Showing posts with label Seattle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Seattle. Show all posts

Monday, April 02, 2018

ATIT Rheated: from 2013 — Chief Seattle's disputed speech

By Pablo Fanque All This Is That National Affairs Editor/ 
Seattle/Pac. NW stringer

 
Some of Chief Seattle's speeches and quotes are controversial--not due to their content (but that too), but because scholars and others (mainly conservatives, and gun nuts[1], ) believe the Chief's speeches were enhanced in the 60's by environmentalists, and others for their own nefarious purposes. [2] Certainly no one thought much of them before the 60's, when the words suddenly chimed with the times.

Chief Seattle's Reply

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? That 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 this 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 memory 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 in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man - all belong to the same family.

So, when the Great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land, he asks much of us. The Great Chief sends word he will reserve us a place so that we can live comfortably to ourselves. He will be our father and we will be his children. So we will consideryour offer to buy our land. But it will not be easy. For this land is sacred to us.

This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors.

If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that the ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells us events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our cannoes, feed our children. If we sell our land, you must learn, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers, and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.

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 his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father's grave behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care. His father's grave and his children's birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert. I do not know. Our ways are different than yours.

The sight of your cities pains the eyes of the red man. But perhaps because the red man is a savage and does not understand. There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insects wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand.

The clatter only seems to insult the ears. And what is there to life if man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of the frogs around a pond at night ? I am red man and do not understand.

The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of a pond, and the smell of the wind itself, cleaned by a mid-day rain, or scented by the pinon pine.

The air is precious to the red man, for all things share the same breath - the beast, the tree, the man, they all share the same breath. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breaths. Like a man dying for many days is numb to the stench.

But if we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh.

And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where even the white man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadows flowers. So we will consider your offer to buy our land. If we decide to accept, I'll make one condition, the white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers. I am a savage and I do not understand any other way.

I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train. I am a savage and I do not understand how the smoking iron horse can be more important than the buffalo that we kill only to stay alive.

What is man without the beasts ? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected.

You must teach the children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.

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. All things are connected. 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.

Even the white man, whose God walks and talks with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We shall see. One thing we know, which the white man may discover one day - our God is the same God. You may think you know that you own Him as you wish to own our land, but you cannot. He is the God of man, and His compassion is equal for the red man and the white. This earth is precious to him, and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its Creator.

The whites too shall pass, perhaps sooner than all other tribes. Contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste. But in your perishing you will shine brightly, fired by the strength of the God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man. That destiny is a mystery to us, for we do not understand when the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with the scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires. Where is the thicket ? Gone. Where is the eagle ? Gone. The end of living and beginning of survival.

-- Chief Sealth (Seattle)

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[1] I I go back and forth on the phrase gun nuts. My tendency is to include everyone who owns any weapon more powerful than a squirt gun or whipped cream dispenser.

[2] From the Wikipedia: Even the date and location of the speech has been disputed, but the most common version is that on March 11, 1854, Sealth gave a speech at a large outdoor gathering in Seattle. The meeting had been called by Governor Isaac Ingalls Stevens to discuss the surrender or sale of native land to white settlers. Doc Maynard introduced Stevens, who then briefly explained his mission, which was already well understood by all present.
Seattle then rose to speak. He rested his hand upon the head of the much smaller Stevens, and declaimed with great dignity for an extended period. No one alive today knows what he said; he spoke in the
Lushootseed language, and someone translated his words into Chinook jargon, and a third person translated that into English.
Some years later, Dr.
Henry A. Smith wrote down an English version of the speech, based on Smith's notes. It was a flowery text in which Sealth purportedly thanked the white people for their generosity, demanded that any treaty guarantee access to Native burial grounds, and made a contrast between the God of the white people and that of his own. Smith noted that he had recorded "...but a fragment of his [Sealth's] speech". Recent scholarship questions the authenticity of Smith's supposed translation.
In 1891, Frederick James Grant's History of Seattle, Washington reprinted Smith's version. In 1929, Clarence B. Bagley's History of King County, Washington reprinted Grant's version with some additions. In 1931, John M. Rich reprinted the Bagley version in Chief Seattle's Unanswered Challenge. In the 1960s, articles by
William Arrowsmith and the growth of environmentalism revived interest in Sealth's speech. Ted Perry introduced anachronistic material, such as shooting buffalo from trains, into a new version for a movie called Home, produced for the Southern Baptist Convention's Christian Radio and Television Commission.The movie sunk without a trace, but this newest and most fictional version is the most widely known. Albert Furtwangler analyzes the evolution of Sealth's speech in Answering Chief Seattle (1997).

The speech attributed to Sealth, as re-written by others, has been widely cited as "powerful, bittersweet plea for respect of Native American rights and environmental values", but there is little evidence that he actually spoke it. A similar controversy surrounds a purported 1855 letter from Sealth to President Franklin Pierce, which has never been located and, based on internal evidence, is considered by some historians as "an unhistorical artifact of someone's fertile literary imagination".
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Thursday, March 08, 2018

save the date!

by Jack Brummet


Save the date! May 19 2-10pm, Ballard, Seattle. I have rented a gymnasium for a one-day art show-sale/party (All Faces at Small Faces Child Development Center). 

There will be 400-500 original paintings and drawings (no prints or digital art). There will be beer, wine, friends, and strangers. More details in early May.



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Saturday, December 09, 2017

The President assaults Lady Liberty (images found in Seattle/Ballad)

by Jack Brummet

On Thursday, there were stacks of this image in old newspaper boxes around downtown Ballard (Seattle, Washington). 8"x11", artist/prankster unknown.

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Friday, August 18, 2017

Drawing: Faces 2084 — A local Sasquatch band defend the Lenin sculpture in Fremont

by Jack Brummet


With the recent news that some right wing groups and the mayor of Seattle want to take down the great state of Lenin in Fremont, a local group of Sasquatch came to defend the statue.





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Thursday, April 13, 2017

The Slender Thread movie with Anne Bancroft and Sidney Poitier

By Jack Brummet

We have an annual screening of the film The Slender Thread at the Crisis Clinic, and I finally made it for the showing tonight. It is a pretty amazing movie on a topic (suicide) that was not really talked about in the 60s. Or the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and even now. Anne Bancroft, Telly Savalas (and his brother George), Sidney Poitier, and Ed Asher are the lead actors. Bancroft and Poitier—the suicidal woman and the phone worker—are the focal points of the story. A lot of it is outdated and nothing like how we work now, but it is still fascinating and touching if you have ever done this kind of work. The movie, directed by Sydney Pollack, was based on the Seattle Crisis Clinic, which was one of the first hotlines in the country.


I worked on a crisis line in 1971-72, and the movie is pretty realistic about that era. We were flying by the seat of our pants, without a lot of professional help from shrinks/MSWs, etc. When I returned to this work a couple years ago, it was much more buttoned-down and professional (and effective). When I was on the Kent crisis line, we had four hours of training provided by the Seattle Crisis Clinic (where I work now): two hours on active listening and communications skills and two hours on suicide work. The next time around, it was 80 hours of training, with four days of in-service training each year, and continual ad hoc feedback on your work.

As corny as it was at times, 
the movie was moving. They got a lot of it right, which, for Hollywood, is pretty good. It's an almost noir looking black and white movie with footage (including aerial) of 1960's Seattle. Another reason this really hit home was that the woman committing suicide lived a few blocks from us in Ballard, and a lot of key moments occurred at Golden Gardens, just down the hill from my house.

I don't know if it is available streaming, but the DVD is for sale on Amazon.
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Saturday, April 08, 2017

Lennin's red hand

Over the last couple of years, I've seen Lennin's hand in Fremont painted red more often than not.


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Tuesday, April 04, 2017

Seattle's massive tunneling machine, Bertha, breaks through the wall


The (formerly) world's largest tunnel-drill machine Bertha broke through its final rock just before 11:30 a.m. today (after years of delays).


Bertha began tunneling on July 30, 2013. It’s expected to finish on April 4. That’s about 1,345 days, or about 32,280 hours. The machine traveled about 9,270 feet (1.755682 miles) over that period, which puts its speed at about 0.00005438915 mph. 
For comparison, garden snails travel at a rate of speed more than 10 times faster (0.000621371 mph or 1 meter/hour), according to a British researcher.
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Thursday, August 18, 2016

Donald Trump naked in Seattle, NYC, Cleveland, San Francisco, and L.A.

By Jack Brummet, Public Art Ed.

Photo via The Stranger  

A statue of a Donald J. Trump has been placed at the corner of 11th Avenue and Pike Street. The plaque reads: "The emperor has no balls."  

As it turns out, these statues now appear in San Francisco, Seattle, L.A., and Cleveland. The statues were created and deployed by the art activist group INDECLINE. Where next?

And when will the candidate freak out publicly about this?  Stay tuned. . .


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Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Saturday, May 28, 2016

Seattle, suicide hotspot?



Seattle myth: Seattle has the highest suicide rate in the U.S. 

Not true. This high suicide rate is commonly blamed on the rain, and S.A.D. (seasonal affective disorder), as well as serotonin deficiencies--caused by lack of sunlight--that lead to depression. In fact, Seattle falls in the bottom half of the top 50 cities. On the other hand, the Aurora Bridge is the second most popular place t
o commit suicide in the U.S. (behind the Golden Gate Bridge). 

The top cities for suicide per capita (including many sunny and warm places):

1 Las Vegas, NV
2 Colorado Springs, CO
3 Tucson, AZ
4 Sacramento, CA
5 Albuquerque, NM
6 Mesa, AZ
7 Miami, FL
8 Denver, CO
9 Jacksonville, FL
10 Pittsburgh, PA
10 Wichita, KS
12 Portland, OR
13 Fresno, CA
14 Phoenix, AZ
15 Tulsa, OK
16 Milwaukee, WI
17 Oklahoma City, OK
18 Atlanta, GA
19 Austin, TX
20 Cincinnati, OH
21 Charlotte, NC
22 St. Louis, MO
23 Indianapolis, IN
24 Louisville/Jefferson Co., KY
24 Virginia Beach,VA
26 Nashville-Davidson,TN
27 Cleveland, OH
28 Seattle, WA
29 Kansas City, MO
30 Houston, TX
31 San Francisco, CA
32 Fort Worth, TX
32 Honolulu, HI
34 Columbus, OH
35 Philadelphia, PA
36 Omaha, NB
37 San Diego, CA
38 Dallas, TX
39 San Antonio, TX
40 Arlington, TX
41 Long Beach, CA
42 San Jose, CA
43 New Orleans, LA
44 Minneapolis, MN
45 Memphis,TN
46 Oakland, CA
47 El Paso, TX
48 Los Angeles, CA
49 Chicago, IL
50 Detroit, MI
51 New York City, NY
52 Baltimore, MD
52 Washington, DC
54 Boston, MA

[source city-data.com]
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Thursday, October 15, 2015

Three million lakes in Alaska

By Jack Brummet, h2O Ed.


Photo of Symphony lake courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.  Photo by Frank Kovalchek, 2009

It's kind of a mind-effer that there are three million lakes in Alaska [statistic via Wikipedia/media].  That is more than four lakes for each person living there. Eat your heart out Minne-land of 10,000 lakes-sota.

Seattle, with 100,000 less people than Alaska, has five lakes. One of them is large.  And then there is the shore of Puget Sound.  Of Seattle's total area, 41% is under water.

Aerial photo of Seattle permission of  Wikipedia User:Jelson25, via Wikipedia Commons.
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