Decameron Tale VI – Chief Seattle and Ted Perry’s Tale

It’s the 50^th anniversary of Earth Day. How’s the planet done in the last half century?

There has been progress.

Congresses have passed legislation like the Endangered Species and Clean Water Acts. There has been a series of international agreements to protect the Earth’s environment: the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and the 2015 Paris Agreement. An entire generation has lived its entire life aware that there is such a thing as ‘the environment’ and that it is something to be taken care of, as well as exploited. Eagles and grizzlies are back, and DDT, CFC’s, and PCB’s are gone.

But no matter how many recycling centers there are, there is a mass of thrown-away plastic the size of Texas floating around trapped in “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”

There are still enough atomic weapons to make a superpower war end life as we know it in a radioactive nuclear winter.

For every animal removed from the Endangered Species List, we are dealing with hundreds of invasive species destroying the natural balance of habitats that once were isolated.

Even with all the battery-powered cars, solar panels, and wind farms, there are still 26 gigatons of carbon dioxide released into the planet greenhouse every year.

Temperatures are rising, and the ice caps are melting.

Perhaps the most toxic emission of all has been the politicizing of concern about the environment. The overall consensus that America should not have another Love Canal or Three Mile Island close-call resulted in an impressive list of legislation to protect the environment during the first ten years after the first Earth Day in 1970. Who can imagine that sort of consensus today?

So, yeah, there is a lot of work still to be done.

What follows is a cautionary Earth Day tale. It comes with a make-believe good guy and a real but inadvertent bad one.

Most people have heard about the famous speech by ‘Chief Seattle,’ the one that has lines like, “How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us…The rivers are our brothers…The air is precious…for all things share the same breath and This we know. The earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family.”

Perhaps you read the book based on his speech, Brother Eagle, Sister Sky, to students in a class or to your grandchildren sitting in your lap.

The beautiful words express a lovely sentiment.

Who wouldn’t argue that our planet would be in much better shape if we humans felt a stronger sense of belonging to the earth or that we are all connected like the blood of one family?

However, no matter how heart-warming the thought or how important it is for us to live lives now that are less abusive of the earth, Chief Seattle never uttered these noble sentiments.

The Chief Seattle of history, actually Si’ahl, was a real 19th-century Dkhw’Duw’Absh leader in the Puget Sound area, and he did make a speech in 1854.

However, the first documents reporting Chief Seattle’s words were written many years after the event. They included many anachronisms. For example, in his native Puget Sound area in 1854, Si’ahl could not have seen a train, a whippoorwill, or a buffalo slaughter, but they are all in his speech. Those impossibilities, not to mention the high-fallutin’ Victorian prose, were all from the pen of a later Seattle newspaperman, Henry Smith.

Besides, Chief Si’ahl (also known as Seathle, Seathl, See-ahth, and Sealth) was a baptized and catechized Catholic, not a New Age evangelist, even though his speech has been called “The Fifth Gospel” by some environmentalists.

So where did the wonderful environmental consciousness of the speech come from?

You’ll be surprised.

Chief Seattle’s original speech is lost forever, but the speech as we know it today, originates with two people at the 1970 Earth Day rally in Austin at the University of Texas.

One was a Professor of Classics, William Arrowsmith, a prominent translator of Euripides. The other was a much less well-known character, Ted Perry. In the spring of 1970, Perry was an aspiring scriptwriter who was in his first year as an untenured junior faculty member.

Arrowsmith has said that somewhere, he couldn’t remember where, he’d come across Henry Smith’s 1887 version of Chief Seattle’s Speech and was impressed with its classical rhetorical flourishes. For unexplained reasons, Arrowsmith updated the speech’s poetic style, removing many of the Victorian embellishments, as he put it, removing “the dense patina of 19th-century literary diction and syntax,” something that he had been doing professionally for his entire successful career as a translator of Greek and Roman literature.

The crucial fact for this story is that Arrowsmith read his modernized version of the speech at that UT Earth Day rally 50 years ago in Austin.

Some of you were probably there at the rally in front of the Tower.

I wasn’t.

But Ted Perry was in the crowd that day. After hearing Senator Ed Muskie speak, he listened to Prof. Arrowsmith read what he believed was Chief Seattle’s speech. It occurred to Perry that it would be something to include in a documentary script he was working on. The project was to be an ecology awareness film funded by the Southern Baptist Convention (of all groups! How times have changed!) The film was called “Home,” and, based on Perry’s script, it came out a couple of years later.

Perry got a copy of Arrowsmith’s modernized version of Henry Smith’s over-the-top version of Chief Seattle’s speech. Then he completely re-wrote it. That’s what became the Chief Seattle Speech.

You’d have to say that Ted Perry was inspired. His creation was the one that went ‘viral,’ –to use my own anachronism.

Ted Perry tells his story:

I asked Professor Arrowsmith… if I might use the idea as a basis for the script; he graciously said yes… So I wrote a speech which was a fiction. I would guess that there were several sentences which were paraphrases of sentences in Professor Arrowsmith’s translation but the rest was mine. In passing the script along to the Baptists, I always made clear that the work was mine. And they, of course, knew the script was original; they would surely not have paid me, as they did, for a speech which I had merely retyped.

In presenting them with a script, however, I made the mistake of using Chief Seattle’s name in the body of the text. I don’t remember why this was done; my guess is that it was just a mistake on my part. In writing a fictional speech I should have used a fictitious name. In any case, when next I saw the script it was the narration for a film called Home aired on ABC or NBC-TV in 1972, I believe. I was surprised when the telecast was over, because there was no ‘written by’ credit on the film. I was more than surprised; I was angry. So I called up the producer and he told me that he thought the text might be more authentic if there were no ‘written by’ credit given.

What should have been called “Ted Perry’s Speech” just doesn’t have the Wow! Factor that calling it “Chief Seattle’s Speech” does. Unfortunately for truth, the mistaken and misleading attribution stuck.

Someone transcribed Chief Seattle’s speech from the 1972 video, and it was this version, Ted Perry’s masterpiece, that began to circulate. It took on a vigorous life of its own. Half a century later, even though Native American groups have long disavowed its inauthenticities and in spite of the speech’s true origin having been known for decades, environmental activists and earth-loving folks continue to adore passages like this:

Every part of this earth is sacred to our people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing, and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.

We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man–all belong to the same family…

We know that the White Man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his fathers’ graves, and his children’s birthright is forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert.

This shining water that moves in the streams and the rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you this land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water’s murmur is the voice of my father’s father…

The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also received his last sigh. And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where even the white man can go and taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow’s flowers.

Wonderful!

Poor Ted Perry, though, now in his 80s and a professor emeritus of Film Studies at Middlebury. He’s spent the past 50 years protesting to deaf ears, attempting to clarify the misunderstanding. He regrets being taken as just another in the long line of European-American writers who have practiced what we now call ‘cultural appropriation.’ At least nowadays, as was the case with the controversy about the American Dirt novel, we hear people asking embarrassed authors, “Why are you writing in someone else’s voice?”

We also live in the Confirmation Bias Age. Don’t be surprised when you find yourself believing a plausible, but nevertheless untrue, story, one you already believed before you ever heard it.

Such is Chief Seattle’s Speech. It’s so beautiful, if only it were real.

The environment is still a mess, and we’re still making it worse.

It’s just that we shouldn’t be using cute bedtime stories to justify our commitment to taking care of the earth, our home.

There is science aplenty to justify that.

Happy Earth Day.

Now, let’s get busy.

Sources:
http://www.newsweek.com/just-too-good-be-true-198926

http://www.historynet.com/chief-seattle

[Notes, not necessarily for inclusion.]
Phony, Photoshopped images of Chief Seattle that are common on the Internet: