Fatherhood Quote by Sitting Bull

Sitting Bull turns the courtroom of American morality back on its self-appointed judges. The string of questions is not hesitation; it is a rhetorical trap. Each line forces the listener to hear how absurd the charge sounds when translated into plain human loyalty: loving your family, honoring your birthplace, defending your nation. By the time he reaches "wicked", the word has been stripped of its religious authority and exposed as a political label, slapped onto Indigenous resistance to make conquest feel like virtue.

The subtext is a devastating double standard. Patriotism is celebrated when it wears the uniform of the United States, but criminalized when it lives in a Sioux body. Sitting Bull’s genius is that he doesn’t ask for special treatment; he asks for consistent terms. If devotion is noble, then it can’t become "wrong" the moment the subject is Native. His repetition of "because" mimics an indictment, as if the prosecution’s case is nothing more than identity itself: skin, nation, geography, ancestry.

The context is the late-19th-century machinery of removal, treaty-breaking, and forced assimilation, when federal policy treated Indigenous sovereignty as an obstacle to be managed. Calling Sioux defense "wicked" wasn’t just rhetoric; it was a tool that cleared the moral ground for violence, confinement, and land theft. Sitting Bull’s questions refuse that erasure. They insist that the Sioux possess what the U.S. claims to revere: a country, a people, and the right to love them without apology.