"It is not necessary for eagles to be crows"
About this Quote
A line like this lands with the calm authority of someone who has watched “adaptation” get weaponized into surrender. Sitting Bull isn’t offering a self-help slogan about confidence; he’s drawing a hard boundary around identity at a moment when Native nations were being pressed, by policy and by force, to become legible to U.S. power on its terms.
The metaphor does two jobs at once. “Eagles” carries spiritual and political freight in many Indigenous traditions: vision, altitude, a relationship to the sacred. “Crows” aren’t merely inferior birds; they’re everyday, crowded, scavenging, associated with noise and conformity. The contrast isn’t natural history, it’s a critique of coercive assimilation: you don’t demand that what is built for flight at great heights learn to peck in the street just to survive someone else’s city.
The subtext is strategic pride. Under reservation regimes, treaty violations, and the tightening net of boarding schools and “civilizing” programs, Indigenous leaders were constantly told that dignity required imitation. Sitting Bull flips the frame: imitation is the indignity. The powerful move here is that it refuses to debate the colonizer’s criteria of success. It doesn’t ask permission to be distinct; it treats distinctness as the premise.
There’s also a warning embedded in the elegance. If an eagle becomes a crow, it doesn’t gain safety; it loses its nature. The line argues that survival without sovereignty is just a quieter form of defeat, and that cultural integrity is not stubbornness but leadership.
The metaphor does two jobs at once. “Eagles” carries spiritual and political freight in many Indigenous traditions: vision, altitude, a relationship to the sacred. “Crows” aren’t merely inferior birds; they’re everyday, crowded, scavenging, associated with noise and conformity. The contrast isn’t natural history, it’s a critique of coercive assimilation: you don’t demand that what is built for flight at great heights learn to peck in the street just to survive someone else’s city.
The subtext is strategic pride. Under reservation regimes, treaty violations, and the tightening net of boarding schools and “civilizing” programs, Indigenous leaders were constantly told that dignity required imitation. Sitting Bull flips the frame: imitation is the indignity. The powerful move here is that it refuses to debate the colonizer’s criteria of success. It doesn’t ask permission to be distinct; it treats distinctness as the premise.
There’s also a warning embedded in the elegance. If an eagle becomes a crow, it doesn’t gain safety; it loses its nature. The line argues that survival without sovereignty is just a quieter form of defeat, and that cultural integrity is not stubbornness but leadership.
Quote Details
| Topic | Native American Sayings |
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