But the potential for genetic testing to be misused in the context of Indigenous identity determinations — for genetic results to be treated as the authoritative determinant of who “really is” Native American — is a concern that Indigenous communities and their advocates have raised in response to the growing availability and declining cost of genetic testing.

The Sitting Bull study’s careful framing — its consistent emphasis that the DNA evidence is consistent with and supportive of the family relationship rather than determinative of it, and its acknowledgment that oral history and documentary records had established the family connection before the genetic analysis — is a meaningful model for how such studies can be communicated without feeding into problematic frameworks of genetic determination of Indigenous identity.

The Long View

Sitting Bull lived through one of the most dramatic and traumatic periods of transformation in the history of the Lakota people — a period in which the patterns of life that had defined Lakota society for generations were disrupted by forces that arrived with extraordinary speed and that the Lakota resisted with extraordinary tenacity.