He was a close friend. Arrowsmith's version hinted at how difficult it was for Seattle to understand the white man's attitude toward land, water, air, and animals. For the soundtrack for a documentary I had already proposed about the environment, I decided to write a new version, elaborating on and heightening what was hinted at in Arrowsmith's text ... While it would be easy to hide behind the producer's decision, without my permission, to delete my "Written by" credit when the film was finished and aired on television, the real problem is that I should not have used the name of an actual human being, Chief Seattle. That I could put words into the mouth of someone I did not know, particularly a Native American, is pure hubris if not racist. While there has been some progress in our knowledge of Native Americans, we really know very little. What we think we know is mediated by films, chance encounters, words, images and other stereotypes. They serve our worldview but they are not true. It turns out that the producer, John Stevens, had added a lot of elements to make the speech compatible with Baptist theology, including the words "I am a savage and do not understand." Stevens said:  I edited the speech to fit our needs [Baptists] more closely. There was no apple pie and motherhood and so I added the references to God and I am a savage to make the Radio and Television Commission happy ... I had edited scripts that did not have the Baptists' line dozens of times. This needed to be done so they could justify spending thousands of dollars on a film ... I eventually quit my job as a producer because I got tired of shoehorning those interests into scripts. The version of Chief Seattle's speech edited by Stevens was then made into a poster and 18,000 copies were sent out as a promotion for the movie. The movie itself sank without a trace, but this newest and most fictional version of Chief Seattle's speech became the most widely known, as it became disseminated within the environmentalist movement of the 1970s — now in the form of a "letter to the President" (see below). In 1993 Nancy Zussy, a librarian at Washington State University, analyzed the versions of Chief Seattle's speech (or "letter") which were then in circulation. She identified four major textual variants, which she ascribed to four authors as follows:  A similar controversy surrounds a purported 1855 letter from Seattle to President Franklin Pierce, which has never been located and, based on internal evidence, is described by historian Jerry L. Clark as ""an unhistorical artifact of someone's fertile literary imagination"".