was, in fact, written by screenwriter Ted Perry in
1971 for a film on ecology. And Perry based his script on
the work of one Henry Smith who probably made up a good bit
of it.
Shocked? So were we. We published the
full text of the speech, which is seldom seen, as the back
cover of the Giraffe Gazette a couple of years ago. Then John
De Graaf, the filmmaker who wrote and produced the public
television documentary on the Giraffe Project, called and
said, “Guess what?” He’d learned the truth
while working on a documentary about Chief Seattle’s
people — what remains of them. Paula Wissel of KPLU
public radio in Tacoma did a report for NPR’s Morning
Edition that told the nation the real story.
In December 1854 Chief Seattle made an
impassioned speech in his own language, Duwamish. He and his
people were meeting with the Territorial Governor, who was
pressing them to sign away their lands in exchange for protection
on a reservation.
Dr. Henry Smith was present and took notes,
which he wrote up 33 years later and sent to the Seattle Sunday
Star. Dr. Smith had been in the area only a year when he made
those notes and one suspects his Duwamish might have been
a little spotty. He was also known to be a poet in his non-medical
hours; the Duwamish were plain, unflowery speakers, so the
one eyewitness account of the speech is highly suspect.
Ted Perry heard Smith’s account
read at an Earth Day gathering in 1970, when he was planning
a film on the environment. He decided he would write a soundtrack
in which a fictitious Native American called for environmental
responsibility.
Perry told us that he’d mentioned
Chief Seattle as his inspiration for the script when he turned
it over to the producer. The script also mentioned the Chief
by name, which Perry sees in retrospect as a “terrible
idea, although at the time it seemed innocent enough. If I
had been writing a play I wouldn’t think twice about
having a fictional Abraham Lincoln say things I wrote, expecting
that the audience could figure out from the ‘written
by Ted Perry’ that the words were not actually those
of Abraham Lincoln.” But when the film aired on ABC
in 1972, the producer had given Perry no “written by”
credit. When Perry protested; the producer said the words
sounded more authentic presented as Chief Seattle’s.
Since then, to his great embarassment,
Perry has seen the speech turn up in the work of Joseph Campbell
and Buckminster Fuller, in songs, oratorios, even on zoo cages.
“One time I had it read to me at church as the sermon
for the day.” Perry says that Giraffe John Seed got
the story right in his book Thinking Like a Mountain and that,
“for years I have been telling the truth about the text
whenever asked.” Still, he describes himself as cringing
at his role in the misattribution.
But when you think about it, the producer
was right. How many of us would have put an environmental
quote from a guy who teaches film at Middlebury College on
our refrigerators or office walls or magazine pages? But what
fine and true and beautiful words they are. It’s time
we thanked Mr. Perry. Here, for your posting, are his most
famous words:
“The earth does not belong to
us; we belong to the earth. All things are connected, like
the blood which unites one family. Mankind did not weave the
web of life. We are but one strand within it. Whatever we
do to the web, we do to ourselves.”—
Ted Perry
Site content © 1978-2004 Ann Medlock
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