Our love of possession is our disease.
The great Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux holy man Sitting Bull resisted forced settlement on reservations in the 1870s. In 1877, after he defeated General Custer at Little Bighorn, he decided to migrate to Canada. He had mixed feelings about such migration as he pronounced the following words:
“Behold my brothers, the Spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love!
Every seed is awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land.
Yet, hear me, people, we have now to deal with another race – small and feeble when our fathers first met them but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.
They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. The nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all that 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 away from us. My brothers, shall we submit or shall we say to them: “First kill me before you take possession of my Fatherland…”
Our love of possession is our disease.
Source
How did you get this quote. I guess I mean how do you know that tatanka iyotake said these words? Who was the translator also??
Winona
good point, where are the refferences?
http://entersection.com/posts/author/charles_alexander_eastman
Charles Alexander Eastman, "Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains", (Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown, and Company, 1918), p. 119.
You guys are on computers and you have to ask for more info? There are about 14000 links to study on just Google alone
Who cares what the source of the quote is? The statements contained therein are so absolutely incredibly true, how can you miss them????!!!!!
and sitting bull spoke the truth about this subject
Thank you Anonymous. How many times shall we bind ourselves in academic arguments (not that it isn't important to analyze the sources of our info)...? Instead of looking at the big picture - colonization was and is destruction, not progress.
The sentence which most bothers me is "They even take tithes of the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule." This would require a fairly deep understanding of Western culture to make at all - the very concept of tithes would be difficult to express in Lakota, because the idea is so foreign, AFAICT. Also, it's something a Sioux warrior would have been very unlikely to encounter at that time/place. While there's a reasonable chance that Tatanka Iyotake learned about it when he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1885/86, after living among Whites, it is also almost certain that he did NOT know it, nor would have said it, in 1877 after the Battle of the Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn.)
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Colonization as someone above called it is a natural occurrence when ever populations thrive and grow. No doubt that the Chief said many similar things and may have even said this exactly as it's easy to see how that could have been his words and perspective. It's sad in one sense and not so sad in another since if the Native American/White clash would have happened just a few centuries earlier there likely wouldn't have been enough of the Natives left to tell about it as most things, especially war, was much more brutal then. Happily there was some so called civilized behaviors being cultivated and espoused so therefore we ended up with surviving remnants of the one larger populations and subsequently reservations, etc. sad as that is. Any way you cut it our native Americans, in the past, were not dealt with in what would now be considered a fair manner at all and far too often were treated very sadly indeed.
Matters not wither those were Sitting Bull's exact words or not, the message and reality are still true. Sitting Bull was a very wise man, I do believe he said this and understood the Europeans and New Americans far better than they understand themselves.
It is time for the People of the Earth to reclaim their birthright of Freedom. Freedom to move freely about the Earth. Corrupt governments and other thieves that have stolen our birthright, made invisible lines on the Earth and placed imaginary debt, not only on us, but on our unborn children and grandchildren. They have already been sold in to slavery before drawing their first breath. It is only by joining together in the spirit of cooperation that we can remove the invisible chains and shackles of Roman Law. Wake up recognize that money is not even worth the paper it is written on, nor are treaties, or the title of your home, we are no different than Feudal England and we don't even see it, but Sitting Bull did.
The Earth belongs to no one, except Herself and The Creator, but is the home of all people, not just the rich, powerful and armed.
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no one really has to even go into a church to feel the greedy controlling attitudes that prevail throughout christianity. Jesus would certainly not approve of such malpractice of the human conscious. comment by Bullfrogs Blues, prophet of light life and love
The wild west was not wild until the comming of the whites. The history of the american conquest is well documented. What one said verbatum doe's not change the facts.