26 pages • 52 minutes read
Chief JosephI Will Fight No More Forever
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1877A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Individual and Cultural Survival
Despite being a statement of surrender, the speech asserts the will to survive and endure as a people. Chief Joseph’s opening line, “Tell General Howard I know his heart” (Line 2), is a strategic choice and an important condition of surrender because it refers to a promise to return the Wallowa band to Idaho territory. Though this return to a corner of Nimíipuu lands is a small consolation compared to the lands taken, Joseph knows that his people’s physical and cultural survival after this conflict hinges on return to the lands that are the home of their culture and identity. They know which foods to gather and when they are in season, where to find resources, and where to hunt for game. It is also the place where their elders are buried and the place from which they draw their identity and spiritual power.
Forced relocation to an unfamiliar region, a common practice of the US government during this period, would mean physical and spiritual death. In this sense, Chief Joseph’s opening line is a bargain for survival, not an admission of defeat. In describing the conditions of the camp, Chief Joseph illuminates in stark and spare detail the nearness, not simply of individual deaths, but the annihilation of his people. This is a disaster that he hopes to avert in the act of surrender. When he says, “The old men all are dead” or “It is cold, we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death,” it is easy to interpret those lines as simply an admission of defeat (Lines 3-5). However, it is in these clear acknowledgments of the possibility of annihilation that Chief Joseph recognizes the need to stop the war and hold onto the hope of survival.
Chief Joseph knows that he might escape true defeat if he can ensure the survival of those remaining. He assumes, perhaps correctly, that the generals will keep firing until there is no one left, and that would be a defeat far worse than admitting his warriors are beaten. In declaring, “I want to look for my children and see how many of them I can find” (Line 5), Chief Joseph asks for a truce so that, perhaps contrary to his claim that he will “fight no more forever” (Line 7), he can gather his people and go on fighting peacefully to survive and endure despite the US government’s genocidal policies.
The Burdens of Leadership
Much of the burden of leadership lies in making choices that will impact others, and this burden becomes particularly heavy when the choices will impact future generations. Chief Joseph’s speech illuminates his reasoning as a young leader under extreme duress and subtly defends his choice to surrender to Generals Howard and Miles. Chief Joseph is not a war leader but instead, following his father’s vocation, a diplomat and camp leader. Chief Joseph has experience ensuring peace among his people, negotiating with outsiders, and organizing people in daily matters, not in fleeing 1000 and more miles with a sizable civilian population to protect.
This inexperience and belief in the futility of war with the US were partially why he and his brother, Ollokat, initially complied with General Howard’s eviction orders. However, when the nontreaty bands’ warriors met with the Wallowa band following the raids at Shore Crossing, Joseph feared retaliation from the army and chose to flee with the rest of the warriors. After enduring the siege at Bear Paw, he was faced with the brutal consequences of that choice, not only for himself, but for the people he was responsible for, women, children, and elders who suffered terribly from the cold and lack of food.
The burden is immense, and he admits readily that he is “tired of fighting” and that his “heart is sick and sad” (Line 6). When he details the state of the camp, it is from the perspective of a camp leader and not a warrior. He highlights missing people who have “run away to the hills” (Line 5) and children “freezing to death” without blankets (Line 4). As a camp leader, the burden of correcting the situation lies on his shoulders, now even more so than before because his fellow leaders and elders are dead. However, making a deal with the army is unpopular even among those who remain, as it means formally relinquishing legal claims to ancestral lands and abandoning the relationships forged with that land for the foreseeable future. With a heavy heart he says, “It is the young men who say yes and no,” indicating that the burden of leadership has shifted out of wiser hands (Line 4).
Only a few young and inexperienced leaders hold the power to choose between suffering starvation and the cold or suffering the loss of the land that made them who they are. In claiming that “our chiefs are killed” and “the old men are all dead” (Line 3), Chief Joseph implies that without a council of leaders and the guidance of elders, his choice might well be a poor one. In the end, though, he can see no other way to live on but to lay down arms and surrender. Holding his people’s survival in his hands, he assumes the burden of negotiating an unpopular truce and takes up the responsibility for the consequences of this choice for his people long after they have been imprisoned in Kansas and relocated to Washington. Chief Joseph carried the burden of leadership to his death in 1904, never giving up in his attempts to regain rights to the Wallowa Valley for his people.
Civilian Suffering in an Unjust War
More is at work within Chief Joseph’s words than a simple declaration of surrender. Chief Joseph also provides unflinching testimony to the results of federal policies of the time and the devastating impact these had on Indigenous communities. Through a thematic lens of injustice, the opening line “Tell General Howard I know his heart” becomes an appeal not just to an earlier promise (Line 2), but to a higher moral imperative to avoid bringing further harm and loss to noncombatants. He asks for justice for the civilians in his care, who have committed no acts of war. From Chief Joseph’s perspective, he is not the leader of a band of warriors but the caretaker of a group of refugees fleeing for their lives without supplies or protection from the weather. When he says, “We are cold, we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death,” and “the old men all are dead” (Line 3-4), Chief Joseph is not simply stating a fact but reminding the generals that they are pursuing, shelling, and laying siege to civilians, which is a war crime.
When he tells Howard “I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find” (Lines 5-6), he means literally missing children who never took up arms. His daughter is among those missing children, and he is candid in his belief that he will find many of these children “among the dead” (Line 5). The loss of civilian life Chief Joseph describes is not an inevitable outcome of war, but the result of choices made by the army to drive a people from their homeland, pursue them across the country, and corner them at the start of winter. The consequences of such actions are made clear in Chief Joseph’s spare but vivid accounting of the conditions at his camp.
