Write an essay about characterization of chief seattle speech
Answers
The speech or "letter" attributed to Chief Seattle has been widely cited as a "powerful, bittersweet plea for respect of Native American rights and environmental values".[7] But this document, which has achieved widespread fame thanks to its promotion in the environmental movement, is of doubtful authenticity.
The evolution of the text of Chief Seattle's speech, from a flowery Victorian paean to peace and territorial integrity, into a much briefer environmentalist credo, has been chronicled by several historians. The first attempt to reconstruct this history was a 1985 essay in the U.S. National Archives' Prologue magazine.[8] A more scholarly essay by a German anthropologist followed in 1987.[9] In 1989, a radio documentary by Daniel and Patricia Miller resulted in the uncovering of no fewer than 86 versions of Chief Seattle's speech. This then prompted a new discussion, first in the Seattle Weekly and then in Newsweek.[10][11] The historian Albert Furtwangler then undertook to analyze the evolution of Chief Seattle's speech in a full-length book, Answering Chief Seattle (1997).[12] More recently, Eli Gifford has written another full-length book, The Many Speeches of Chief Seattle (2015), which assembles further elements of the story, gives accurate transcriptions of 11 versions of the speech, and explores possible motivations for manipulating the words in each case.[6]