ABSTRACT
One of the most famous and controversial pieces of North American literature is the oration of Chief Seattle (Sealth) reportedly delivered in the 1850s in the Puget Sound area in present-day Washington state. That Seattle was a historical character and leader of Native American peoples is not in doubt. That settlers were moving into his territory and seeking to acquire rights to land in the 1850s is also not in doubt. The origins and content of the oration attributed to him have, however, been hotly debated. Opinion ranges from the piece being wholly the work of a settler-doctor named H. A. Smith in the 1880s to being largely inspired by the words of the chief despite problems of recording his speech, translating it, or reporting it from memory several decades later. Smith published his version of the oration in the Seattle Sunday Star on October 29, 1887, from recollections and notes of an oration that Seattle supposedly gave in December 1854. His notes have never been found, nor do governmental sources from the 1850s record the oration. There is apparently no other source or corroboration for the speech, and some have doubted that Seattle could or would have delivered such words, which since the 1880s have been rendered in many different forms. Most famously, a screenwriter in the early 1970s added the phrase “The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth” to Chief Seattle’s speech for a broadcast on environmental concerns of the day. The authority of a nineteenth-century Native American was thus appropriated to support twentieth-century ecological awareness and to make Seattle an environmental prophet.
