Time & Perspective Quote by Sitting Bull

The blunt rhythm of Sitting Bull's line does more than protest a single demand; it exposes a system. "They want us" starts with an unignorable plural: power is not a lone villain but an organized machine - officials, settlers, soldiers, treaties, and paperwork all moving in the same direction. The phrase "another chunk" is doing quiet, devastating work. It shrinks sacred, lived territory into something that can be sliced, measured, and traded, mocking the colonial habit of treating land as a commodity. Sitting Bull repeats that language without accepting its morality, letting the ugliness of the transaction speak for itself.

Then comes the real weapon: time. "This is not the first time or the last time" turns grievance into pattern recognition. It's not a negotiation; it's a script. The subtext is that concessions don't buy peace, they teach the other side how cheaply more can be taken. By framing loss as serial, Sitting Bull denies the myth that each treaty is a fresh start. He points to the historical reality Native nations were pushed into: boundaries drawn, redrawn, then erased as soon as they became inconvenient.

As a statesman, he's also rallying internal unity. The line is calibrated to harden resolve by stripping away hope in "reasonable" compromise. It's not despair; it's diagnosis - and the implicit call is to stop treating dispossession as an event and start treating it as policy.