Native Authenticity, Rhetorical Circulation, and Neocolonial Decay: The Case of Chief Seattle’s Controversial Speech

In 1971, Ted Perry, a member of the Southern Baptist Convention, accessed a questionable 1854 elegiac speech from Chief Seattle (Suquamish Nation) to include in his eco-friendly film, Home. The complications surrounding Perry’s misuse of Seattle’s “The Indians’ Night Promises to be Dark” amid the environmental trends of that decade such as the inception of Earth Day and the popularity of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring are multifold. Foremost among the difficulties is that Perry (a non-Native) redacted Seattle’s speech to retrofit it into his film’s message of Judeo-Christian guardianship of the earth. Historians agree that Seattle’s alleged speech was a response to U.S. governmental encroachments into the Suquamish Nation’s territory and the removal treaty that followed.¹ But Perry ignored the chief’s resistive rhetoric and instead added environmentally based lines such as, “This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth,” and “Whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected.”² These sentiments never appeared in the publicly extant versions of what Michael Calvin McGee might call the “fragments” of Seattle’s supposed speech.³ However, this discourse reflected a 1970s-era fascination with environmentalism—a body of social change that demanded some ethos. In this case, that credibility would come from ciphering so-called Native connections to the earth.⁴

Another complication is that Perry’s manufactured speech became the most famous version of Seattle’s words; it became a Boudrillardian “simulacrum” of the text, allowing “originals and copies to blur.”⁵ Ostensibly, Perry’s speech circulated as the sine qua non of Seattle’s voice. Ralph Lutts writes that it was “clipped and published in 1972 . . . where the National Wildlife Federation found it for its own publication. [Then] Northwest Orient Airline’s magazine Passages spread the bogus speech around the world.”⁶ Moreover, renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell quoted the Perry speech in his book The Power of Myth; later, the speech was spotlighted at the Spokane World’s Fair in 1974.⁷ In the end, the Perry speech took on a life of its own following the public release of his blended environmental and religious film.

This essay focuses on Perry’s cooptation of Seattle’s speech and what it says about the entanglements of authenticity, rhetorical circulation, and neocolonialism in contexts involving Native-U.S. relationships. The Eurocentric pursuit of authenticity, in particular, is problematic because it punctuates a Western obsession with attributing essentialized genuineness to key Native agents.⁸ This pursuit denies a Native oral tradition that puts stock in individual tribal lifeways.⁹ This problem with authenticity leads seamlessly to rhetorical circulation, which attends to the ways rhetoric flows, unanchored, around and through our daily lives.¹⁰ The way fragmented discourse circulates says much about a public that interprets it and the ideologies that underscore that particular public’s civic imaginary. This imaginary in the United States is partly constituted by neocolonial renderings of American Indian histories, presents, and futures.¹¹

These frames merge here to create a lens through which to view Perry’s co-optation of Seattle’s problematic speech. I argue that Perry’s ciphering of Seattle’s nineteenth century rhetoric reveals the ways that American Indian pasts, presents, and futures are symbolically controlled by Western interests that tend to overlook the importance of Native voice. Publicly cognizant of the circulation of contrived Native texts, such Western circulators nonetheless tend to rely on these texts to stand in for Native cultures. In the process, what occurs is a type of textual decay; that is, as colonial reckonings of Native texts strengthen, Native cultures themselves disappear. I contend that rhetorical colonialism, to borrow from Mary Stuckey and John Murphy,¹² works in this very way: Native texts are co-opted as authentic by Western interlocutors who “play Indian”¹³ and then circulate those texts to serve colonial narratives. The result is that such circulations gloss Natives as apolitical in their own affairs, while suddenly and...