You may have encountered the famous "The earth is out mother" speech attributed to Chief Seattle. Maybe you got it in an e-mail. Maybe you read it in the children's book, Brother Eagle, Sister Sky: A Message from Chief Seattle. Perhaps you heard or read it in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

The inconvenient truth here is that while the words are real, Chief Seattle never spoke them. They were penned by a screeenwriter in 1971, over a hundred years after Seattle died, for an ecology film.