Chief Seattle (1786-1866)

Decent white Americans can read the passage without shame: what decent white Americans can't do is ignore it.

There’s no proper way to truly express how that short passage made me feel. The only word I can think of that properly describes sitting on the edge of my bed, an unheard track by My Chemical Romance playing in the background with my hand unconsciously clenched as I look at but don’t read the last words of Chief Seattle’s speech, is awkward. I felt so out of place after reading those few pages of thought. It was akin to touching the obelisk and realizing I could use tapir bones as a weapon: such a simple idea once understood, but it can leave a civilization staring in awe, or in this case, a disheveled looking youth in a slight disarray. I know of what happened hundreds of years ago at the founding of the country: I understand the thought process of the time, and I can sympathize with the settlers and their way of thinking. But now, it’s… different. Now I know what happened hundreds of years ago at the founding of this country.

Chief Seattle’s speech was very enlightening for me. I’ve never truly understood what happened to the natives of this land when the settlers came. It had to be done, in the name of progress, much like the crusades and slavery, and that it is on the same list as those evils should be common knowledge to everyone, and yet sadly it rarely is. I’m not about to become an advocate for Native rights, but I think I’ll try. I’ll do something. I don’t even have any idea what that will be, but it seems wasteful of the knowledge I have to simply not do… something.

It’s so easy for someone to look back on history. Once we’re a generation or two, or even a year of two, removed from an event, we can start to see it differently. It’s easier to see things as facts instead of events once we’re reading it out of a slightly cold book that’s been sitting on your floor all night, rather than living the life of seeing everything you’re ever loved being raped and changed by a force that cannot be defeated and hardly reasoned with. We can see history as a huge play of forces that are all connected: of course Europe would discover America, and of course they would settle there, and of course the natives would put up a fight. It’s when we truly think about, and look outside of the history books written by the victors that we see what happened. This is true with all history, but especially with what happened to the Native Americans when we came. And I use the word we, even though I don’t consider any of us today responsible. What’s done is done, sadly, and that really is that. But we must shoulder this black cross whether we know it or not. I for one would like to think that people today could at least make an effort to learn what was lost. We can visit a Native American museum. We can read a book about them. We could, at the very least, Wikipedia their culture.

What’s truly unsettling is that this is what it’s come to: we could at least Wikipedia them.