Based on the complete question, we can see that the speech made by Chief Joseph in 1879 was to discuss the plights of the Native Americans and also to show how unfair the US government was treating them. In 1879, the Indian "Napoleon" as he was known, was invited to speak before cabinet members, congressmen and diplomats in Washington D.C. "I cannot understand how the Government sends a man out to fight us, as it did General Miles, and then breaks his word. it discusses the unequal treatment of american indians by the us government. One of the many issues he brings up is about the treatment of his people. we shall be all alike—brothers of one father and mother, with one sky above us and one country around us and one government for all. Too-hul-hul-sote is dead. Words do not pay for my dead people. Interpretation of the idiom "hold our own" in a speech to Congress in ... How Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce became a hero of ... - Slate Magazine On October 5, 1877, his. What is historically significant about this 1879 speech by Chief Joseph? The following is a transcript of Chief Joseph's surrender, as recorded by Lieutenant Wood, Twenty-first Infantry, acting aide-de-camp and acting adjutant-general to General Oliver O. Howard, in 1877. In one of many appeals to Congress on behalf of his people, Chief Joseph made this speech in 1879 in Washington D.C. When Joseph emerged as an advocate for his people, he was one of many Nez Perce leaders spread across the far-flung autonomous bands, outranked by older men who had long experience hunting buffalo . In his speech, he speaks from the Indian's perspective of how they are treated and handled. The leader of one band of the Nez Perce people, Chief Joseph was born Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt in 1840 in the Wallowa Valley in what is now Oregon.