Tour d’Joko: Chief Sealth & The Ketchup Peninsula
This was the kind of Tour d’Joko I wanted to go on last weekend when my car broke down. Then, this week, my employer cut my pay by 30%. My video camera is pretty much unusable now due to the faulty LCD screen. It was time for me to catch a break.
Nothing I enjoy more than getting out on the road and exploring new places… Enjoy!
I hope the spirit of Chief Sealth smiles at the video.
I won’t re-print the entire text of Chief Sealth’s speech to the early Seattle settlers on signing the Treaty of Puget Sound, as it is quite long. You can read the whole thing here. It’s worth it. It is a powerful missive about the environment, culture and the future of humanity.
Suffice to say, can you imagine if his words were subject to the nitpicking and intense scrutiny that today’s leaders face thanks to a voracious media? Imagine these snippets, taken out context, and discussed on Fox News or MSNBC?
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.
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.
Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We will see.
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’s 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.
Pretty powerful stuff there.
Take 5 …aye the perfect song for this Tour De Joko
As far as who God loves better…well everyone full well knows that God loves Americans the most….white Americans as well….it goes without saying really doesn’t…
“IT’S AN OTTER” 😯 😯 😯
Ohhhh lololol oh noz…:) 😛
Enya,and Flannel just seem to go together huh….:)
Brown Flannel I hope…. 😥
Brown flannel always makes me cry…. 😐
Nice to see you finally located that chip….:)
Have a great Monday J…and remember since your employer has cut your pay 30 %……now you can legally reduce your efforts at work by 30%……..ya sure….. 😉
Such beautiful totem poles at Chief Sealth’s gravesite! Chief have big double wood. Due to protecting the children with family values, schools do not teach that totem poles were magnificent manifestations of Native warrior “masculinity”. Myself being a homoeccentric historical scholar, I am waging a campaign to change all this.
I’ve been pronouncing the h all these years on the Sealth Anglicization of his name! It is actually Chief Si’ahl. It has recently come to light that some Native Americans in The U.S.A. owned slaves of African descent. But being more politically correct, and thus ahead of his time, Chief Si’ahl owned Native American slaves instead – from his raids on other tribes. Perhaps some of whom were known to attack his?
A statue of the chief was erected in Seattle in 1912, where it stands today near the space needle, another hard-to-miss Seattle erection.
The outstretched arm was rendered by Seattle’s first sculptor, James A. Wehn, from the sitting of a later native, who declined to return for further sittings after spotting a human skull in his studio. The skull, retrieved from an exposed Native grave, was also used to model the statue. Along with the only known photo of the chief, an 1864 portrait by Seattle’s first known photographer, E. A. Sammis. What no one knew until I revealed it here, is that Sammis is also an Anglicized name – he was the creator of the original Sammich.
Upset at what he perceived to be an inferior-quality casting company, the sculptor threw his first plaster model of the work into Elliott Bay. He was cajoled into making another though, which was then cast in bronze by a firm in New York, as Wehn had originally stipulated. Wehn was the first head of The U.W. Sculpture Department in 1919, where he taught for five years. A pic of Wehn is below, standing with another model for his famous statue – obviously a Native American “little person”. And a pic of the statue in place in the 1920’s.
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In 1989, perhaps upset at the low public image of those in his profession, a cabbie took it upon himself to valiantly clean Chief Si’ahl’s entire erectness with muriatic acid. We all know cosmetic surgeons use dermabrasion for younger looking skin, right? Well, why not take it one step further – acid dermabrasion? Your face may be red for a week from dermabrasion alone, but “Nothing Gets You Cleaner Than Acid Clean!” The damage almost cost Chief Si’ahl his life a second time. Thousands of dollars were spent on restoration. The liberals are right – damn whiteys.