Chief Seattle: The Green's Ever Ready Bunny

Any of you who are as old as I am will remember the heady days of the environmental movement in the 1970s when this continent's first peoples where elevated to the exalted status of gaia gods. You might also remember the television advertisement for Ever Ready batteries featuring a battery powered bunny that marched along beating a drum who went on and on and on. Chief Seattle was dug up from his grave and anointed as an environmental counter culture hero in the late 1960s and early 1970s and his legacy appears to have continued on and on and on.

Dime a Dozen blogger, Robert Jago, has been documenting the interesting, if pathetic, mindset of most of the Green Party candidates in the upcoming election, who apparently still subscribe to gaia-like nirvana dreams of world-wide peace and harmony, including, of course, harmony with Mother Earth. I've been following with interest. (Start here and work your way up, if you want to catch the fun.)

Anyway, inspired by the results of Jago's research, I checked out several Green websites and found many, of course, that refer to our hero, Chief Seattle, whose complete so called speech that inspired the Greens' adoration, is cited here. As that website says, the Greens' elevation of the Chief to the status of gaia god has been thoroughly debunked by numerous historians and archivists. For the real story of Chief Seattle's famous quotations, read these examples first, and then read on:

University of Washington Library Digital Collections

"Seattle's fame came more slowly. His death went unreported in the city named after him, and it was not until 1870, when the Seattle Weekly Intelligencer reprinted an Overland Monthly article describing his funeral, that any local attention was paid to him. But it was not until Henry Smith worked the notes he claimed to have taken of Seattle's 1854 remarks into a speech laden with prophetic irony that was printed in the Seattle Sunday Star on Oct. 29, 1887, that his status as a folk icon approached that of Joseph. Smith's reconstruction of the speech, one of eleven essays celebrating pioneer achievements, appeared at a highly charged moment in Seattle's social history, and was intended as an admonition to the emergent professional elites that were displacing the older pioneer proprietors. Like Joseph, Seattle became an attractive and compelling symbol."

[---]

"Seattle's fame is such that many continue to attribute to him a speech presenting him as an environmental prophet, despite the fact that it has been shown to be entirely apocryphal, the innocent product of screen writer Ted Perry in 1970."

Thus Spoke Chief Seattle: The Story of An Undocumented Speech

"It is known that Seattle was non-literate, so yet another person must have written the alleged message— yet no source for the text of the 1855 letter has ever been discovered. Thus this widely-distributed document can safely be considered an unhistorical artifact of someone's fertile literary imagination."

[---]

"Does it really make any difference today whether the oration in question actually originated with Chief Seattle in 1855 or with Dr. Smith in 1887? Of course it matters, because this memorable statement loses its moral force and validity if it is the literary creation of a frontier physician rather than the thinking of an articulate and wise Indian leader. Noble thoughts based on a lie lose their nobility. The dubious and murky origins of Chief Seattle's alleged "Unanswered Challenge" renders it useless as supporting evidence."

No matter though. Like the Ever Ready Bunny, Chief Seattle continues to serve a purpose for gaia godess Lizzie May and her legions of gaia worshippers. He keeps on going and going and going. Here's a list of green folks who quote Chief Seattle's famous non-words on their websites:

Kingston Greens (scroll down)

Environment site forum

Milwaukee Greens (scroll down)

The Uruguayan Party of the Sun: Ecological, Federal and Non-Violent

Even the Green Party of Botswana!! (scroll down to section on ecology)

Al Gore, of course. Gotta keep those high priced speaking engagements rolling in.

And... Well, I'm sorry. Maybe the Ever Ready batteries have finally run out. This one has no mention of Chief Seattle, but I just can't resist. Here's a guy who is stark raving mad, as I'm sure many of the Green Party folks that responded to Robert Jago's request for information are. Dystopia Now!!

And here's an enterprising community that is actually exploiting the myth. The 16,000 souls living in the town of Aracta, on the left coast of America. Good for them. Long live the myth of the ecological Indian!!

Enjoy.

Of course, if you want a serious scholarly treatment of the way Indians really lived you might want to pick up a copy of any of the following books:

Killing the White Man's Indian by Fergus M Borewich (Anchor Books, 1996)

The Ecological Indian: Myth and History by Shepard Krech III (Norton, 1999)

Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade by Calvin Martin (University of California Press, 1987)

The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions & Government Policies by James A. Clifton, Editor (Transaction Publishers, 1990)

Oh, and did I mention, Chief Seattle owned slaves. A dirty little secret that might be as delicious as the Green Party leader showing up at a rally along side Hezbollah.