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Sitting Bull

13 quotes

“This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that from us also. My brothers, shall we submit? or shall we say to them: ‘First kill me, before you can take possession of my fatherland!’”
Sitting Bull (1831–1890) said by 1890 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted by Charles Eastman, Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains (1918)
“Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love! Every seed is awakened, and all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land.”
Sitting Bull (1831–1890) said by 1890 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted by Charles Eastman, Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains (1918)
“You come here to tell us lies, but we don't want to hear them. If we told you more, you would have paid no attention. That is all I have to say.”
Sitting Bull (1831–1890) said by 1890 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As recorded by reporters covering a speech made by Sitting Bull to U.S. military officers at a conference between the military and the Sioux who had retreated to Canada. Published in Utley, Robert M. The Lance and the S…
“I hardly sustain myself beneath the weight of white men's blood that I have shed. The whites provoked the war; their injustices, their indignities to our families, the cruel, unheard of and wholly unprovoked massacre at Fort Lyon … shook all the veins which bind and support me. I rose, tomahawk in hand, and I have done all the hurt to the whites that I could.”
Sitting Bull (1831–1890) first seen 1868 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Recorded by the Jesuit priest Pierre-Jean De Smet after a council with Sitting Bull on June 19,1868. Published in Utley, Robert M. The Lance and the Shield. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993. p. 79-80.
“I have killed, robbed, and injured too many white men to believe in a good peace. They are medicine, and I would eventually die a lingering death. I had rather die on the field of battle.”
Sitting Bull (1831–1890) first seen 1867 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Recorded by Charles Larpenteur at Fort Union in 1867. Published in Utley, Robert M. The Lance and the Shield. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993. p. 73.
“Look at me, see if I am poor, or my people either. The whites may get me at last, as you say, but I will have good times till then. You are fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of fat bacon, some hard-tack, and a little sugar and coffee.”
Sitting Bull (1831–1890) first seen 1867 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Also told to Charles Larpenteur at Fort Union in 1867. Published in Utley, Robert M. The Lance and the Shield. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993. p. 73.
“I am nothing, neither a chief nor a soldier.”
Sitting Bull (1831–1890) first seen 1877 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Recorded by a reporter after Sitting Bull's retreat to Canada after being defeated in the Black Hills War, originally published in the New York Herald on November 16, 1877. Published in Utley, Robert M. The Lance and th…
“This is a good day to die. Follow me!”
Sitting Bull (1831–1890) first seen 1876 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rallying cry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn (25 June 1876), quoted in Campaigns of General Custer in the North-west by Judson Elliott Walker
“I will remain what I am until I die, a hunter, and when there are no buffalo or other game I will send my children to hunt and live on prairie, for where an Indian is shut up in one place his body becomes weak.”
Sitting Bull (1831–1890) first seen 1879 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Recorded by James M. Walsh, inspector in the Northwest Territory of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, at a conference with Sitting Bull on March 23, 1879. Published in Utley, Robert M. The Lance and the Shield. New Yor…
“I am here by the will of the Great Spirit, and by his will I am chief.… I want to tell you that if the Great Spirit has chosen anyone to be the chief of this country, it is myself.”
Sitting Bull (1831–1890) first seen 1883 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Testimony to the Dawes Commission (22 August 1883)
“Because I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans; in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit. It is not necessary, that eagles should be crows.”
Sitting Bull (1831–1890) said by 1890 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Vine Deloria, God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. Golden, Colo: Fulcrum Pub, 2003, cited to Virginia Armstrong, I have spoken; American history through the voices of the Indians. Chicago, Sage Books, 1971.
“Yet hear me, friends! W have now to deal with another people, small and feeble when our forefathers first met with them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possessions is a disease in them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break, but the poor may not! They have a religion in which the poor worship, but the rich will not! They even take tithes of the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They compel her to produce out of season, and when sterile she is made to take medicine in order to produce again. All this is sacrilege.”
Sitting Bull (1831–1890) said by 1890 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted by Charles Eastman, Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains (1918)
“For 64 years you have kept me and my people and treated us bad. What have we done that you should want us to stop? We have done nothing. It is all the people on your side that have started us to do all these depredations. We could not go anywhere else, and so we took refuge in this country. It was on this side of the country we learned to shoot, and that is the reason why I came back to it again. I would like to know why you came here. In the first place, I did not give you the country, but you followed me from one place to another, so I had to leave and come over to this country. I was born and raised in this country with the Red River Half-Breeds, and I intend to stop with them. I was raised hand in hand with the Red River Half Breeds, and we are going over to that part of the country, and that; is the reason why I have come over here. That is the way I was raised, in the hands of these people here, and that is the way I intend to be with them. You have got ears, and you have got eyes to see with them, and you see how I live with these people. You see me? Here I am! If you think I am a fool you are a bigger fool than I am. This house is a medicine-house. Yon come here to tell us lies, but we don't want to hear them. I don't wish any such language used to me; that is, to tell me such lies in my great Mother's house. Don't you say two more words. Go back home where you came from. This country is mine, and I intend to stay here, and to raise this country full of grown people. See these people here. We were raised with them.”
Sitting Bull (1831–1890) first seen 1877 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sitting Bull speaking to the U.S. Secretary of War & Secretary of the Interior, as recorded by the Northwest Mounted Police, Fort Walsh, Saskatchewan, Canada p. 9 (18 October 1877)