"God made me an Indian"
About this Quote
A sentence this short can still carry a whole political universe. When Sitting Bull says, "God made me an Indian", he is not offering a private confession of faith; he is issuing a public claim of legitimacy that no treaty, census, or boarding school can revoke. The power is in the grammar: God is the author, "Indian" is the finished fact, and Sitting Bull is the living evidence. If identity is divine workmanship, then assimilation becomes more than policy - it becomes sacrilege.
In the late 19th century, U.S. expansion increasingly framed Native nations as a "problem" to be managed through relocation, starvation rations, Christianization, and the erasure of language and ceremony. Sitting Bull answers that machine with a logic the colonizing state itself often invoked: providence. He flips the dominant culture's favorite argument - that God is on the side of conquest - into a refusal. If the Creator made him Lakota, then the demand to become something else is not civilization; it is theft dressed as moral instruction.
The subtext is also strategic. By grounding identity in the sacred, he sidesteps the colonizer's courtroom categories (citizen, ward, savage) and relocates the debate to a higher jurisdiction. The line is simple enough to travel, memorable enough to become a slogan, and absolute enough to end negotiation. It's a boundary drawn in one breath: you can take land, you can break promises, but you cannot unmake what God has made.
In the late 19th century, U.S. expansion increasingly framed Native nations as a "problem" to be managed through relocation, starvation rations, Christianization, and the erasure of language and ceremony. Sitting Bull answers that machine with a logic the colonizing state itself often invoked: providence. He flips the dominant culture's favorite argument - that God is on the side of conquest - into a refusal. If the Creator made him Lakota, then the demand to become something else is not civilization; it is theft dressed as moral instruction.
The subtext is also strategic. By grounding identity in the sacred, he sidesteps the colonizer's courtroom categories (citizen, ward, savage) and relocates the debate to a higher jurisdiction. The line is simple enough to travel, memorable enough to become a slogan, and absolute enough to end negotiation. It's a boundary drawn in one breath: you can take land, you can break promises, but you cannot unmake what God has made.
Quote Details
| Topic | Native American Sayings |
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