What Are The Rhetorical Devices Used In Chief Seattle's Speech

Chief Seattle’s speech is a message to Governor Isaac Stevens who is trying to take the Native American’s land. In this speech Chief Seattle is trying to convince Stevens to be fair with the Native Americans. Chief Seattle makes a powerful speech with the use of several rhetorical devices such as, metaphors, similes, and vivid language, throughout this piece. With these devices he is able to convey his message of sorrow and loss which allows his audience to paint a picture of this grief in their heads.

The evidence that Chief Seattle presents to Stevens in his speech is often metaphors or similes that are comparing nature to the lives of his people. This technique is found within the very first sentence of the speech “Yonder sky that has

Although they were disappearing Chief Seattle warned that the “red children whose teeming multitudes once filled this vast continent as stars fill the firmament” (1641) Meaning that the native people who once filled the land are now they are all filling heaven because of the amount of deaths they have had. He is showing his audience that they have been outnumbered and that it is harder for them to fight back. However, he throws a punch back at Stevens and the “white men” or white settlers by stating “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.” (1643). This line is saying that no matter where they go there will always be a spirit of one of the Natives with them because they took their land. This stab that Chief Seattle took at the white settlers shows that these two groups are extremely different because the white settlers didn’t care for the land like the Natives