It survived a century of institutional custody.

It preserved, in degraded but recoverable form, genetic material that could be compared to that of a living descendant.

It carried the information needed to confirm, in the idiom of contemporary science, a relationship that family memory and documentary records had maintained for generations.

But the hair’s significance was never primarily scientific.

It was the hair of a man whose life had been extraordinarily significant — to his community, to the Lakota Nation, to the broader history of the relationship between the United States and the Native nations within its borders.

The fact that it survived, that it was returned, and that it was capable of being used in the service of the family’s interests is remarkable precisely because of the historical forces that had worked against those outcomes.