Justice & Law Quote by Sitting Bull

The brilliance of Sitting Bull's barrage of questions is that it refuses the courtroom the U.S. state has built around him. He doesn’t plead; he cross-examines. Each line forces a settler audience to confront a mismatch between the charges implied by conquest and the evidence of character they claim to respect. “What white man has ever seen me drunk?” isn’t just moral housekeeping; it’s an indictment of the colonial stereotype that framed Indigenous people as undisciplined and therefore governable. He pulls the argument onto ground the occupiers think is neutral: sobriety, hospitality, restraint, adherence to law.

But the subtext cuts deeper. By specifying “white man,” Sitting Bull exposes the real standard at work: credibility only counts when it is witnessed, validated, and recorded by the colonizer. He meets that standard, then turns it against them. The questions about feeding the hungry and not abusing family function as a deliberate inversion of “civilization” rhetoric. He claims the virtues settlers publicly preach, implying that the violence and disorder they project onto him are, in fact, theirs.

“What law have I broken?” lands as both a challenge and a trap. Under U.S. expansion, “law” is less a shared social contract than a moving border: statutes follow the flag. Sitting Bull’s point is that he is being punished not for crime but for refusing assimilation and resisting dispossession. The power of the passage is its clarity: the state wants him guilty because it needs him legible as a criminal, not as a leader defending a nation.