Sitting Bull
"Hear me, friends! We have now to deal with another people--small and feeble when we first met with them, but now great and overbearing. They till the soil, and the love of possessions is a disease in them. These people have made many rules which the rich may break, but the poor may not! They have a religion in which the poor worship, but the rich do not! They even take tithes of the poor 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 is made to take medicine in order to produce again. All this is sacrilege!
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. only four years ago we made a treaty to keep the white man out of our sacred lands. Now they threaten to take that from us also. My brothers, shall we submit? Or shall we say to them: 'First you must kill me, before you can take possession of my fatherland!