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Chief Seattle's Speech(Es): Ambivalent Idealizations And Emplacing The Uprooted 'Origin', Paul J. O'Malley

Theses : Honours

This thesis traces the narcissistic dynamics behind mounting idealizations of a Native American Indian, Chief Seattle, and his renowned speech of 1854. In my work I draw from psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, 'post-colonial', and translation theories, as well as from contemporary Indian scholarship. I develop my own provisional model of what I term "Narcissistic Drift", providing a means of charting the intertextual dynamics driving colonial representations of otherness to converge progressively with stereotypical norms. Where previous Seattle studies have tended to concern themselves with issues of textual 'authenticity', I build on such work to consider how an indigenous speech 'uprooted' from its …