Sitting Bull was born sometime around 1831, in the Grand River area of what is now South Dakota, into the Hunkpapa band of the Lakota Nation.

The Hunkpapa were one of the seven council fires of the Lakota — the westernmost of the Siouan-language peoples who had come to dominate the northern Great Plains and who, by the mid-nineteenth century, were engaged in an increasingly existential struggle to maintain their territory, their economy, and their way of life against the encroachment of the United States.

His childhood name was Jumping Badger.

He earned the name Tatanka Iyotake — Sitting Bull — as a young man, a name that in Lakota carried associations of strength, stubbornness, and the kind of deliberate, unmovable power attributed to the bull buffalo at the center of a herd.

It was not a name given to someone expected to be inconsequential.

By the time he was in his thirties, Sitting Bull was recognized as a man of extraordinary leadership — a wichasa wakan, a holy man, as well as a warrior and a political figure whose influence extended well beyond his own band.

He was not, despite what American popular culture has sometimes claimed, a chief of all Sioux or the supreme military commander of Lakota resistance.

The Lakota did not organize their political life that way.

But he was one of the most significant voices in the opposition to the federal government’s attempts to confine the Lakota to reservations and to extract their land — the Black Hills in particular — for non-Native settlement and resource extraction.

His role in the events of 1876 — specifically the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors under the military leadership of Crazy Horse and others defeated a U.S.

Seventh Cavalry force commanded by George Armstrong Custer — made him the most famous Native leader in American popular consciousness, a status that brought with it enormous distortion.

He was cast as a villain by those who mourned the soldiers and celebrated the expansion of white settlement.

He was cast as a symbol of resistance and pride by those who saw the Little Bighorn as something other than a defeat to be avenged.

Neither casting was adequate to the actual man.