Sitting Bull Quotes

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.

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.

Native Americans have faced centuries of atrocities to their people, their land, and their culture - all under various presidents who took an oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Indigenous peoples was messed over. It was like a tradition here. We broke every treaty with them that ever was written. I think Andrew Jackson wanted to wipe them out.

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.

Since its inception, the government has broken and coerced treaties with hundreds of Native American tribes. And this is even worse when you realize that the native peoples of this land are negotiating for land that is, by all common sense and elementary school logic, their land.

The Cherokees tried to do everything within the law and wished only to live in peace on their own lands. Yet they were cheated out of their birthright and treated as if they were less than human.

The whole Indian thing, I always say it's really the American holocaust. It's something we need to look at.

In the end, there is no absence of irony: the integrity of what is sacred to Native Americans will be determined by the government that has been responsible for doing everything in its power to destroy Native American cultures.

Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly receding tide that will never return. The white man's God cannot love our people, or He would protect them.

The name 'reservation' has a negative connotation among Native Americans - an intern camp of sorts.

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.

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.

In Brazil, the history of the interaction between blancos and indios - whites and Indians - often reads like an extended epitaph. Tribes were wiped out by disease and massacres; languages and songs were obliterated.

As a Cherokee, I can attest to the fact that Native Americans have been on the losing side of history. Our rights have been infringed upon, our treaties have been broken, our culture has been stolen, and our tribes have been decimated at the hands of our own United States government.

I can't imagine what it must be like to be one of the indigenous people of the United States of America. I can't imagine watching the news every day - as people debate whose country this is and who should be in charge of it and how to make it great again - and hardly ever see your people brought into the discussion.

I already knew, from church, that this place was raped and pillaged by Spaniards and the Pilgrims. "Don't sit here and try to tell me that they broke bread together, brother.

The Mohawks have on all occasions shown their zeal and loyalty to the Great King; yet they have been very badly treated by his people.

Step by step a powerful and enterprising race has driven them back from the Atlantic to the West until at last there is scarcely a spot of ground upon which the Indians have any certainty of maintaining a permanent abode.

General Howard informed me, in a haughty spirit, that he would give my people 30 days to go back home, collect all their stock, and move onto the reservation.

The Native American side was tragic. It's just unbelievable what has happened to them.

Natives had to be made tame, to the gun.

…the native races, whose land it was long before we came here

No acid ever worked more mechanically on a vegetable fiber than the white man acted on the Indian. As the line of American settlements approached, the nearest Indian tribes withered away.

Whole Indian nations have melted away like snowballs in the sun before the white man's advance. They leave scarcely a name of our people except those wrongly recorded by their destroyers.