The Canada period — roughly 1877 to 1881 — is often treated as a footnote to the Little Bighorn story, but it represents four years of sustained effort to maintain something like the free Lakota way of life in a context that was rapidly becoming untenable. The northern buffalo herds were diminishing. The Canadian government was not sympathetic. The United States government wanted him to surrender, and the pressure on his Canadian followers was increasing. He stayed as long as he could stay. When he returned and surrendered at Fort Buford in July 1881, it was not because he had changed his mind about anything. It was because his people were hungry and he could no longer protect them from that.
The years at Standing Rock from 1883 onward are similarly complex. He was under the authority of an agent who found him troublesome, living within a reservation system that was designed to transform Lakota people into individual farmers following Euro-American models of agriculture and property — a transformation that Sitting Bull consistently and explicitly opposed. He was not passive during this period. He continued to argue against land cessions, to maintain ceremonial practices, to organize opposition to the policies that were stripping the reservation of land and resources.
His one-season appearance with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in 1885 is sometimes treated as a contradiction — the fierce Lakota resistor commercializing his own image. But it can also be read as a practical response to a situation where few options were available. He made money. He gave away his earnings to others, including reportedly to orphaned children he encountered in eastern cities, whose poverty disturbed him. He returned to Standing Rock. He continued to be himself.