Parenting & Family Quote by Geronimo

Necessity is doing a lot of work in Geronimo's theology. "I cannot think that we are useless" is less a pious reflection than a survival argument, a refusal to accept the colonizer's verdict that Apache life is expendable. He builds a case the way a statesman does: if we exist, there is purpose; if there is purpose, then we have standing. It's metaphysics as political defense.

The line "There is one God looking down on us all" flattens the hierarchy the U.S. military and federal policy tried to impose. One God means no God-sanctioned caste system where "civilized" nations sit closer to the divine than the conquered. "We are all the children of one God" sounds conciliatory, but the subtext is confrontational: if we're siblings, then what you've done to us is not conquest, it's kin-violence.

Then the quote pivots into something more culturally specific and rhetorically canny: "The sun, the darkness, the winds are all listening". That isn't quaint nature-poetry; it's a courtroom. Geronimo calls witnesses older than any treaty and larger than any border. In a world where Apache testimony was routinely dismissed and agreements were broken, he relocates accountability to the elements - an audience that cannot be bribed, deported, or silenced.

Context matters: Geronimo spent years as a prisoner of war and a public spectacle, paraded at fairs and photographed as an emblem of "the last hostile Indian". These sentences push back against that reduction. They claim moral personhood, spiritual equality, and a cosmos attentive enough to remember what governments try to erase.