Sitting Bull Quotes

This land was our land; it was taken from us illegally …. John Smith did not bring a civilization here. There was already civilization here…. We should have burned the boat and killed them. all.

My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon. So long as they occupy and cultivate it they have a right to the soil. Nothing can be sold but such things as can be carried away.

The land was ours before we belonged to the land.

We have looked back, and remembered how the Yorkers purchased our lands in former times. They bought them, piece after piece – for a little money paid to a few men in our nation, and not all our brethren – until our planting and hunting grounds have become very small, and if we sell them, we know not where to spread our blankets.

The white people have no right to take the land from the Indians, because they had it first; it is theirs. They may sell, but all must join. Any sale not made by all is not valid.

When I was a boy, the Sioux owned the world. The sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them?

I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.

The white race were a land-loving people, and had a right to possess it because they used it according to the intentions of the Creator.

Our land is our memory.

One does not sell the land upon which the people walk.

When the white man came we had the land and they had the Bibles; now they have the land and we have the Bibles.

What is this you call property? It cannot be the earth for the land is our mother… How can one man say it belongs only to him?

Have we, the first holders of this prosperous region, no longer a share in your history? Glad were your fathers to sit down upon the threshold of the long house. Had our forefathers spurned you from it, when the French were thundering at the opposite side to get a passage through, and drive you into the sea, whatever has been the fate of other Indians, the Iroquois might still have been a nation, and I, instead of pleading here for the privilege of living within your borders, I – might have had a country.

By the latter part of the last century, the Indians finally realized that … treaties were real-estate deals designed to separate them from their lands.

When I was here before, the President gave me my country, and I put my stake down in a good place, and there I want to stay.... You speak of another country, but it is not my country; it does not concern me, and I want nothing to do with it. I was not born there.... If it is such a good country, you ought to send the white men now in our country there and let us alone...

Brothers, the white men are not friends to the Indians: at first, they only asked for land sufficient for a wigwam; now, nothing will satisfy them but the whole of our hunting grounds, from the rising to the setting sun. Brothers, the white men want more than our hunting grounds; they wish to kill our old men, women, and little ones.

The whites didn’t really steal the land, because the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves

The Indians are acknowledged to have an unquestionable … right to the lands they occupy.

You cannot turn the clock back, you cannot give the island of Manhattan back to the indigenous, but on the other hand, you can ensure that the indigenous can maintain their way of life.

Sundance started with two acres back in 1963 that I bought from a sheepherder for $500. What has happened, I could see development starting to descend on the state of Utah. I thought I had better acquire more land to protect it. I thought that would probably be my legacy, to protect land.

We accept it as normal that people who have never been on the land, who have no history or connection to the country, may legally secure the right to come in and, by the very nature of their enterprises, leave in their wake a cultural and physical landscape utterly transformed and desecrated. What's more, in granting such mining concessions, often initially for trivial sums to speculators from distant cities, companies cobbled together with less history than my dog, the government places no cultural or market value on the land itself.

Give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years' lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert.

I have, for many years past, contemplated the noble races of red men who are now spread over these trackless forests and boundless prairies, melting away at the approach of civilization. Their rights invaded, their morals corrupted, their lands wrested from them, their customs changed, and therefore lost to the world; and they at last sunk into the earth, and the ploughshare turning the sod over their graves, and I have flown to their rescue--not of their lives or of their race (for they are "doomed" and must perish), but to the rescue of their looks and their modes, at which the acquisitive world may hurl their poison and every besom of destruction, and trample them down and crush them to death

Whose voice was first sounded on this land? The voice of the red people who had but bows and arrows... When the white man comes in my country he leaves a trail of blood behind him... I have two mountains in that country... I want the Great Father to make no roads through them.