The great Lakota Sioux Chief 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.
3 Comments
I don’t think I’ve ever heard the nature of our society described so well. I fear that we shall ultimately succumb to that disease, and perhaps do greater damage to the very planet that sustained us so generously.
Dear Mr. Wilson,
I was going through a tape I bought just after 911 that was held up at the Canadian border for 2 years, entitled: “What I learned About American foreign Policy”; basically…as I am sure you’re aware, a collection of PBS documentaries that paints a pretty dismal picture of the U.S when they’re all stung together. I’ve watched this thing many times, and I was sure that you were killed when you tried to stop that train! Please forgive the oversight, you are one of my heros sir, along with people like Rachel Corey, and Oscar Romero. (who is still being deliberately omitted from Texas history books, I recently heard!) I just got tired of watching “the boob tube”, and thought I’d google John Stockwell, Ramsay Clark, Amy Goodman, you, and see if I could find out what’s happened to Manuel Noriega! (fat chance!)
Yours in the struggle!!! God bless you!
Truly, Mose Stephenson
I grew up with ‘Skyhawk’ of the BlackFeet Tribe in Oregon. He has many stories (He’s traveled the world telling these stories to other culture’s as they sat in disbelief)from his grandfather and great-grandfather telling of killings by the white man, tribe’s destroyed for land and control, and Diseases given to them by those who INVADED their country. wow, 2000-2008 we return to 1700. History does repeat itself…Madness! Insanity!!! James, California, Italy, Germany, France, Canada and with terminal cancer ‘darkness soon’. Great! I am ready to get out of here. truly.