My People By: Chief Seattle and Salvation By: Langston Hughes are two different works that have similar under meanings. Chief Seattles My People tells about the red people (Native Indians) being colonized where as Hughess Salvation recounts an experience where he saved. Three points that both works have in common are Parable, Irony and Tone.
Parable is a simple narrative that illustrates a moral or religious lesson. This is shown in My People when Chief Seattle states (pg 1187) Your God loves our people and hates mine. He is saying that the red people and white people can never live together because the white men are destroying everything. They are destroying the land, culture and anything that represents the red people due to the colonization. In Salvation the parable is shown when Hughes recalls a gathering where he was supposed to be saved. Saved meaning to see a light and Jesus representing God has come into your life and will stay with you from then on.
Irony is the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning. In My People Chief Seattle explains that the red people believe in there is life in everything. The land, the water, everything had a spirit. When one passed on he/she would be reborn as a spirit through one of these elements. The white men believed the red people were savage yet they were the ones taking everything away from the red people. The white people tried making the red people civilized by teaching them about Jesus. Chief Seattle says (pg 1189) ..for the dead are not altogether powerless., this is ironic because the white peoples Jesus is dead but he is not powerless. So the same would apply to the red peoples beliefs. In Salvation the irony is Hughes ended up losing his faith when the faithful tried to save him. He was a young boy and expected to physically see a man but he did not. Resulting in him deceiving everyone by standing up and saying that he did see Jesus, he was hurt that Jesus did not appear to him.
Tone is the authors attitude. Both Chief Seattles attitude in My People and Hughess attitude in Salvation was bitter and skeptic. Chief Seattle was bitter due to the actions the white people did where as Hughes was bitter because he did not see Jesus when everyone else saw him. As for being skeptic, Chief Seattle was skeptic that the red and white people would ever live together as one because the ways of the white man and the ways of the red men were too different. Hughes was skeptic when he stated (pg 352) ..and I hadnt seen Jesus, and that now I didnt believe there was a Jesus any more, since he didnt come to help me. He did not believe in the truth of his religion.
Chief Seattles My People is a speech and persuasive, Hughess Salvation is a narrative which is descriptive and persuasive. These were two different works but had the same similarities through Parable, Irony and Tone to show the emphasis of the points they portrayed.
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Works Cited
Hughes, Langston Salvation
Chief Seattle My People
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