Red Jacket

Red Jacket (known as Otetiani in his youth and Sagoyewatha(Keeper Awake) Sa-go-ye-wa-tha after 1780 because of his oratorical skills) (c. 1750–January 20, 1830) was a Native American Seneca orator and chief of the Wolf clan. He negotiated on behalf of his nation with the new United States after the American Revolutionary War, when the Seneca as British allies were forced to cede much land, and signed the Treaty of Canandaigua (1794). He helped secure some Seneca territory in New York state, although most of the people had migrated to Canada for resettlement after the defeat of the British.

His talk on "Religion for the White Man and the Red" (1805) has been preserved as an example of his great oratorical style.

Read more about Red Jacket:  Life, Speech To The U.S. Senate, Honors and Legacy

Famous quotes containing the words red and/or jacket:

    Iconic clothing has been secularized.... A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.
    Angela Carter (1940–1992)

    Old age begins in the nursery, and before the young American is put into jacket and trowsers, he says, “I want something which I never saw before” and “I wish I was not I.”
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)