"Chief Seattle's Speech" to Americans: Transliterating the Translation (30 Years After Delivery)

~This link is for Americans with an accurate sense of humor: Meaningful Native American Tribal Song~

  What is the criterion to call a literary work “historically accurate” (in good conscience)? For Dr. Henry Smith, a “pioneer who heard [Chief Seattle’s] speech but who waited until 1887, more than thirty years later, to publish it in the Sunday Seattle Star,” the criterion seems loose (to put it delicately). Smith, a Conservationist, supposedly transcribed a translation of Seattle’s powerful speech, which speech was delivered by Chief Seattle to “the white man.” This speech, in spite of being packed with admirable sentiments (sentiments that were likely shared, maybe even said, by Native American chieftains), contains a laughable amount of Anglo-American tropes and references that indicate an American appropriation of a culture, and/or speech, in order to fulfill its “white man’s burden” to the Native Americans. The concept of a “white man’s burden” has no grounding in reality (save to exist in the wake of racism and racial inequality). That which is human doesn't need to be humanized!

            Smith’s transliteration of Seattle’s speech reflects the literary style and devices within American Naturalism and Realism. Smith chases the “sublime” in his version of Seattle’s speech through metaphors of an Anglo-American God, using a hybrid of romantic and natural depictions of Indian spirits and the dead (in order to create the Romantic/Realist sensation of sublime awe/horror), and he uses an abundance of sweeping natural metaphors to universalize a speech. In all honesty, my experience reading “Seattle’s Speech” led me to a firm belief that this speech was practically guaranteed to have been much more humble and to have possessed a much deeper quality of pathos.

Honestly, is this the face of a man who
would threaten to curse white
Americans with the spirits of the dead?

            I believe that Seattle’s speech likely addressed, as did the speeches of many other Chieftains (e.g. Pontiac, Samson Occom, Logan, Red Jacket, Tecumseh, Speech to the Osages, etc.), the narrative of a people moved by pride and pain to speak to the raw emotions of their fellow Native American brothers and the expansionist Anglo-Americans who failed to understand them. As it stands, the rhetorical argument within this piece sounds like the musings of a white American’s guilty conscience in the aftermath of racial injustices and dehumanization, or a highly unlikely “last minute curse” by a Native American Chieftain, or literally anything BUT what the speech from Seattle would have been like. Should we blame Henry Smith for translating it thirty years after-the-fact?