They knew who they were.

Their community knew who they were.

The documentary records that survive from the relevant period were consistent with their account of their descent from Sitting Bull.

None of this required a genetics laboratory.

The reason the DNA test was conducted — and the reason its results received the attention they did — is rooted in something deeper than the specific facts of this case.

It reflects a persistent pattern in how American scientific and legal institutions have related to Indigenous claims of kinship, ancestry, and cultural connection: a pattern in which Indigenous people are required to prove, in the idiom of the dominant culture, things that the dominant culture’s institutions should have been willing to accept on other grounds.