ABSTRACT
Chief Seattle's speech is as famous as it is problematic. Its appropriation by an environmental movement eager to claim a Native American voice has been carefully untangled and strongly criticized. Seattle's speech, one of the most powerful statements of mourning produced in nineteenth-century America, takes shape across a sharp cultural divide. If Seattle adopts the role of a dying man in the speech, he goes to his afterlife clutching the soul of the man who wants to take his place. Seattle's speech offers a very specific, and aggressive, message to his Indian audience. Yet he also shifts the register of ghosts from a strictly Salish context to a cross-cultural one. In Catherine L. Albanese's view, nature religion played a key role in the formation of a cross-cultural religious synthesis, as can be seen in the work of a number of Native American writers at the end of the nineteenth century.
