Yes, that's it. Dr. Henry Smith created that out of whole cloth himself, and Perry modernized it. The record actually shows a couple of brief remarks made by Sealth, nothing so grandiose and typically Victorian.

The truth of the words is that they're a collection of tropes, many of them paternalistic, and while they sound good to Euramerican ears, they upset a lot of Indians. And scholars (Indian and non-) who would like to know what the Indians really had to say.

There are arguments raging in academia about how "ecological" pre-columbian Indians were (and modern Indians are); some would have them making nary a mark on the continent, others would have them killing everything they got near and causing mass extinctions. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, and to bring this discussion full circle, it happens that an Apache from the White Mountain Apache Reservation has admittied to starting the fire that errupted into the largest fire in Arizona's recorded history. Ironic, isn't it? If fires had been allowed to burn the low levels of fuel for the last 100 years, and those fires were often started by the Indians who lived on the land, this fire probably wouldn't have been possible.

A complex set of feelings goes along with the irony noted above. I used to fight fires--and we all knew of people who wanted to work more who just might have started a fire somewhere if they thought they could get away with it. There's a lot of cultural damage on the White Mountain reservation, and though I suspect that it will resolve itself sooner than they imagine, and in ways more interesting than desolate, right now it's hard to fathom how one individual could do so much damage. Yet I wouldn't send him to prison. He learned his lesson, and his community is going to make sure he never forgets it.

How's that for reweaving the creeping thread?

SRS