A Lock Of Sitting Bull’s Hair Was Tested More Than A Century Later – And The DNA Confirmed A Family Claim

Sitting Bull was killed on a reservation where the U.S. government had required him to live.

His belongings were taken from his body without authority by people acting in the context of that same governmental power.

His hair spent more than a century in a federal museum collection.

The investigation that found the taking to have lacked proper authority came more than a century after the fact.

The repatriation came more than a century after the taking.

What the LaPointe family carried through that century was knowledge — of who they were, of where they came from, of the specific relationship between their family and Tatanka Iyotake that no institutional custody and no century of silence could extinguish.