Friday Filosophy v.06.03.2022
Friday Filosophy v.06.03.2022
Sitting Bull (Lakota: Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake(c. 1831 – December 15, 1890) was a Hunkpapa Lakota leader who led his people during years of resistance against United States government policies. He was killed by Indian agency police on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation during an attempt to arrest him, at a time when authorities feared that he would join the Ghost Dance movement.[
Before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull had a vision in which he saw many soldiers, “as thick as grasshoppers,” falling upside down into the Lakota camp, which his people took as a foreshadowing of a major victory in which many soldiers would be killed. About three weeks later, the confederated Lakota tribes with the Northern Cheyenne defeated the 7th Cavalry under Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer on June 25, 1876, annihilating Custer’s battalion and seeming to bear out Sitting Bull’s prophetic vision. Sitting Bull’s leadership inspired his people to a major victory. In response, the U.S. government sent thousands more soldiers to the area, forcing many of the Lakota to surrender over the next year. Sitting Bull refused to surrender, and in May 1877, he led his band north to Wood Mountain, North-Western Territory (now Saskatchewan). He remained there until 1881, at which time he and most of his band returned to U.S. territory and surrendered to U.S. forces.
After working as a performer with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, Sitting Bull returned to the Standing Rock Agency in South Dakota. Due to fears that he would use his influence to support the Ghost Dance movement, Indian Service agent James McLaughlin at Fort Yates ordered his arrest. During an ensuing struggle between Sitting Bull’s followers and the agency police, Sitting Bull was shot in the side and head by Standing Rock policemen Lieutenant Bull Head (Tatankapah, Lakota) and Red Tomahawk (Marcelus Chankpidutah, Lakota: Čhaŋȟpí Dúta), after the police were fired upon by Sitting Bull’s supporters. His body was taken to nearby Fort Yates for burial. In 1953, his Lakota family exhumed what were believed to be his remains, reburying them near Mobridge, South Dakota, near his birthplace.
- 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!
- Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children.
- 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.
- Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possessions is a disease in them.
- If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man, he would have made me so in the first place.
- Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Sioux? Because I was born where my father lived? Because I would die for my people and my country?
- 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?
- What white man can say I never stole his land or a penny of his money? Yet they say that I am a thief.
- 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.
- The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it.
- There are things they tell us that sound good to hear, but when they have accomplished their purpose, they will go home and will not try to fulfill our agreements with them.
- If I agree to dispose of any part of our land to the white people, I would feel guilty of taking food away from our children’s mouths, and I do not wish to be that mean.
- What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken? Not one.
- What white woman, however lonely, was ever captive or insulted by me? Yet they say I am a bad Indian.
- What white man has ever seen me drunk? Who has ever come to me hungry and left me unfed?
- Who has seen me beat my wives or abuse my children? What law have I broken?
- God made me an Indian.
The Time is Now.