Showing posts with label Chief Seattle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chief Seattle. Show all posts

Monday, April 02, 2018

ATIT Rheated: from 2013 — Chief Seattle's disputed speech

By Pablo Fanque All This Is That National Affairs Editor/ 
Seattle/Pac. NW stringer

 
Some of Chief Seattle's speeches and quotes are controversial--not due to their content (but that too), but because scholars and others (mainly conservatives, and gun nuts[1], ) believe the Chief's speeches were enhanced in the 60's by environmentalists, and others for their own nefarious purposes. [2] Certainly no one thought much of them before the 60's, when the words suddenly chimed with the times.

Chief Seattle's Reply

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? That idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Every part of this earth is sacred to my 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 memory of the red man.

The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother 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.

So, when the Great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land, he asks much of us. The Great Chief sends word he will reserve us a place so that we can live comfortably to ourselves. He will be our father and we will be his children. So we will consideryour offer to buy our land. But it will not be easy. For this land is sacred to us.

This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors.

If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that the ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells us events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our cannoes, feed our children. If we sell our land, you must learn, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers, and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.

We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of the 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 father's grave behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care. His father's grave and his children's birthright are 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. I do not know. Our ways are different than yours.

The sight of your cities pains the eyes of the red man. But perhaps because the red man is a savage and does not understand. There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insects wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand.

The clatter only seems to insult the ears. And what is there to life if man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of the frogs around a pond at night ? I am red man and do not understand.

The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of a pond, and the smell of the wind itself, cleaned by a mid-day rain, or scented by the pinon pine.

The air is precious to the red man, for all things share the same breath - the beast, the tree, the man, they all share the same breath. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breaths. Like a man dying for many days is numb to the stench.

But if we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives 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 to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadows flowers. So we will consider your offer to buy our land. If we decide to accept, I'll make one condition, the white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers. I am a savage and I do not understand any other way.

I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train. I am a savage and I do not understand how the smoking iron horse can be more important than the buffalo that we kill only to stay alive.

What is man without the beasts ? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected.

You must teach the children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.

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. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. 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.

Even the white man, whose God walks and talks with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We shall see. One thing we know, which the white man may discover one day - our God is the same God. You may think you know that you own Him as you wish to own our land, but you cannot. He is the God of man, and His compassion is equal for the red man and the white. This earth is precious to him, and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its Creator.

The whites too shall pass, perhaps sooner than all other tribes. Contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste. But in your perishing you will shine brightly, fired by the strength of the God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man. That destiny is a mystery to us, for we do not understand when the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with the scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires. Where is the thicket ? Gone. Where is the eagle ? Gone. The end of living and beginning of survival.

-- Chief Sealth (Seattle)

____________________________


[1] I I go back and forth on the phrase gun nuts. My tendency is to include everyone who owns any weapon more powerful than a squirt gun or whipped cream dispenser.

[2] From the Wikipedia: Even the date and location of the speech has been disputed, but the most common version is that on March 11, 1854, Sealth gave a speech at a large outdoor gathering in Seattle. The meeting had been called by Governor Isaac Ingalls Stevens to discuss the surrender or sale of native land to white settlers. Doc Maynard introduced Stevens, who then briefly explained his mission, which was already well understood by all present.
Seattle then rose to speak. He rested his hand upon the head of the much smaller Stevens, and declaimed with great dignity for an extended period. No one alive today knows what he said; he spoke in the
Lushootseed language, and someone translated his words into Chinook jargon, and a third person translated that into English.
Some years later, Dr.
Henry A. Smith wrote down an English version of the speech, based on Smith's notes. It was a flowery text in which Sealth purportedly thanked the white people for their generosity, demanded that any treaty guarantee access to Native burial grounds, and made a contrast between the God of the white people and that of his own. Smith noted that he had recorded "...but a fragment of his [Sealth's] speech". Recent scholarship questions the authenticity of Smith's supposed translation.
In 1891, Frederick James Grant's History of Seattle, Washington reprinted Smith's version. In 1929, Clarence B. Bagley's History of King County, Washington reprinted Grant's version with some additions. In 1931, John M. Rich reprinted the Bagley version in Chief Seattle's Unanswered Challenge. In the 1960s, articles by
William Arrowsmith and the growth of environmentalism revived interest in Sealth's speech. Ted Perry introduced anachronistic material, such as shooting buffalo from trains, into a new version for a movie called Home, produced for the Southern Baptist Convention's Christian Radio and Television Commission.The movie sunk without a trace, but this newest and most fictional version is the most widely known. Albert Furtwangler analyzes the evolution of Sealth's speech in Answering Chief Seattle (1997).

The speech attributed to Sealth, as re-written by others, has been widely cited as "powerful, bittersweet plea for respect of Native American rights and environmental values", but there is little evidence that he actually spoke it. A similar controversy surrounds a purported 1855 letter from Sealth to President Franklin Pierce, which has never been located and, based on internal evidence, is considered by some historians as "an unhistorical artifact of someone's fertile literary imagination".
---o0o---

Saturday, February 05, 2011

Alien Lore No. 191 - Four UFO sightings in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood

By Jack Brummet
Paranormal Editor




On 7/30/1999 in Ballard,  an object was seen "near the Orion's belt and traveled in a southwesterly direction turning bright green and then faded out."  The story "Two See Erratic Moving Light in Morning Sky" was reported on UFOSNW.COM:

"I was standing on my deck and looking from the Ballard area (Seattle) near the Ballard Bridge looking over the top of Queen Ann Hill. It was just at dawn this morning 7/21/08 around 5:00AM. I saw a dot of light that moved with extreme speed from my vantage point coming from the Southwest. The light stopped on a dime from a high speed to a complete stop.

"I would have no way of determining how far it was, but it was very faint and appeared to be over the SeaTac airport area as I could see the lights of aircraft in a normal fashion landing or taking off almost as faint, but this was not an aircraft due to the extreme speed and movement patterns.

"The dot of light as it moved, continued to move at a very high rate of speed right to left at two or three points moving up and back to what appeared to be exactly where it originally arrived from the original approach. I noticed that it moved West to East, South of my position. It continued to dart rapidly in what appeared to be a fixed trajectory moving extremely fast between two reference points that I used which were tree tops in the Queen Ann area (a hill approximately at it's top elevation of around 500 feet).

"Again the object was certainly off at least 10 miles south of those reference points. I called my friend to observe it when I first noticed it and they had never seen a UFO before. The friend concurred that in their mind, it was not a plane, jet, helicopter, group of aircraft such as military jets, shooting star, meteor or any other object because of the fast darting between the points.

"The object over approximately 5 minutes would also vanish as if the lights went off and then either reappear at the same place or another place and it darted back to a similar position horizontal, and the 2 or 3 times it elevated it was almost as if it move the same distance upward from it horizontal point position as if to coordinate the distance once in place from the original west to east position.

"At the time I saw it move into it's position and would travel what appeared the same space left to right or (East to West) and up back down to the original line of entry left to right. About 5 minutes after it appeared it then moved quickly away at an upwardly 30 to 45 degree fashion towards the west from where it originally appeared. It then shot off into the upper levels of space at a very high rate of speed. I would suggest that each movement was not longer than 1/2 to 1/4 of a second for each movement to a complete stop."



MUFON reports that on July 4th, 1947, a "gentleman, who currently serves as a Research Archaeologist for the MUTUAL UFO NETWORK, describes a sighting of a strange disc he experienced in the Ballard area of Seattle. He is a professional artist, and has volunteered to submit an illustration of what the object looked like.  We will be posting more information, and several illustrations to the NUFORC homepage during the next several days."  No additional information is available.



There is a YouTube video related to another sighting, from 1966, in the Ballard neighborhood.





Disclose.tv has posted this video of yet another sighting, "UFOs Hunting Chemtrails Over Seattle WA June 2010," in my Ballard neighborhood: .
---o0o---

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Mount Rainier's three summits

Mount Rainier is 54 miles southeast of my house. This photo is not the more traditionally beautiful and rounded face we see on clear days in Seattle, but a great view of its three summits (Liberty Cap, Columbia Crest, and Point Success).


click to enlarge
---o0o---

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Excerpt from Chief Seattle's Oration On The 1854 Treaty

THE AUTHENTIC TEXT OF CHIEF SEATTLE'S TREATY ORATION 1854
by Chief Seattle a/k/a Sealth

It matters little where we pass the remnant of our days. They will not be many. The Indian's night promises to be dark. Not a single star of hope hovers above his horizon. Sad-voiced winds moan in the distance. Grim fate seems to be on the Red Man's trail, and wherever he will hear the approaching footsteps of his fell destroyer and prepare stolidly to meet his doom, as does the wounded doe that hears the approaching footsteps of the hunter.

A few more moons, a few more winters, and not one of the descendants of the mighty hosts that once moved over this broad land or lived in happy homes, protected by the Great Spirit, will remain to mourn over the graves of a people once more powerful and hopeful than yours. But why should I mourn at the untimely fate of my people? Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We will see.
---o0o---

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Mount Rainier: Beauty and terror


Source: Washington State Archives. State Library Photograph Collection. Photo by L.D. Lindsley - click to enlarge

I have two friends climbing Mount Rainier this weekend. I recently read the best book I'd ever read about it... The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier by Bruce Barcott. He focused on climbing, the native folklore about the mountain, the animals and insects, the history, including a detailed account various expeditions, and of the army plane crash in the 40s that left dozens of bodies buried in the Tacoma Glacier.

If you are fascinated by Mt. Rainier--and it's hard not to be in Seattle, when its massive presence looms over us every day ("the mountain's out today!")--this is a great book to start with. What makes Barcott's book so engrossing is that he digs in to all aspects of the mountain. And tells his personal story of climbing the mountain, and how when he finally summited, he didn't feel much at all. Except anxious. He does a great job describing both the danger and the beauty.


click to enlarge - Rainier from the northwest

The mountain is arguably the single most impressive mountain in the lower 48. It's only the 5th tallest mountain-- a few feet lower than California's Mt. Whitney (14,494'/4418m) and also a few feet shorter than some of the Sawatch Range peaks in Colorado. It is second to Shasta in total volume for a single peak, and only nearby Mount Baker has more glacial ice. In terms of it's high elevation, massive bulk, and 30 glaciers, Mt. Rainier reigns supreme. And it is only 40 miles to the sea level shores of Puget Sound. Because it is so big, and relatively alone, it dominates the landscape, and can be seen from Oregon to Canada.

Climbing Mt. Rainier, by its easiest route, requires you to ascend 9,000 vertical feet! This is actually the same distance as the climb from advance base camp in the Western Cwm to the top of Mt. Everest. Of course, the air is considerably thicker...
---o0o---

Monday, June 29, 2009

Chiet Seattle's speech, like it or not



By Pablo Fanque
All This Is That National Affairs Editor
And sometime Seattle/Pac. NW stringer

Some of Chief Seattle's speeches and quotes are controversial--not due to their content (but that too), but because scholars and others (mainly conservatives, and gun nuts[1], ) believe the Chief's speeches were enhanced in the 60's by environmentalists, and others for their own nefarious purposes. [2] Certainly no one thought much of them before the 60's, when the words suddenly chimed with the times.

Chief Seattle's Reply

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? That idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Every part of this earth is sacred to my 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 memory of the red man.

The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother 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.

So, when the Great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land, he asks much of us. The Great Chief sends word he will reserve us a place so that we can live comfortably to ourselves. He will be our father and we will be his children. So we will consider
your offer to buy our land. But it will not be easy. For this land is sacred to us.

This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors.

If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that the ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells us events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our cannoes, feed our children. If we sell our land, you must learn, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers, and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.

We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of the 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 father's grave behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care. His father's grave and his children's birthright are 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. I do not know. Our ways are different than yours.

The sight of your cities pains the eyes of the red man. But perhaps because the red man is a savage and does not understand. There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insects wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand.

The clatter only seems to insult the ears. And what is there to life if man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of the frogs around a pond at night ? I am red man and do not understand.

The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of a pond, and the smell of the wind itself, cleaned by a mid-day rain, or scented by the pinon pine.

The air is precious to the red man, for all things share the same breath - the beast, the tree, the man, they all share the same breath. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breaths. Like a man dying for many days is numb to the stench.

But if we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives 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 to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadows flowers. So we will consider your offer to buy our land. If we decide to accept, I'll make one condition, the white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers. I am a savage and I do not understand any other way.

I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train. I am a savage and I do not understand how the smoking iron horse can be more important than the buffalo that we kill only to stay alive.

What is man without the beasts ? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected.

You must teach the children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.

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. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. 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.

Even the white man, whose God walks and talks with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We shall see. One thing we know, which the white man may discover one day - our God is the same God. You may think you know that you own Him as you wish to own our land, but you cannot. He is the God of man, and His compassion is equal for the red man and the white. This earth is precious to him, and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its Creator.

The whites too shall pass, perhaps sooner than all other tribes. Contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste. But in your perishing you will shine brightly, fired by the strength of the God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man. That destiny is a mystery to us, for we do not understand when the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with the scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires. Where is the thicket ? Gone. Where is the eagle ? Gone. The end of living and beginning of survival.

-- Chief Sealth (Seattle)






[1] I go back and forth on the phrase gun nuts. My tendency is to include everyone who owns any weapon more powerful than a squirt gun or whipped cream dispenser.

[2] From the Wikipedia: Even the date and location of the speech has been disputed, but the most common version is that on March 11, 1854, Sealth gave a speech at a large outdoor gathering in Seattle. The meeting had been called by Governor Isaac Ingalls Stevens to discuss the surrender or sale of native land to white settlers. Doc Maynard introduced Stevens, who then briefly explained his mission, which was already well understood by all present.
Seattle then rose to speak. He rested his hand upon the head of the much smaller Stevens, and declaimed with great dignity for an extended period. No one alive today knows what he said; he spoke in the
Lushootseed language, and someone translated his words into Chinook jargon, and a third person translated that into English.
Some years later, Dr.
Henry A. Smith wrote down an English version of the speech, based on Smith's notes. It was a flowery text in which Sealth purportedly thanked the white people for their generosity, demanded that any treaty guarantee access to Native burial grounds, and made a contrast between the God of the white people and that of his own. Smith noted that he had recorded "...but a fragment of his [Sealth's] speech". Recent scholarship questions the authenticity of Smith's supposed translation.
In 1891, Frederick James Grant's History of Seattle, Washington reprinted Smith's version. In 1929, Clarence B. Bagley's History of King County, Washington reprinted Grant's version with some additions. In 1931, John M. Rich reprinted the Bagley version in Chief Seattle's Unanswered Challenge. In the 1960s, articles by
William Arrowsmith and the growth of environmentalism revived interest in Sealth's speech. Ted Perry introduced anachronistic material, such as shooting buffalo from trains, into a new version for a movie called Home, produced for the Southern Baptist Convention's Christian Radio and Television Commission.The movie sunk without a trace, but this newest and most fictional version is the most widely known. Albert Furtwangler analyzes the evolution of Sealth's speech in Answering Chief Seattle (1997).

The speech attributed to Sealth, as re-written by others, has been widely cited as "powerful, bittersweet plea for respect of Native American rights and environmental values", but there is little evidence that he actually spoke it. A similar controversy surrounds a purported 1855 letter from Sealth to President Franklin Pierce, which has never been located and, based on internal evidence, is considered by some historians as "an unhistorical artifact of someone's fertile literary imagination".
---o0o---