In the late 1960s, a new era dawned in the fame of the speech and in its further modification. This began with a series of articles by William Arrowsmith, a professor at the University of Texas, which revived interest in Seattle's speech. Arrowsmith had come across the speech in a collection of essays by the President of Washington State University. At the end of one of the essays, there were some quotes from Smith's version of Chief Seattle's speech. Arrowsmith said it read like prose from the Greek poet Pindar. With interest aroused, he found the original source. After reading it, he decided to try improving Smith's version of the speech, by removing Victorian influences. Arrowsmith attempted to get a sense of how Chief Seattle might have spoken, and to establish some "likely perimeters of the language."[5]
But the massive fame of Chief Seattle's speech is probably due to a poster printed in 1972, which shows a picture of Chief Seattle overlaid with words from his "letter" to "the president in Washington". The words are in fact taken from Arrowsmith's version of the speech, but with further modifications such as the image of shooting buffalo from trains, and the line "The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth."
The poster was made to promote a movie called Home, an environmentalist movie produced for the Southern Baptist Radio and Television Commission.[10] The movie's producer wanted to show a distinguished American Indian chief delivering a statement of concern for the environment, so the script writer, Ted Perry, wove together environmentalist rhetoric with pieces of Chief Seattle's speech in the Arrowsmith version. But Perry was not credited with this because, according to Perry, the producer thought the movie would seem more authentic if the text was attributed directly to Chief Seattle himself and not to a screenwriter.
Perry himself explained what happened:
"I first heard a version of the text read by William Arrowsmith at the first Environmental Day celebration in 1970. I was there and heard him. He was a close friend. Arrowsmith's version hinted at how difficult it was for Seattle to understand the white man's attitude toward land, water, air, and animals. For the soundtrack for a documentary I had already proposed about the environment, I decided to write a new version, elaborating on and heightening what was hinted at in Arrowsmith's text ... While it would be easy to hide behind the producer's decision, without my permission, to delete my "Written by" credit when the film was finished and aired on television, the real problem is that I should not have used the name of an actual human being, Chief Seattle. That I could put words into the mouth of someone I did not know, particularly a Native American, is pure hubris if not racist. While there has been some progress in our knowledge of Native Americans, we really know very little. What we think we know is mediated by films, chance encounters, words, images and other stereotypes. They serve our worldview but they are not true."[5]It turns out that the producer, John Stevens, had added a lot of elements to make the speech compatible with Baptist theology, including the words "I am a savage and do not understand." Stevens said:
"I edited the speech to fit our needs [Baptists] more closely. There was no apple pie and motherhood and so I added the references to God and I am a savage to make the Radio and Television Commission happy ... I had edited scripts that did not have the Baptists' line dozens of times. This needed to be done so they could justify spending thousands of dollars on a film ... I eventually quit my job as a producer because I got tired of shoehorning those interests into scripts."[5]The version of Chief Seattle's speech edited by Stevens was then made into a poster and 18,000 copies were sent out as a promotion for the movie. The movie itself sank without a trace, but this newest and most fictional version of Chief Seattle's speech became the most widely known, as it became disseminated within the environmentalist movement of the 1970s - now in the form of a "letter to the President" (see below).[7]
In 1993 Nancy Zussy, a librarian at Washington State University, analyzed the versions of Chief Seattle's speech (or "letter") which were then in circulation.[16] She identified four major textual variants, which she ascribed to four authors as follows:
- "Version 1", the Smith version
- "Version 2", the Arrowsmith version
- "Version 3", the Perry/Stevens version
- "Version 4", a shortened version of the Perry/Stevens version - no known author
No comments:
Post a Comment