Question

Discuss trans-culturation as represented in Seattle’s speech.

Answer 1

It has elements of trans-culturation. Although Seattle tended to emphasize the differences between Native Americans and Euro-Americans, the Euro-American idea that the Native Americans were going to become extinct surfaced throughout his speech.This idea of the inevitable extinction of the Native Americans as a race originated from the colonists. This idea served the colonists quite conveniently. It justified what Ring calls the “transfer of real estate,” the process in which European settlers gradually moved into established Indian communities as the Indians “disappeared”. Apparently, killing and stealing from an already-doomed race was easier to accept.

Throughout his speech, Chief Seattle indicates his acceptance of this belief that the Native Americans would become extinct. He refers to their “untimely decay” and laments, “It matters little where we pass the remnant of our days. They will not be many”, although he does not provide any concrete reasons for these sentiments. Instead, Seattle settles with the warning, “When the last Red Man shall have perished… these shores will throng with the invisible dead of my tribe… The White Man will never be alone”. In accepting the ultimate defeat of the Indians, Chief Seattle adopted an element of the dominant, Euro- American thought, demonstrating the trans-culturation predicted