Chief Seattle
American Indian Chief Seattle made a fabled statement on values in 1854 in a letter to the American President:How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us.
If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?
Every part of the earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.
The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.
The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful Earth, for it is the mother of the red man.
We are part of the Earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers.
The rocky crests, the juices of the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man - all belong to the same family.
The ashes of our fathers are sacred. Their graves are holy ground, and so these hills, these trees, this portion of Earth is consecrated to us.
We know that the white man does not understand our ways.
One portion of the land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs.
The Earth is not his brother, but is his enemy, and when he has conquered it he moves on.
He kidnaps the Earth from his children. He does not care.
His father's graves and his childrens' birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother the Earth, and his brother the sky, as things to be bought and plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads.
His appetite will devour the Earth and leave behind only a desert.
Where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone.
And what is it to say goodbye to the swift pony and the hunt ?
The end of living and the beginning of survival.
Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth. Man did not weave the Web of Life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.
The whites too shall pass; perhaps sooner than all other tribes.
Continue to contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.
When the last red man is vanished from this Earth, and his memory is only a shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, these shores and forests will still hold the spirits of my people.
North American Indian Chief Seattle, 1854.
