Talk:Red Jacket

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Why is Red Jacket characterized as having been an apologist for the native religion? If you read the speech, you can see that it's dripping with sarcasm and is in fact a scathing indictment of whites as liars, murderers and cheats, and an outright rebuke and rejection of a religion he sees as at best an inferior one that doesn't prevent the hypocracy of its believers being such murderes and cheats, and at worst being just another way to defraud and victimize the natives.

Refer to the traditional meaning of apologetics, not the contemporary sense of apologizing, and that's exactly what he's doing. Pollinator 16:35, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

I came away with a completely different take on the speech. I first heard the speech as a podcast and was moved by the articulate refusal of the white man's religion. In the version I heard, there was no position taken on which religion was inferior - just the opposite: he claims one religion suits the red man and the other suits the white man. While he certainly held nothing back on how the white man had treated his people, it did not come across as scathing, rather as simple statement of fact. Maybe it was just in the way it was read. See the article for the link to the audio. Dougsta 13:32, 3 May 2007 (UTC)