The differences between the Smith version and the fourth version are striking, including the line, Your God loves your people and hates mine, vs. Our God is the same God. There are inspiring phrases, in the newer version, that the Smith transcription lacks: How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us….The rivers are our brothers….The air is precious…for all things share the same breath and This we know. The earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family.

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For many years this fourth variant has been the accepted version of Chief Seattle’s speech. So it came as some surprise when this last rendering was traced to a screenwriter, Ted Perry, for the 1972 movie Home, a production of the Southern Baptist Radio and Television Commission. Perry heard Arrowsmith read his 1969 version and with permission, used the text as the basis for a new, fictitious speech for a film on pollution and ecology. The film’s producers revised Perry’s script without his knowledge, removed his name from the film credits, sent off 18,000 posters with the speech to viewers who requested it, and glibly began the confusion we have today. Perry was not pleased.

Ted Perry is now a professor at Middlebury College in Vermont and has tried to set the record straight, but with little result. In a Newsweek article in 1992, Perry mused, Why are we so willing to accept a text like this if it’s attributed to a Native American, and not to a Caucasian? Over the years, he has been embarrassed by his role in putting words in the mouth of Chief Seattle. I would never have allowed anyone to believe that it was anything but a fictitious item written by me, he has said. Yet, Perry has also been pleased that his words have served as a powerful inspiration for so many others. Would that this stimulus had not come at the expense of more distancing and romanticizing the Native American, he adds.

The legend of Chief Seattle’s speech may never die. Undoubtedly there will be many who refuse to believe that such fine and noble words and sentiments could have been made by a non-Indian during the 20th century–and for a television show at that. To allow any version of the speech to pass away would be to deny the magic and power of the words and their meaning. If something is true, it shouldn’t matter who said it and when it was said as long as we recognize the source. What matters most is that the Chief Seattle Speech has something to teach us all: So if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it as we have cared for it. We may be brothers after all.

The chief died in 1866. His grave lies in a little cemetery behind the historic St. Peter’s Catholic Church in the hamlet of Suquamish on Washington’s Kitsap Peninsula. Through tall Douglas-fir trees toward the west, visitors can gaze across mist-covered Puget Sound on warm summer days. With the snow-clad Cascade Mountains on the far horizon as background, the tiny bumps of downtown Seattle rise like headstones.

Wild West.

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