Wounded Knee Quotes

The whites were always trying to make the Indians give up their life and live like white men – go to farming, work hard and do as they did – and the Indians did not know how to do that, and did not want to anyway…If the Indians had tried to make the whites live like them, the whites would have resisted, and it was the same way with many Indian.

– Ten Bears

Chief Ten Bears (Para-Wa-Samen) of the Tamparika Comanches, in a speech to peace commissioners at Medicine Lodge Council in 1867. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown.

I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there are no enclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls. I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas. I have hunted and lived over that country. I lived like my fathers before me, and, like them, I lived happily.

– Ten Bears

The Tamparika Comanches chief, in a speech to peace commissioners at Medicine Lodge Council in 1867. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown.

When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches. After many summers I walked again and found another race of people had come to take it. How is it? Why is it that the Apaches wait to die – that they carry their lives on their fingernails. They roam over the hills and plains and want the heavens to fall on them. The Apaches were once a great nation; they are now but few, and because of this they want to die and so carry their lives on their fingernails. Many have been killed in battle. You must speak straight so that your words may go as sunlight to our hearts. Tell me, if the Virgin Mary has walked throughout all the land, why has she never entered the wickiups of the Apaches? Why have we never seen or heard her?

I have no father nor mother; I am alone in the world. No one cares for Cochise; that is why I do not care to live, and wish the rocks to fall on me and cover me up. If I had a father and mother like you, I would be with them and they with me.

– Cochise

Apache leader’s plea to live in the mountains made to General Gordon Granger. Cochise was nearly sixty years old here, tired and at the end of the road. Granger was meeting him to talk peace and persuade him and his people to settle on a reservation. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown.

Although wrongs have been done me I live in hopes. I have not got two hearts…Now we are together again to make peace. My shame is as big as the earth, although I will do what my friends advise me to do. I once thought that I was the only man that persevered to be the friend of the white man, but since they have come and cleaned out our lodges, horses, and everything else, it is hard for me to believe white men any more.

– Black Kettle

The prominent chief of the Southern Cheyennes, speaking about suffering of the Indians at the hands of the U.S. government. He is addressing a council called by government commissioners on the Little Arkansas River 1890. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown.

I looked toward the chief’s lodge and saw that Black Kettle had a flag tied to the end of a long lodgepole and was standing in front of his lodge, holding the pole, with the flag fluttering in the gray light of the winter dawn. I heard him call to the people not to be afraid, that the soldiers would not hurt them; then the troops opened fire from two sides of the camp.

– George Bent

Describing the Sand Creek massacre of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians by troops under the command of Colonel John Chivington. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown.

Not all of Anthony’s officers, however, were eager or even willing to join Chivington’s well-planned massacre. Captain Silas Soule, Lieutenant Joseph Cramer, and Lieutenant James Connor protested that an attack on Black Kettle’s peaceful camp would violate the pledge of safety given the Indians by both Wynkoop and Anthony, that it would be murder in every sense of the word, and any officer participating would dishonor the uniform of the Army.

– Dee Brown

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

After the firing the warriors put the squaws and children together, and surrounded them to protect them. I saw five squaws under a bank for shelter. When troops came up to them they ran out and showed their persons, to let the soldiers know they were squaws and begged for mercy, but the soldiers shot them all…There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed, and four or five bucks outside. The squaws offered no resistance. Every one I saw dead was scalped. I saw one squaw cut open with an unborn child, as I thought, lying by her side. Captain Soule afterwards told me that such was the fact. I saw the body of White Antelope with the privates cut off, and I heard a soldier say he was going to make a tobacco pouch out of them. I saw one squaw whose privates had been cut out…I saw quite a number of infants in arms killed with the mothers.

– Robert Bent

The guide who rode with Colonel John Chivington describes the indiscriminate killings and mutilations during the massacre at Sand Creek. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown.

Whose voice was first sounded on this land? The voice of the red people who had but bows and arrows…What has been done in my country I did not want, did not ask for it; white people going through my country…When the white man comes in my country he leaves a trail of blood behind him…I have two mountains in that country – the Black Hills and the Big Horn Mountain. I want the Great Father to make no roads through them. I have told these things three times; now I have come here to tell them the fourth time.

– Red Cloud

The Oglala Sioux chief, in speech to the Secretary of the Interior Jacob Cox in Washington in 1870. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown.

‘I want to say that further you are not a great chief of this country. That you have no following, no power, no control.’ Logan continued, ‘You are on an Indian reservation merely at the sufferance of the government. You are fed by the government, clothed by the government, your children are educated by the government, and all you have and are today is because of the government. If it were not for the government you would be freezing and starving today in the mountains. I merely say these things to notify you that you cannot insult the people of the United States of America or its committees…the government feeds and clothes and educates your children now, and desires to teach you to become farmers, and to civilize you, and make you as white men.’

– Dee Brown

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. Senator John A. Logan, 1883, to Chief Sitting Bull at Standing Rock Indian Reservation.

I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream…the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

– Black Elk

The Lakota Sioux holy man speaking about the Massacre of Wounded Knee. On December 29, 1890, 150-300 Lakota Sioux were killed by U.S. soldiers in the area of Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown.

I was living peacefully with my family, having plenty to eat, sleeping well, taking care of my people, and perfectly contented. I don’t know where those bad stories first came from. There we were doing well and my people well. I was behaving well. I hadn’t killed a horse or man, American or Indian. I don’t know what was the matter with the people in charge of us. They knew this to be so, and yet they said I was a bad man and the worst man there; but what had I done? I was living peacefully there with my family under the shade of the trees, doing just what General Crook had told me I must do and trying to follow his advice. I want to know now who it was ordered me to be arrested. I was praying to the light and to the darkness, to God and to the sun, to let me live quietly there with my family. I don’t know what the reason was that people should speak badly of me. Very often there are stories put in the newspapers that I am to be hanged. I don’t want that anymore. When a man tries to do right, such stories ought not to be put in the newspapers. There are very few of my men left now. They have done some bad things but I want them all rubbed out now and let us never speak of them again. There are very few of us left.

– Geronimo

Speaking at conference with U.S. Army General George Crook in 1886. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown.

Fathers, fathers, fathers, hear me well. Call back your young men from the mountains of the bighorn sheep. They have run over our country; they have destroyed the growing wood and the green grass; they have set fire to our lands. Fathers, your young men have devastated the country and killed my animals, the elk, the deer, the antelope, my buffalo. They do not kill them to eat them; they leave them to rot where they fall. Fathers, if I went into your country to kill your animals, what would you say? Should I not be wrong, and would you not make war on me?

– Bear Tooth

The Crow chief attacks the wanton destruction of the environment and wildlife by his enemy. He is speaking here to the government’s peace commissioners at Fort Laramie. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown.

In a short time a group of commissioners arrived to begin organization of a new Indian agency in the valley. One of them mentioned the advantages of schools for Joseph’s people. Joseph replied that the Nez Percés did not want the white man’s schools.
‘Why do you not want to have schools,’ the commissioner asked.
‘They will teach us to have churches,’ Joseph answered.
‘Do you not want churches?’
‘No, we do not want churches.’
‘Why do you not want churches?’
‘They will teach us to quarrel about God,’ Joseph said. ‘We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that.’

– Dee Brown

Exchange between commissioner sent by U.S. President Grant and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perces. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West.

‘It is too often the case,’ Crook said, ‘that border newspapers…disseminate all sorts of exaggerations and falsehoods about the Indians, which are copied in papers of high character and wide circulation, in other parts of the country, while the Indians’ side of the case is rarely ever heard. In this way the people at large get false ideas with reference to the matter. Then when the outbreak does come public attention is turned to the Indians, their crimes and atrocities are alone condemned, while the persons whose injustice has driven them to this course escape scot-free and are the loudest in their denunciations. No one knows this fact better than the Indian, therefore he is excusable in seeing no justice in a government which only punishes him, while it allows the white man to plunder him as he pleases.’

– George Crook

U.S. Army general. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown
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