Chief Seattle's speech
Chief Seattle's speech is one that Chief Seattle probably gave in 1854 to an audience including the first Governor of Washington Territory, the militaristic Isaac Stevens. Though the speech itself is lost to history, many putative versions exist, none of which are particularly reliable.

The evolution of historic records of the 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. A more scholarly essay by a German anthropologist followed in 1987. 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". The historian Albert Furtwangler then undertook to analyze the evolution of Chief Seattle's speech in a full-length book, "Answering Chief Seattle" (1997).
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.
Q216477
Chief Seattle
PER
Q1710656
Washington Territory
LOC
Q888719
Isaac Stevens
PER
Q7249639
Prologue
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Q86755697
Chief Seattle's speech
Concept
Q86755697
Chief Seattle's speech
Concept
Q86755697
Chief Seattle's speech
Concept
1854-01-01T00:00:00Z^^http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime
1854
DATE
1985-01-01T00:00:00Z^^http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime
1985
DATE
1987-01-01T00:00:00Z^^http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime
1987
DATE
1989-01-01T00:00:00Z^^http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime
1989
DATE
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86
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1997
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2015
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11
NUMBER
author
notable work