In the political structures of the Hunkpapa and the broader Lakota alliance, decision-making operated through consensus rather than top-down command. A chief like Sitting Bull could persuade, advise, inspire, and model the values the community held — but he could not compel warriors to follow him if they disagreed. His influence was real and substantial, but it was influence earned and maintained through constant demonstration of the qualities the community valued, not through institutional authority of the kind that Euro-American political structures routinely wielded.
This distinction matters for understanding how Sitting Bull operated during the period leading to the Little Bighorn and afterward. He did not command the warriors who surrounded and destroyed Custer’s companies. He did not give the order to attack. He had organized the community’s defense of the camp, and the vision he had shared from the Sun Dance had shaped the way his people understood what was happening and what their chances were. But the warriors who fought that day — among them Crazy Horse, who served as a kind of war chief in the more tactical sense — were acting from their own understanding of the situation, informed by the ceremonial and spiritual preparation that Sitting Bull had led.
After the victory at the Little Bighorn, when the political consequences became clear and the U.S. Army’s pursuit intensified, the coalition that had assembled in the big camp began to disperse. This was not a failure of Sitting Bull’s leadership in the conventional military sense — it was the natural functioning of a political structure in which people could choose their own path when the collective situation changed. Families made individual decisions about where to go and what to do. Some went to agencies. Some followed Sitting Bull to Canada.