Weeks before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull performed a grueling Sun Dance and saw a vision of soldiers falling into his camp like grasshoppers. This episode moves past Western caricatures to trace his life from a careful child nicknamed Slow to the spiritual and political anchor of a unified camp of thousands.

We explore why he rejected the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, the Black Hills gold rush ultimatum, his exile in Canada, the deliberate destruction of the buffalo, his 1881 surrender at Fort Buford, his tour with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and bond with Annie Oakley, and his killing by agency police during the Ghost Dance crisis in 1890.

• The meaning of counting coup and how he earned the name Sitting Bull
• Why he saw reservation treaties as a trap of dependency
• How a camp of roughly 10,000 people was organized and sustained
• Ecological warfare through the slaughter of the buffalo
• The 2021 DNA confirmation of his great-grandson Ernie LaPointe