The Problem of Proving What Families Know

The second opening of this story — the moment where the question shifts from “what did the DNA find” to “why did we need a DNA test at all” — arrives somewhere in the middle of the events described above, and it is worth pausing to examine it directly.

Lakota kinship is not organized around genetic analysis.

It is organized around the kinds of relationships that human communities have maintained throughout history: family memory, community witness, oral transmission across generations, and the documentary records — birth registrations, census records, church documents, photographs, letters — that have accumulated in Lakota communities over the past century and a half.

Ernie LaPointe and his sisters had all of these forms of evidence.