War & Peace Quote by Red Cloud

A lifetime of watching treaties get rewritten into dispossession will teach you what “riches” really buys. When Red Cloud says, “We do not want riches, we want peace and love,” he’s not offering a soft, pastoral plea. He’s issuing a hard-nosed political correction to the language Americans used to justify taking Lakota land: development, prosperity, progress. “Riches” is the colonizer’s metric, a bait word that turns theft into opportunity and starvation into “civilization.” By rejecting it outright, Red Cloud refuses the premise that Native survival should be negotiated in the currency of someone else’s economy.

The line works because it flips the usual power dynamic. The United States positioned itself as the dispenser of benefits: rations, payments, “gifts,” the thin cash value assigned to homelands. Red Cloud’s “we” answers with collective clarity: what you’re offering is not what we asked for, and it won’t repair what you’ve broken. The phrase “peace and love” reads almost disarmingly plain, but in context it’s a demand for sovereignty and safety: peace as an end to military pressure and settler invasion; love as the right to maintain kinship systems, ceremony, and a future that isn’t managed by distant agents.

As a statesman who forced the U.S. into the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868 after Red Cloud’s War, he understood leverage. This sentence is leverage in miniature: moral high ground sharpened into policy terms, stripping the empire’s bribes of their legitimacy.