Daily Inspiration Quote by Black Elk

“I cured with the power that came through me” is a masterclass in authority without ego. Black Elk stakes a claim to real efficacy - he cured - then immediately reroutes the source of that efficacy away from personal dominance. The grammar does the cultural work: the verb is active, but the power is passive, arriving “through” him rather than “from” him. In one line, he defines leadership as a conduit role, not a conquest.

The subtext is corrective, aimed at two audiences at once. Inside his own community, it keeps a healer from tipping into vanity or spiritual coercion; the medicine person is accountable to forces larger than the self, and success is never proof of individual superiority. Outside it, the phrasing quietly resists the colonial obsession with the lone genius and the Western habit of treating Indigenous spiritual practice as either superstition or performance. Black Elk’s power is not a trick he owns, and not a credential he can cash in. It is relational.

Context sharpens the stakes. Black Elk lived through the crushing of Lakota life: Wounded Knee, forced assimilation, the shrinking of ceremonial space, and the long afterlife of outsiders collecting Native testimony like artifacts. Against that backdrop, “came through me” reads like both humility and defiance. It preserves a cosmology in which healing is communal and sacred, even when the surrounding world is designed to make that cosmology illegal, invisible, or “quaint.” The line works because it’s simultaneously personal witness and political theology: a declaration that something still moves, despite everything trying to stop it.