Daily Inspiration Quote by Sitting Bull

Poverty, in Sitting Bull's mouth, lands not as defeat but as a weaponized reframe: if the colonizer has stripped you of material security, you can still deny him the deeper prize of obedience. The line turns the U.S. project of “civilizing” and “providing” into a trap. To be made dependent is to be managed; to be poor is to slip the leash.

The intent is bluntly political. Sitting Bull is asserting sovereignty in the smallest unit that can’t be legislated away: movement. “Footsteps” is doing heavy work here, pointing at forced removals, reservation confinement, and the bureaucratic policing of where Native people could live, hunt, and gather. The phrasing also flips the usual frontier mythology. Freedom, in the American story, is acquired through property and expansion. Sitting Bull offers the opposite: freedom survives through refusal, even when the empire has taken the visible assets.

The subtext is both proud and grieving. “Now that we are poor” admits the crushing reality of dispossession without granting it the moral last word. It’s a statement meant to harden resolve inside the community and to embarrass the occupying power: you can take our horses, our food sources, our land, but you cannot make us volunteer for your definition of progress.

Historically, it sits in the long aftermath of broken treaties and military campaigns against the Lakota and other Plains nations, when “control” increasingly meant paperwork, rations, passes, and prisons. The quote’s power is its clarity: the cost of survival under colonial rule is often paid in autonomy, and Sitting Bull is naming the one currency he refuses to surrender.