But they were a rational response to abundance or scarcity in the context of institutions that governed resource use. Sometimes these changes were beneficial, at other times harmful. The romantic image evoked by the speech obscures the fact, fully acknowledged by historians, that American Indians transformed the North American landscape. The speech reflects what many environmentalists want to hear, not what Chief Seattle said. Perry, not Chief Seattle, wrote that “every part of the Earth is sacred to my people.” (Perry, by the way, has tried unsuccessfully to get the truth out.) Perry’s version added “a good deal more, particularly modern ecological imagery,” according to one historian who has researched the subject (Wilson 1992, 1457).
NATIVE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY QUOTES MOVIE
In a movie about pollution, he paraphrased a translation of the speech that had been made by William Arrowsmith (a professor of classics). They were written by Ted Perry, a scriptwriter. Yet the words in the oft-quoted speech are not actually those of Chief Seattle. “Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of earth.” “All things are connected like the blood which unites one family,” Senator Chafee quotes him as saying. The impression that American Indians were guided by a unique environmental ethic often can be traced to words widely attributed to Chief Seattle. Though the actual laws and customs vary among societies, all societies have such institutions to guide them. By institutions, I mean the traditions, rules, laws and habits that guided Indian societies. Second, it will illustrate how American Indians used complex and evolving institutions to conserve scarce natural resources and to survive in a sometimes hostile environment. First, it will put to rest the myth of a unique and romantic American Indian environmental ethic.
NATIVE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY QUOTES FULL
By missing this history of Indian institutions, the environmentalists’ interpretation deprives Indians and non-Indians alike of a full understanding of how we can conserve our natural heritage. By focusing on this myth instead of reality, environmentalists patronize American Indians, disparaging their rich institutional heritage which encouraged resource conservation. The spiritual connection attributed to Native Americans frequently does not mesh with the history of Indian resource use. “In scientific terms, we recognize that their use of the forest was ecologically responsible–meaning that it kept all the parts.”(3)Īppealing as this image of a Native American environmental ethic is, it is not accurate. “For many thousands of years, most of the indigenous nations on this continent practiced a philosophy of protection (first) and use (second) of the forest,” says Herb Hammond in the Sierra Club book Clearcut.
Chafee recently quoted words allegedly spoken by Chief Seattle: “Man did not weave the web of life.
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