Nature & Animals Quote by Sitting Bull

“Mysterious power” is doing double duty here: it’s spiritual language and political argument, metaphysics sharpened into a land claim. Sitting Bull isn’t appealing to sentiment; he’s staking jurisdiction in a moral universe where existence itself is a shared endowment, not a deed filed at a courthouse. By grounding “our being” in a force that precedes any tribe, treaty, or flag, he makes human ownership look like a late, shaky invention.

The sentence turns on “therefore.” If life is granted by something beyond us, then entitlement can’t be monopolized. That logic quietly dismantles the settler premise that land becomes legitimate through paperwork, conquest, or “improvement.” It also refuses the narrow category of “neighbor.” The phrase “even to our animal neighbors” expands community past the human, suggesting an ethics of reciprocity rather than extraction. Animals aren’t scenery or resources; they are co-inhabitants with standing. In a single clause, he folds ecology into sovereignty.

Context matters: Sitting Bull was speaking from inside the violent compression of the Plains nations in the 19th century, as buffalo were annihilated and U.S. expansion rebranded dispossession as destiny. His rhetoric answers that pressure by shifting the debate’s terrain. Instead of arguing over borders on a map, he argues over the rules of being. The subtext is a rebuke: a society that denies animals a “right to inhabit” will eventually deny people the same, because it has mistaken domination for order.