Themes of Luther Standing Bear statement:
- Native Americans did not see the land as something to be conquered but yet a "parent" who one could give and take necessary items for life.
- Animals and plants has just the same amount of right to grow and thrive as man does
- The Native American culture only dies when the ideas and traditions have died within the community
Chief Seattle Speech:
- The only way for their traditions to survive was to accept the protection and restrictions that the Governor was proposing.
- The red man's god and the white man's god can not be one in the same because God was not fighting for the rights of the red man.
- The Native Americans could not fight the fact that their numbers were dwindling and so they had to accept their fate.
Because the Chief Seattle Speech was not recorded and published the same year it was spoken, many translations or versions have been produced. The authentic version was lost to the winds of time as the words left Chief Seattle's mouth, however many have tried to copy and reinvent this speech even it means completely contradicting the true meaning. The American Indian Quarterly Journal wrote about this authenticity issue in an article called "Contemporary Reinvention of Chief Seattle: Variant Texts of Chief Seattle's 1854 Speech. It explains that even as recently as 1992 writers have tried to republish this speech in many different ways. The first published version however was in 1887 almost 30 years afterwards by Dr. Smith, a man who did not even speak the same language as Seattle.
To read more from this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1185598?seq=1
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