While the hair and leggings were in the Smithsonian, the people who knew best what they were and who they belonged to were not the institution’s curators.

They were the members of Sitting Bull’s family, living in the communities and on the lands that had always been Lakota territory, maintaining the knowledge of their ancestry in the way that Lakota families maintain such knowledge: through oral transmission, through family memory, through the accumulated testimony of grandparents and parents and elders who knew who they came from.

Ernie LaPointe and his sisters occupy a specific and documented position in this family history.

LaPointe has identified publicly and consistently as a great-grandson of Sitting Bull, through a lineage that has been supported by both oral history and documentary records.