Daily Inspiration Quote by Sitting Bull

A radical leveling hides inside this plain sentence. “Each man” flattens the usual hierarchies of empire: no separate moral accounting for “civilized” and “savage,” no special exemption for the nation that arrives with flags, rifles, and a Bible. Sitting Bull’s phrasing doesn’t plead for inclusion in someone else’s moral order; it asserts an older, parallel jurisdiction. The Great Spirit isn’t a metaphor meant to reassure white officials. It’s a sovereign reference point, a way of saying: our ethics don’t require your approval, and your conquest doesn’t confer spiritual superiority.

The line also works as a quiet rebuke to the logic that justified U.S. expansion in the 19th century. Assimilation campaigns and treaty-breaking were routinely dressed up as moral improvement. By insisting that “each man is good” in the sight of a higher power, Sitting Bull undercuts the premise that Native people needed saving, remaking, or managing. It’s moral counter-propaganda: simple enough to travel, sharp enough to wound.

Context matters. Sitting Bull spoke as a Hunkpapa Lakota leader navigating a world of broken treaties, military pressure, and the state’s insistence that Indigenous nations dissolve into wards and reservations. The sentence reads like diplomacy with teeth: dignified, universal on its face, and strategically disarming. If every person is already seen as “good,” then the real question shifts to the invaders’ conduct. The subtext is an indictment: who, exactly, is failing the Great Spirit’s standard?