Chief Joseph

I will be doing a reflection over the speech "I Will Fight No More Forever" by Chief Joseph. The speech is about a chief of an Indian tribe who is pleading to General Howard that there be no more fighting. He says in the speech, "What he told me before, I have in my heart. I am tired of fighting." (Joseph) Here the chief displays his true heart and soul is in what he is doing. This is like Thoreau because he would write of things that were important and close to his heart, as Chief Joseph did here. This gives the speech that heartwarming/ heart wrenching personality that makes it so popular. The speech then continues on to talk about how many of his men are missing and dead. This makes the speech very sad and hit another level because any time death is involved in a speech it then goes to another level of writing that can be hard to accomplish successfully without messing with the speech or putting in too much personal views. Here because it is a speech there is much of a personal view to it. This is very much like the idea of having a personal heart wrenching tale to be told that Emerson uses in his own speech "Divinity School Address". Although he uses more happy things instead of death like Joseph did in his speech. He says, “The little children are freezing to death." which pulls hard at your heart because the idea of little children dying is absolutely horrific to most people. This makes the speech slowly turn into a persuasive speech in my opinion because it uses things that would make you want to do what they are telling you to do. For instance, in this case the Chief is trying to get the people to stop fighting his people. By talking about how people and children are dying, this makes many people want to help make the fighting stop.


Joseph, Chief. "I Will Fight No More Forever." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 533 . Print.