Fatherhood Quote by Sitting Bull

“Great Father” lands like a polite bow with a knife hidden inside it. Sitting Bull borrows the U.S. government’s own paternal nickname for the president and flips it into an indictment: this so-called father demands land the way a guardian raids a child’s inheritance. The opening “Therefore” signals that he’s not reacting emotionally or impulsively; he’s issuing a conclusion, a statesman’s verdict after evidence has been laid out. That formality matters. It positions the Lakota not as petitioners pleading for mercy, but as a political nation making a final refusal.

The intent is blunt: no negotiation over territorial surrender. But the subtext is sharper. “Any proposition” rejects the entire framework of treaty-making as it had come to function on the Plains: agreements drafted under duress, revised when gold is found, enforced with soldiers when signatures aren’t enough. By refusing even to “consider,” he denies legitimacy to a process designed to funnel Native sovereignty into administrative paperwork.

“Tribal holdings” is also a strategic phrase. It translates a complex relationship to land into the language the U.S. claims to respect: property, title, holdings. He speaks across the cultural gap without surrendering the core point: this land is not the government’s to portion out. The line carries the weight of an era when “cession” was a euphemism for starvation policy, confinement, and the slow dismantling of a people’s future. The power here is that the sentence is calm. The stakes aren’t.