July 24, 2026

The River Behind You

Behind every man now living stands one hundred thousand dead. His life is the concentrated sum of endless generations of ancestors, and their lives in turn have flowed into his, as tributary streams that join to form a river.

Sitting Bull was the Hunkpapa Lakota leader who led his people to victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, only to watch the buffalo vanish and his nation forced onto reservations within his own lifetime. Those who knew him recorded this reflection during years when everything familiar to the Lakota was dissolving around him, the old ways giving way to a world he did not choose. Rather than mourn what was ending, he located himself inside something larger than his own moment, a long river of ancestors flowing through him toward generations not yet born. It is a way of meeting change that does not deny loss but places a single life inside a current that keeps moving regardless.