“Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors.”
Dwamish Chief Seattle surrendered his land, on which the city of Seattle is now located, in 1855 and accepted reservation status for his people. At the signing of the treaty, he addressed Governor Isaac Stevens.
MY PEOPLE are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain… There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory…
To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret. Your religion was written on tables of stone by the iron finger of your God so that you could not forget. The Red Man could never comprehend nor remember it. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors—the dreams of our old men, given them in the solemn hours of night by the Great Spirit; and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people.
Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb and wander away beyond the stars.
They are soon forgotten and never return. Our dead never forget the beautiful world that gave them being…
When the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white man, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your childrens’ children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone… At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.
Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead—I say? There is no death. Only a change of worlds.
(Reprinted from the book Touch The Earth, compiled by T. C, McLuhan and published in 1987.)
