西雅图酋长谈话 The“Alternate Statement”of Chief Seattle

西雅图酋长 / Chief Seattle

西雅图酋长（1786—1866），杜瓦米许族印第安人，勇武且善于领导，以酋长身份统治德奥米什和苏卡米什等6个部落。西雅图早年受法国传教士的影响，信仰天主教。他的父亲与当地白人建立了友好关系，而他多年来一直维护着这种关系。1855年他与白人签订了《埃利澳特港条约》，并建立印第安人保留地，当时美国政府要将当地土人驱逐到“保留地”定居。本文就是西雅图在美国政府压力下所给予的答复。

Ace in the Hole

Understand these new words before you read this article.

1.startle ['stɑ:tl] v.使吓一跳；使惊奇

2.arrest [?'rest] v.吸引

3.bud [b?d] n.芽，萌芽

Yonder sky that has wept tears of compassion upon my people for centuries untold, and which to us appears changeless and eternal, may change.Today is fair.Tomorrow it may be overcast with clouds.My words are like the stars that never change.Whatever Seattle says, the great chief at Washington can rely upon with as much certainty as he can upon the return of the sun or the seasons.

White Chief says that Big Chief at Washington sends us greetings of friendship and goodwill.This is kind of him for we know he has little need of our friendship in return.His people are many.They are like the grass that covers vast prairies.My people are few.They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain.The great, and I presume—good, White Chief sends us word that he wishes to buy our lands but is willing to allow us enough to live comfortably.This indeed appears just, even generous, for the Red Man no longer has rights that he needs respect, and the offer may be wise also, as we are no longer in need of an extensive country.

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.I will not dwell on, nor mourn over, our untimely decay, nor reproach my paleface brothers with hastening it, as we too may have been somewhat to blame.

Youth is impulsive.When our young men grow angry at some real or imaginary wrong, and disfigure their faces with black paint, it denotes that their hearts are black, and that they are often cruel and relentless, and our old men and old women are unable to restrain them.Thus it has ever been.Thus it was when the White Man began to push our forefathers ever westward.But let us hope that the hostilities between us may never return.We would have everything to lose and nothing to gain.Revenge by young men is considered gain, even at the cost of their own lives, but old men who stay at home in times of war, and mothers who have sons to lose, know better.

Our good father in Washington—for I presume he is now our father as well as yours, since King George has moved his boundaries further north—our great andgood father, I say, sends us word that if we do as he desires he will protect us.His brave warriors will be to us a bristling wall of strength, and his wonderful ships of war will fill our harbors, so that our ancient enemies far to the northward—the Haidas and Tsimshians, will cease to frighten our women, children and old men.He in reality he will be our father and we will be his children.

But can that ever be? Your God is not our God! Your God loves your people and hates mine! He folds his strong protecting arms lovingly about the paleface and leads him by the hand as a father leads an infant son.But, He has forsaken His Red children, if they really are His.

Our God, the Great Spirit, seems also to have forsaken us.Your God makes your people wax stronger every day.Soon they will fill all the land.Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly receding tide that will never return.The White Man’s God cannot love our people or He would protect them.They seem to be orphans who can look nowhere for help.How then can we be brothers? How can your God become our God and renew our prosperity and awaken in us dreams of returning greatness?

If we have a common Heavenly Father, He must be partial, for He came to His paleface children.We never saw Him.He gave you laws but had no word for His Red children whose teeming multitudes once filled this vast continent as stars fill the firmament.No, we are two distinct races with separate origins and separate destinies.There is little in common between us.

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 upon tablets of stone by the iron finger of your God so that you could not forget.The Red Man could never comprehend or remember it.Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors—the dreams of our old men, given them in solemn hours of the 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 this beautiful world that gave them being.They still love its verdant valleys, its murmuring rivers, its magnificent mountains, sequestered vales and verdant lined lakes and bays, and ever yearn in tender fond affection over the lonely hearted living, and often return from the happy hunting ground to visit, guide, console and comfort them…

…

Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits.

And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone.In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude.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, did I say? —There is no death, only a change of worlds.