It was not intended to.

What it did was provide a specific piece of documentation, in a specific scientific idiom, that is relevant to some of them — while being clear, in its framing and its findings, about what it established and what it did not.

That clarity is itself a form of respect.

The researchers who conducted the study appear to have understood that the family’s knowledge did not need their confirmation to be valid, that the genetic evidence was supplementary to rather than foundational for the family’s claim, and that the most important story here was not a scientific achievement but a family’s long maintenance of knowledge about who they were and where they came from.

Tatanka Iyotake was born into a world where the Hunkpapa Lakota were among the most powerful peoples on the northern Great Plains.