The Great Spirit will not make me suffer because I am ignorant. He will put me in a place where I shall be better off than in this world.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the belief that ignorance is not a reason for suffering and that there is a higher purpose or place for individuals beyond this life.
Red Cloud's quote emphasizes the idea that ignorance should not lead to suffering, suggesting that the Great Spirit (or a higher power) understands our limitations and will provide us with a better place or state of being than what we experience in our current world. It underscores a philosophy of compassion and the belief in a benevolent guiding force that accommodates human flaws and seeks to offer improvement or redemption.
In practice
In a speech about resilience, one might say, 'As Red Cloud reminds us, the Great Spirit will not make me suffer because I am ignorant.'
I am poor and naked, but I am the chief of the nation. We do not want riches but we do want to train our children right. Riches would do us no good. We could not take them with us to the other world. We do not want riches. We want peace and love.
When I was a young man, I was poor. In a war with other nations, I was in eighty-seven fights. There I received my name and was made Chief of my nation. But now I am old and am for peace.
We were told that they wished merely to pass through our country. . . to seek for gold in the far west . . . Yet before the ashes of the council are cold, the Great Father is building his forts among us. . . . His presence here is . . . an insult to the spirits of our ancestors. Are we then to give up their sacred graves to be allowed for corn?
Look at me. I was a warrior on this land where the sun rises, now I come from where the sun sets. Whose voice was first surrounded on this land - the red people with bows and arrows. The Great Father says he is good and kind to us. I can't see it.
There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.
Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.
I am this fiery snail crawling home.
For a long time—always, in fact—I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn’t able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.
[A]nd soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.
What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.
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