"Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children"
About this Quote
The subtext is political triage. By centering "our children", Sitting Bull shifts the argument away from pride, revenge, or even immediate victory. He invokes the one constituency that can shame rivals into cooperation and pull a community beyond factional disputes. It is also an implicit critique of leaders who treat conflict as personal legacy: if the measure is children, then performative bravado stops looking like courage and starts looking like negligence.
Context sharpens the stakes. Sitting Bull spoke in the era of U.S. expansion, broken agreements, starvation policies, and the tightening net of reservation confinement. In that landscape, the quote reads less like sentimental futurism and more like an emergency blueprint: if dispossession is engineered, then endurance must be engineered too - through unity, foresight, and cultural continuity. The line endures because it refuses both surrender and romanticism. It insists that the future is a collective project, even when the present is being forcibly reorganized.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
|---|---|
| Source | Later attribution: Dream of a Nation (Tyson Miller, 2011) modern compilationISBN: 9780615482262 · ID: vpwx8P4s9zcC
Evidence:
... Sitting Bull said, “Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children,” let us chart a course of peace and harmony. Let us have the courage, strength, the will and the wisdom to do this for the next seven ... |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Bull, Sitting. (2026, February 28). Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/let-us-put-our-minds-together-and-see-what-life-22551/
Chicago Style
Bull, Sitting. "Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children." FixQuotes. February 28, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/let-us-put-our-minds-together-and-see-what-life-22551/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children." FixQuotes, 28 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/let-us-put-our-minds-together-and-see-what-life-22551/. Accessed 1 Mar. 2026.




