Success Quote by Black Elk

A whole worldview pivots on the word "gift": the bison are not a resource to be managed but a sacred endowment that organizes economy, ritual, diet, kinship, and dignity. Black Elk’s line carries the gravity of a leader speaking after the fact, when prophecy and memory collapse into the same terrible clarity. “I know now” is doing heavy work: it signals hindsight earned through catastrophe, the kind that arrives only when the old order has been forcibly unmade.

The subtext is grief that refuses to become nostalgia. He names the bison as “our strength,” then, almost without ornament, accepts the impending loss: “we should lose them.” That phrasing is devastatingly restrained, as if the sentence itself is practicing the discipline survival will demand. In historical context, it echoes the systematic destruction of bison herds in the late 19th century - not incidental environmental change, but a calculated strategy that starved Plains nations into submission. The “good spirit” that once gave abundance becomes, in the wake of colonial violence, the only place left to locate meaning that isn’t controlled by the occupier.

The final turn is the leadership move: not denial, not surrender, but a forced rerouting of strength. “From the same good spirit we must find another strength” frames adaptation as continuity rather than capitulation. He’s arguing that spiritual sovereignty can outlast material dispossession - a radical claim when the dominant power is trying to replace an entire cosmology. It’s elegy with instructions, theology as triage.