The object was small enough to hold between two fingers.<\/p>\n
A lock of hair, cut from a man’s body in December 1890 in the hours after he was killed, kept for more than a century in institutional custody, and eventually returned to his family \u2014 who had never stopped knowing whose hair it was.<\/p>\n
Years after the Smithsonian Institution repatriated that hair to Sitting Bull’s descendants, a research team led by evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev ran a DNA analysis on a small sample of it.<\/p>\n
What they found supported what the family had said for generations: that a man named Ernie LaPointe and his sisters are direct descendants of Tatanka Iyotake \u2014 Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota leader whose life had become one of the most contested, mythologized, and incompletely understood stories in American history.<\/p>\n
The finding was published in a peer-reviewed study and drew significant attention, not least because the DNA analysis had to overcome a fundamental problem: hair that has been kept for more than a hundred years does not preserve genetic material well.<\/p>\n
The researchers used a method specifically developed to recover usable autosomal DNA from badly degraded biological material \u2014 a technique that has broad implications for how scientists approach ancient and historical human remains.<\/p>\n
But here is the question the headline cannot fully contain: why did a genetic test need to be run at all?<\/p>\n
The LaPointe family had known for generations who they were.<\/p>\n
They had oral history.<\/p>\n
They had documentary records.<\/p>\n
They had the kinds of kinship knowledge that Lakota communities have maintained and transmitted for centuries, not through paper trails or laboratory analysis but through exactly the kinds of family relationships and community memory that have always been how human beings know who they come from.<\/p>\n
The answer to that question reaches into something much larger than a single DNA result: the history of how Sitting Bull’s belongings \u2014 including his hair \u2014 were taken from his body without proper authority, how they spent decades in museum collections, how the legal and scientific frameworks of the dominant American culture have persistently demanded that Indigenous people prove what their communities already know, and what it means, ethically and practically, to turn an object taken without consent into scientific evidence.<\/p>\n
The hair was returned.<\/p>\n
The DNA was tested.<\/p>\n
The family claim was supported by the analysis.<\/p>\n
All of that is documented.<\/p>\n
The deeper story is about why all three things were necessary.<\/p>\n
Tatanka Iyotake and Why His Remains Mattered<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Sitting Bull was born sometime around 1831, in the Grand River area of what is now South Dakota, into the Hunkpapa band of the Lakota Nation.<\/p>\n
The Hunkpapa were one of the seven council fires of the Lakota \u2014 the westernmost of the Siouan-language peoples who had come to dominate the northern Great Plains and who, by the mid-nineteenth century, were engaged in an increasingly existential struggle to maintain their territory, their economy, and their way of life against the encroachment of the United States.<\/p>\n
His childhood name was Jumping Badger.<\/p>\n
He earned the name Tatanka Iyotake \u2014 Sitting Bull \u2014 as a young man, a name that in Lakota carried associations of strength, stubbornness, and the kind of deliberate, unmovable power attributed to the bull buffalo at the center of a herd.<\/p>\n
It was not a name given to someone expected to be inconsequential.<\/p>\n
By the time he was in his thirties, Sitting Bull was recognized as a man of extraordinary leadership \u2014 a wichasa wakan, a holy man, as well as a warrior and a political figure whose influence extended well beyond his own band.<\/p>\n
He was not, despite what American popular culture has sometimes claimed, a chief of all Sioux or the supreme military commander of Lakota resistance.<\/p>\n
The Lakota did not organize their political life that way.<\/p>\n
But he was one of the most significant voices in the opposition to the federal government’s attempts to confine the Lakota to reservations and to extract their land \u2014 the Black Hills in particular \u2014 for non-Native settlement and resource extraction.<\/p>\n
His role in the events of 1876 \u2014 specifically the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors under the military leadership of Crazy Horse and others defeated a U.S.<\/p>\n
Seventh Cavalry force commanded by George Armstrong Custer \u2014 made him the most famous Native leader in American popular consciousness, a status that brought with it enormous distortion.<\/p>\n
He was cast as a villain by those who mourned the soldiers and celebrated the expansion of white settlement.<\/p>\n
He was cast as a symbol of resistance and pride by those who saw the Little Bighorn as something other than a defeat to be avenged.<\/p>\n
Neither casting was adequate to the actual man.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What is relevant to the story of his hair and his remains is what happened to his reputation and to his physical legacy after his death \u2014 and the nature of his death itself, which was violent, politically charged, and surrounded by the kind of contested authority that would continue to mark everything associated with his name for the next century and more.<\/p>\n
The Morning of December 15, 1890<\/p>\n
By 1890, Sitting Bull was living on the Standing Rock Reservation in what is now North Dakota, having returned from Canada \u2014 where he had led a portion of his people after the Little Bighorn \u2014 and having eventually surrendered to U.S. authorities in 1881.<\/p>\n
He had spent time as a kind of attraction in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show, an experience that illustrated with particular clarity the American appetite for a version of Sitting Bull that was spectacle rather than person.<\/p>\n
In the fall of 1890, the Ghost Dance movement was spreading across the Plains reservations.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Ghost Dance was a religious movement that promised spiritual renewal and, in some interpretations, the return of the buffalo and the displacement of the colonizers \u2014 promises that the U.S. government and reservation agents viewed with alarm.<\/p>\n
The movement did not advocate armed resistance, but its rapid spread through communities that had genuine reasons for despair made federal authorities nervous.<\/p>\n
Sitting Bull had not formally adopted the Ghost Dance, but his presence on the reservation and his continuing influence made him a perceived focus of the movement’s energy.<\/p>\n
Reservation agent James McLaughlin, who had a long and complicated relationship with Sitting Bull, decided that Sitting Bull needed to be arrested and removed before the Ghost Dance situation could escalate.<\/p>\n
On the morning of December 15, 1890, a group of Indian Police \u2014 Lakota men employed by the agency \u2014 arrived at Sitting Bull’s cabin to carry out the arrest.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A confrontation developed.<\/p>\n
Shots were fired.<\/p>\n
Sitting Bull was shot and killed, along with several others on both sides.<\/p>\n
The circumstances of who fired first and what the sequence of events actually was have been disputed in accounts recorded at different times and by people with different relationships to what happened.<\/p>\n
What is not disputed is that Sitting Bull was dead at approximately fifty-nine years of age, killed by Indian Police in an arrest ordered by a federal reservation agent, on the reservation where the U.S. government had required him to live.<\/p>\n
What happened to his body in the hours and days that followed is where the story of his belongings \u2014 including his hair \u2014 begins.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Taking<\/p>\n
In the immediate aftermath of Sitting Bull’s death, his body was at the center of conflicting claims and conflicting currents of authority.<\/p>\n
The reservation agency had ordered his arrest.<\/p>\n
The military had been involved in the events surrounding the Ghost Dance.<\/p>\n
Journalists, curiosity-seekers, and a wider American public were intensely interested in anything connected to one of the most famous \u2014 and in much of the non-Native world, most feared and despised \u2014 figures of the Indian Wars era.<\/p>\n
Under these circumstances, items were taken from Sitting Bull’s body and from his immediate surroundings by people acting without the consent of his family or his community and without any legitimate authority over his possessions or his remains.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The specific circumstances of how different objects were removed have been documented to varying degrees, but the pattern is clear: in the chaos and aftermath of his death, things that belonged to Sitting Bull \u2014 and things that were Sitting Bull \u2014 moved into the hands of people who had no right to them.<\/p>\n
A lock of his hair was among the items that were taken.<\/p>\n
Leggings that he had been wearing or that were associated with him were also removed.<\/p>\n
These objects eventually made their way into the collection of the Army Medical Museum and, from there, into the collections of what would become the Smithsonian Institution \u2014 the country’s largest complex of museums and research institutions, maintained by the federal government as a public trust.<\/p>\n
The Smithsonian’s collection of Native American human remains and sacred objects was, by the late twentieth century, a subject of intense ethical and political controversy.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The institution held the remains of thousands of Native people \u2014 individuals who had been removed from their burial places, taken from battlefields, or otherwise acquired in ways that would have been impossible to justify under any meaningful standard of consent.<\/p>\n
It also held enormous quantities of sacred objects, ceremonial items, and culturally significant belongings taken from Native communities across the country.<\/p>\n
The Smithsonian’s acquisition of Sitting Bull’s hair and leggings fit squarely within this pattern.<\/p>\n
It was not exceptional.<\/p>\n
It was standard practice for its era \u2014 which is precisely what made the era’s standard practices so damaging.<\/p>\n
The Museum System and What It Kept<\/p>\n
To understand why Sitting Bull’s hair spent decades in a museum collection, it helps to understand the broader context of how museums in nineteenth and early twentieth century America related to Native American material culture and human remains.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The dominant framework was scientific and acquisitive simultaneously.<\/p>\n
Anthropologists, archaeologists, military surgeons, and collectors operating within the intellectual culture of the era treated Native American bodies, belongings, and cultural objects as specimens to be gathered, catalogued, and preserved for scientific and educational purposes.<\/p>\n
The consent of the communities from which these objects came was not considered relevant within this framework \u2014 indeed, the framework often assumed that Native people were a vanishing population whose material culture needed to be preserved by institutions precisely because Native communities themselves were not expected to survive to maintain it.<\/p>\n
This assumption was both wrong and self-serving.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was wrong because Native communities have survived \u2014 their continuity is one of the signal failures of the assimilationist and eliminationist policies that characterized the federal government’s approach to Native nations through most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.<\/p>\n
And it was self-serving because it allowed institutions to acquire vast quantities of Native material without having to answer for the ethics of the acquisition.<\/p>\n
The Army Medical Museum’s collection, which eventually transferred to the Smithsonian, was built in part through the systematic collection of Native American skulls and other remains by military personnel operating in the context of the Indian Wars.<\/p>\n
Surgeons and other officers were instructed at various points to collect remains for study.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The remains of people killed in military engagements \u2014 sometimes including people killed by the military doing the collecting \u2014 ended up in federal museum collections.<\/p>\n
Sitting Bull’s hair and leggings were not human remains in the same category as skeletal material, but they were objects removed from his body without authorization, and they carried the specific significance of being associated with one of the most important figures in Lakota and American history.<\/p>\n
Their presence in the Smithsonian’s collection was not incidental.<\/p>\n
The legal framework that eventually provided a mechanism for addressing this situation was the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act \u2014 NAGPRA \u2014 signed into law in 1990.<\/p>\n
NAGPRA required federal agencies and federally funded museums to inventory their holdings of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony, and to work with the relevant tribal nations to repatriate those holdings.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Smithsonian Institution is governed by a separate but parallel statute \u2014 the National Museum of the American Indian Act of 1989, which established specific repatriation obligations for the Smithsonian \u2014 rather than NAGPRA directly.<\/p>\n
But the principles were similar, and the effect for the Sitting Bull hair and leggings was that the Smithsonian was required to investigate how those objects had been acquired and whether the acquisition had been legitimate.<\/p>\n
The Smithsonian’s investigation concluded that the taking of Sitting Bull’s hair and leggings had lacked proper authority.<\/p>\n
That conclusion led directly to the repatriation.<\/p>\n
The Family That Never Forgot<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
While the hair and leggings were in the Smithsonian, the people who knew best what they were and who they belonged to were not the institution’s curators.<\/p>\n
They were the members of Sitting Bull’s family, living in the communities and on the lands that had always been Lakota territory, maintaining the knowledge of their ancestry in the way that Lakota families maintain such knowledge: through oral transmission, through family memory, through the accumulated testimony of grandparents and parents and elders who knew who they came from.<\/p>\n
Ernie LaPointe and his sisters occupy a specific and documented position in this family history.<\/p>\n
LaPointe has identified publicly and consistently as a great-grandson of Sitting Bull, through a lineage that has been supported by both oral history and documentary records.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This identification was not a claim made in response to scientific testing or in anticipation of legal proceedings \u2014 it was knowledge the family had held and transmitted for generations.<\/p>\n
The relationship between LaPointe and Sitting Bull, as established through family history and documentary records before any DNA analysis was conducted, is the foundation on which the entire scientific study rests.<\/p>\n
This is important to state clearly because the coverage of the DNA study has sometimes implied that the genetic test proved or established the family’s connection to Sitting Bull \u2014 as though the connection were uncertain or disputed before the science arrived.<\/p>\n
That framing inverts the actual sequence and misrepresents the relationship between family knowledge and scientific confirmation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
LaPointe has been an active advocate for the recognition of Sitting Bull’s descendants and for the proper handling of Sitting Bull’s remains and associated belongings.<\/p>\n
He has been involved in ongoing discussions about where Sitting Bull’s burial remains should be recognized and what the appropriate relationship between the family, tribal institutions, and governmental and scientific authorities should be.<\/p>\n
These are not simple questions, and the DNA study did not resolve them \u2014 something to which we will return.<\/p>\n
The repatriation of the hair and leggings in 2007 was the result of the Smithsonian’s investigation and the process established by its repatriation statute.<\/p>\n
The objects were returned to the family \u2014 to LaPointe and his sisters as the recognized descendants \u2014 not to a tribal government or to the U.S. government, but to the people who were Sitting Bull’s direct family.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The return was significant in itself.<\/p>\n
After more than a century in institutional custody, objects taken from Sitting Bull’s body were back with the people they belonged to.<\/p>\n
The question of what to do with them \u2014 and specifically what the family’s relationship to science and scientific study would be \u2014 then became a matter for the family to determine.<\/p>\n
How a Hair Can Hold a Century of Information<\/p>\n
To understand how the DNA study worked, it is necessary to understand what happens to biological material \u2014 specifically hair \u2014 over time, and why recovering genetic information from old hair is a genuine scientific challenge.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Hair is composed primarily of a protein called keratin.<\/p>\n
Unlike living cells in the body, which are constantly being supplied with new material and which contain abundant DNA in their nuclei, the hair shaft itself is largely dead material \u2014 the cells of the hair shaft have been keratinized, a process that destroys the cellular structures that make DNA extraction straightforward.<\/p>\n
The DNA in hair is present primarily in the hair root and in trace quantities within the shaft, and it degrades significantly over time through chemical processes that break the DNA strands into shorter and shorter fragments.<\/p>\n
Hair that has been preserved for more than a century \u2014 kept in a museum collection, subjected to varying temperatures and humidity levels, potentially treated with preservatives or cleaning agents \u2014 has typically undergone extensive DNA degradation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What remains is not intact DNA molecules that can be straightforwardly extracted and sequenced, but highly fragmented material with chemical modifications that complicate analysis.<\/p>\n
The method developed by Eske Willerslev’s group and applied to Sitting Bull’s hair was specifically designed to address this kind of badly degraded material.<\/p>\n
Willerslev is a Danish evolutionary geneticist at the University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen who has done extensive work on ancient DNA \u2014 the recovery and analysis of genetic material from archaeological specimens, permafrost-preserved organisms, and other sources where DNA has survived in degraded form for long periods.<\/p>\n
His laboratory has been at the forefront of developing techniques for extracting and interpreting genetic information that would be inaccessible to standard methods.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The specific technique applied to the Sitting Bull hair sample focused on recovering autosomal DNA \u2014 DNA from the non-sex chromosomes, which carries information about direct biological relationships including parent-child relationships and more distant ancestry.<\/p>\n
Autosomal DNA analysis can determine whether two individuals share enough genetic material to be consistent with a specific family relationship \u2014 grandparent and grandchild, great-grandparent and great-grandchild \u2014 by comparing the proportion and pattern of shared genetic segments.<\/p>\n
The analysis compared the genetic material recovered from Sitting Bull’s hair with genetic material provided by Ernie LaPointe.<\/p>\n
The comparison found a level and pattern of shared autosomal DNA consistent with the relationship that family history had identified \u2014 that of great-grandfather and great-grandson, in the lineage that LaPointe had described.<\/p>\n
The researchers were appropriately careful in how they characterized this finding.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They stated that the genetic evidence was consistent with \u2014 that it supported \u2014 the family relationship, not that it proved it in an absolute sense.<\/p>\n
Genetic relationships at the remove of great-grandfather to great-grandchild involve substantial statistical inference, because the amount of genetic material shared decreases with each generation and the range of what is expected to be shared at any specific generational distance is relatively wide.<\/p>\n
The finding was meaningful and supportive, not mathematically certain.<\/p>\n
This qualification is important and was built into how the researchers published and communicated the results.<\/p>\n
The DNA analysis was additional evidence consistent with the family’s account, not a replacement for the other forms of evidence the family had accumulated over generations.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Problem of Proving What Families Know<\/p>\n
The second opening of this story \u2014 the moment where the question shifts from “what did the DNA find” to “why did we need a DNA test at all” \u2014 arrives somewhere in the middle of the events described above, and it is worth pausing to examine it directly.<\/p>\n
Lakota kinship is not organized around genetic analysis.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 birth registrations, census records, church documents, photographs, letters \u2014 that have accumulated in Lakota communities over the past century and a half.<\/p>\n
Ernie LaPointe and his sisters had all of these forms of evidence.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They knew who they were.<\/p>\n
Their community knew who they were.<\/p>\n
The documentary records that survive from the relevant period were consistent with their account of their descent from Sitting Bull.<\/p>\n
None of this required a genetics laboratory.<\/p>\n
The reason the DNA test was conducted \u2014 and the reason its results received the attention they did \u2014 is rooted in something deeper than the specific facts of this case.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This pattern manifests across many contexts.<\/p>\n
Native people seeking recognition of their tribal citizenship have been subjected to blood quantum requirements \u2014 a specifically racial standard of tribal membership that was imposed by federal policy and that has no parallel in the governance of any other community in the United States.<\/p>\n
Native people seeking repatriation of their ancestors’ remains from museum collections have been required to demonstrate cultural affiliation through archaeological and historical evidence that would never be demanded of non-Native families seeking the return of a relative’s body.<\/p>\n
The DNA test conducted on Sitting Bull’s hair was not designed to meet a legal requirement.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was a scientific study undertaken with the family’s participation and consent.<\/p>\n
But its reception \u2014 the extent to which the published result was treated as confirming what the family had said, as if confirmation were what was needed \u2014 reflects the deeper dynamic.<\/p>\n
A result that said “the DNA is consistent with the family relationship” was treated by much of the coverage as stronger evidence than the generations of family memory and documentary records that had preceded it.<\/p>\n
Ernie LaPointe has spoken publicly about this dimension of the story.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He has been clear, in his public statements, that the DNA analysis was not necessary to establish the family’s identity or their relationship to Sitting Bull.<\/p>\n
The family already knew.<\/p>\n
What the DNA test added was a form of evidence legible in a specific scientific and institutional framework \u2014 which has its own value in contexts where that framework is the one through which decisions are made, but which should not be understood as epistemologically superior to the forms of knowledge the family had maintained without it.<\/p>\n
This is not an argument against the DNA study.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It is an argument about what the DNA study means, and what it does not mean.<\/p>\n
What the Research Team Said, and What They Did Not Say<\/p>\n
The peer-reviewed publication of the Sitting Bull DNA study was accompanied by statements from the research team that were notably careful in their framing \u2014 more careful, in many cases, than the subsequent media coverage.<\/p>\n
Eske Willerslev and his colleagues stated that their analysis found genetic evidence consistent with a familial relationship between the hair sample and Ernie LaPointe at the generational distance consistent with the great-grandfather\/great-grandson relationship that LaPointe had identified through family history.<\/p>\n
They did not state that the DNA analysis proved LaPointe’s descent from Sitting Bull.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They did not state that the genetic evidence superseded other forms of evidence.<\/p>\n
They did not suggest that the test was necessary for the family’s claim to be valid.<\/p>\n
The researchers also engaged with the ethical dimensions of the study in ways that are worth examining.<\/p>\n
They noted that the study had been conducted with the full participation and consent of the family \u2014 that the family had not merely tolerated the research but had actively chosen to participate in it, for reasons related to the family’s own interests in having a form of evidence that would be legible in institutional and legal contexts.<\/p>\n
The family’s reasons for agreeing to the study are their own and have been only partially articulated in public statements.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But one dimension that has been discussed is the ongoing dispute over the recognition and control of Sitting Bull’s burial site \u2014 a dispute that involves the specific location of his interment and the question of who has legitimate authority over decisions related to that site.<\/p>\n
The DNA evidence, while it does not legally resolve these questions, provides a form of scientific documentation of the family relationship that is potentially relevant in institutional contexts where such documentation carries weight.<\/p>\n
The study also addressed the scientific method itself in ways that go beyond the specific case of Sitting Bull’s hair.<\/p>\n
The technique used to recover autosomal DNA from the degraded sample represents an advance in the field of ancient and historical DNA research \u2014 one with implications for the study of human remains in museum collections, archaeological specimens, and other contexts where standard DNA extraction methods fail.<\/p>\n
This scientific contribution is genuine and significant, and it has attracted attention from researchers working across multiple disciplines.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The ability to recover meaningful genetic information from biological material that was previously considered too degraded for reliable analysis opens possibilities for both scientific research and for repatriation-related investigations \u2014 the ability to confirm relationships between museum-held remains and living descendants being one of the more immediate applications.<\/p>\n
The History of Ancient DNA Research<\/p>\n
The field of ancient DNA research \u2014 the study of genetic material preserved in archaeological and historical specimens \u2014 has developed with remarkable speed over the past four decades, and the Sitting Bull study represents one thread in a much broader scientific story.<\/p>\n
The first successful recovery and analysis of ancient DNA was reported in 1984, when researchers extracted DNA from preserved tissue of a quagga, an extinct relative of the zebra.<\/p>\n
In the decades that followed, the field expanded rapidly, driven by improvements in sequencing technology that allowed researchers to analyze increasingly small and degraded samples.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ancient DNA research has produced findings that have significantly revised the understanding of human prehistory.<\/p>\n
Studies of genetic material from Neanderthal and Denisovan specimens \u2014 members of human species or subspecies that coexisted with anatomically modern humans tens of thousands of years ago \u2014 revealed that interbreeding between these groups and modern humans had occurred, leaving genetic traces in modern human populations.<\/p>\n
Studies of ancient human remains from across Eurasia and the Americas have illuminated patterns of migration, population replacement, and cultural exchange that were previously obscured or unknown.<\/p>\n
The relevance of this broader research context to the Sitting Bull study is partly technical \u2014 the method developed for the Sitting Bull hair sample builds on the same decades of methodological development that have enabled ancient DNA research more broadly \u2014 and partly ethical.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ancient DNA research involving human remains has, from its earliest days, generated significant ethical questions about the appropriate relationship between researchers and the communities whose ancestors are being studied.<\/p>\n
These questions have been particularly acute in North America, where the intersection of ancient DNA research with the repatriation rights established by NAGPRA has created genuine tensions between scientific interests and Indigenous community interests.<\/p>\n
The Kennewick Man case is the most prominent example of this tension.<\/p>\n
A set of ancient human remains discovered in Washington State in 1996 were found to be approximately 9,000 years old, making them among the oldest human remains ever found in North America.<\/p>\n
The remains were claimed by local tribal nations for repatriation under NAGPRA, and were claimed by scientists who argued that the remains were scientifically important and should be studied before any repatriation decision was made.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The legal and ethical dispute lasted for years and was eventually resolved through legislation and subsequent DNA analysis that supported a connection to contemporary Native American populations and led to repatriation.<\/p>\n
The Kennewick Man case illustrates a central tension in how ancient DNA research has related to Indigenous communities: the scientific value of studying ancient remains is real, but so is the harm done when that value is used to override the wishes of descendant communities, when scientific frameworks are used to adjudicate questions that communities have the right to answer for themselves, and when the results of genetic studies are used to challenge or displace Indigenous accounts of their own history and ancestry.<\/p>\n
Eske Willerslev’s research record includes engagement with these tensions.<\/p>\n
His work has generated important scientific findings about early human populations in the Americas, and he has also been involved in ongoing discussions about the appropriate ethical frameworks for ancient DNA research involving Indigenous peoples.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Sitting Bull study’s approach \u2014 conducting the research with the family’s full participation and consent, framing the findings carefully, and acknowledging the limits of what the genetic evidence establishes \u2014 reflects a more ethically sophisticated approach than has characterized some earlier ancient DNA research.<\/p>\n
NAGPRA, the Smithsonian, and the Repatriation Landscape<\/p>\n
The 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was the result of decades of advocacy by Native communities and their allies, and its passage represented a significant shift in the legal relationship between museums and the Indigenous communities whose material heritage those museums held.<\/p>\n
NAGPRA required museums and federal agencies that receive federal funding to inventory their collections of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony, and to notify affiliated tribal nations.<\/p>\n
Upon request, those holdings were required to be repatriated \u2014 returned to the affiliated tribes \u2014 unless the institution could demonstrate a right of possession that overrode the repatriation obligation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The law was not and is not self-executing.<\/p>\n
It requires institutions to conduct inventories and make notifications, and it requires tribal nations to request repatriation.<\/p>\n
The process has been slow, inconsistent, and marked by significant failures on the part of many institutions to comply with the law’s requirements in good faith.<\/p>\n
Decades after NAGPRA’s passage, substantial quantities of Native American remains and sacred objects remain in museum collections \u2014 sometimes because institutions have not completed inventories, sometimes because affiliation determinations are contested, and sometimes because institutions have found ways to classify objects as “unaffiliated” in ways that avoid repatriation obligations.<\/p>\n
The Smithsonian Institution, as noted earlier, is governed by the National Museum of the American Indian Act rather than NAGPRA directly, but its repatriation obligations are similar in structure and intent.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Smithsonian has made significant progress on repatriation relative to many other institutions, though significant quantities of material remain in its collections pending repatriation decisions.<\/p>\n
The specific investigation that led to the repatriation of Sitting Bull’s hair and leggings to his family in 2007 was conducted under the Smithsonian’s repatriation statute and process.<\/p>\n
The investigation found that the objects had been acquired without proper authority \u2014 a finding that was not difficult to reach, given the circumstances of their taking in the hours after Sitting Bull’s death.<\/p>\n
The repatriation that followed was one among many the Smithsonian has carried out, but it attracted particular attention because of who Sitting Bull was and because of the specific history of how his belongings had come to be in institutional custody.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The repatriation to the family \u2014 rather than to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe as a governmental entity \u2014 was itself a matter of some significance.<\/p>\n
The family had asserted a direct claim as Sitting Bull’s descendants, distinct from the tribal government’s claim as the governmental representative of the community.<\/p>\n
The Smithsonian’s repatriation to the family reflected an assessment that the family’s claim was the most directly relevant in this specific case, given that the objects were personal belongings of an identified individual rather than communal or sacred objects of the tribe as a whole.<\/p>\n
The relationship between family claims and tribal governmental claims in repatriation contexts is a recurring and sometimes contentious issue in NAGPRA and related contexts.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Tribal governments have legal standing under NAGPRA as the governmental representatives of affiliated communities.<\/p>\n
But families also have claims \u2014 sometimes stronger than tribal governmental claims \u2014 to objects that belonged to specific individuals.<\/p>\n
Navigating these overlapping claims requires case-by-case assessment and sometimes produces disputes that are neither simple nor easily resolved.<\/p>\n
The Burial Question the DNA Did Not Settle<\/p>\n
One of the most important things to be clear about in discussing the Sitting Bull DNA study is what the genetic findings did not establish, did not resolve, and were not intended to address.<\/p>\n
Sitting Bull’s burial location has been the subject of a long-running dispute.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
After his death at Standing Rock in 1890, he was buried there.<\/p>\n
In 1953, in an operation that was controversial at the time and remains contested, his purported remains were disinterred and reburied at a location near Mobridge, South Dakota, in what was then a different state’s jurisdiction.<\/p>\n
The precise circumstances of that 1953 reinterment \u2014 including whether the remains actually recovered and moved were genuinely those of Sitting Bull \u2014 have been disputed, and there is uncertainty about what was actually moved and where.<\/p>\n
The LaPointe family has maintained a position regarding the recognition of Sitting Bull’s burial that differs from positions taken by Standing Rock Sioux tribal officials and by South Dakota officials and institutions.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
These disputes involve questions of historical record, of tribal jurisdiction, and of the family’s specific rights as direct descendants \u2014 questions that were not resolved by the DNA study and that remain active points of discussion and disagreement.<\/p>\n
The DNA study’s finding that the hair sample’s genetic material is consistent with a familial relationship to Ernie LaPointe is relevant to these broader disputes only indirectly.<\/p>\n
It supports the family’s claimed identity as Sitting Bull’s direct descendants, which is relevant context for their standing in discussions about his burial.<\/p>\n
But it does not establish where Sitting Bull is actually buried, does not resolve the question of whether the 1953 reinterment moved his actual remains, and does not determine what decisions the family, the tribal government, or other parties should or must make regarding the burial site.<\/p>\n
Anyone reading the DNA study’s coverage who came away thinking that the genetics resolved the burial dispute would be misinformed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The study’s findings were specific, carefully stated, and significant within their scope.<\/p>\n
They were not a solution to questions that were beyond their scope.<\/p>\n
What Degraded DNA Can and Cannot Tell Us<\/p>\n
The scientific method at the heart of the Sitting Bull study has implications that extend well beyond this specific case, and understanding those implications requires understanding more precisely what the technique does and what its limitations are.<\/p>\n
The challenge of extracting useful genetic information from old biological material is a challenge of chemistry and statistics simultaneously.<\/p>\n
Chemical degradation breaks DNA into fragments; the longer material has been preserved, and the more variable the preservation conditions, the shorter the surviving fragments tend to be.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The fragments also accumulate chemical modifications \u2014 specifically a process called cytosine deamination, which converts cytosine bases to uracil bases at damaged sites \u2014 that can introduce errors if not properly accounted for in the analysis.<\/p>\n
Modern ancient DNA techniques address both problems.<\/p>\n
Library preparation methods designed for ancient DNA can work with very short fragments \u2014 sometimes just a few dozen base pairs \u2014 that would be unusable in standard DNA extraction.<\/p>\n
Computational methods can identify and account for the chemical modifications associated with degradation, allowing researchers to distinguish genuine genetic variation from sequencing artifacts caused by those modifications.<\/p>\n
The specific technique applied to the Sitting Bull hair sample was particularly focused on recovering autosomal DNA from material where the amount of usable DNA was very small.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Autosomal DNA analysis for relationship determination requires enough information across enough genomic positions to make statistical inferences about shared ancestry.<\/p>\n
The technique used in the study was designed to maximize the useful signal from a minimal amount of starting material.<\/p>\n
The result was enough information to compare against modern reference samples and to make statistical inferences about the degree of genetic relationship between the hair sample and Ernie LaPointe.<\/p>\n
The comparison found shared genetic segments at levels and in patterns consistent with the stated family relationship.<\/p>\n
What the technique cannot do \u2014 and what no genetic technique currently can do \u2014 is identify a specific individual with certainty from degraded hair alone.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The comparison required a reference sample from a living individual (LaPointe) and a hypothesis about the relationship to test.<\/p>\n
The test found the hypothesis consistent with the data.<\/p>\n
It did not independently identify Sitting Bull from the hair sample as a matter of forensic certainty.<\/p>\n
This distinction is important because it clarifies the evidentiary status of the finding.<\/p>\n
The study found that the genetic evidence is consistent with the family’s claim.<\/p>\n
It did not find that the genetic evidence proves the family’s claim in the sense of ruling out all alternatives.<\/p>\n
The difference between “consistent with” and “proves” is meaningful in scientific communication, and the researchers maintained that distinction in their publication.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The broader implications of the technique for ancient DNA research are significant.<\/p>\n
The ability to recover autosomal DNA from highly degraded material in quantities sufficient for relationship analysis means that samples previously considered too degraded for meaningful study may be revisitable using these methods.<\/p>\n
This has potential applications in archaeology, in forensic science, and specifically in repatriation contexts \u2014 where the ability to genetically confirm relationships between museum-held remains and living descendants could provide an additional form of evidence supporting repatriation claims.<\/p>\n
It also raises ethical questions that the research community is actively working through.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The same technique that can help confirm family relationships in repatriation contexts can also be applied to study ancient remains in ways that communities may not have consented to.<\/p>\n
The ethical framework for such research \u2014 one that centers Indigenous community interests and genuine consent, rather than treating research access as a default entitlement \u2014 is still developing.<\/p>\n
The Object That Was Taken and What Came Back<\/p>\n
The hair that was tested was not just a biological sample.<\/p>\n
It was an object with a specific history, a specific chain of custody, and a specific weight of meaning that no laboratory analysis can fully capture.<\/p>\n
It was cut from Sitting Bull’s body in December 1890, in circumstances defined by violence, contested authority, and the specific dynamics of power that characterized the Standing Rock Reservation at the end of the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was taken without the consent of his family or his community.<\/p>\n
It moved through institutional hands \u2014 medical museum, national museum \u2014 for more than a century.<\/p>\n
It was the subject of an investigation that found the taking had lacked proper authority.<\/p>\n
It was returned to the family in 2007.<\/p>\n
The return was not a simple transfer of an object.<\/p>\n
It was a recognition \u2014 partial, formal, and long overdue \u2014 that the object had always belonged to the family and to the community, that its removal had been wrong, and that the institutional framework that had held it was capable of acknowledging that wrong and beginning to address it.<\/p>\n
When the family subsequently agreed to allow a small sample to be used in the DNA study, that decision was made from a position of ownership and authority that had not existed as long as the object was in institutional custody.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The family decided what to do with their ancestor’s hair.<\/p>\n
That decision \u2014 the fact that it was theirs to make \u2014 was itself significant.<\/p>\n
The DNA results, supporting the family relationship that had always been known through family memory and documentary records, added a layer of evidence in a specific scientific idiom.<\/p>\n
For the family, and for many who followed the story, the return of the hair was more meaningful than the laboratory result.<\/p>\n
The laboratory result was additional documentation of a truth the family had never doubted.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Repatriation Beyond the Headline<\/p>\n
The Sitting Bull repatriation and DNA study sit within a much larger story about the ongoing relationship between museums, scientific institutions, and Native communities across the United States and around the world.<\/p>\n
Understanding that context adds important dimensions to what the specific events mean.<\/p>\n
The history of museums collecting Native American material \u2014 human remains, sacred objects, everyday objects, artistic and ceremonial items \u2014 is a history that reflects the power asymmetries of the colonial era.<\/p>\n
The institutions that built these collections operated within a framework that treated Native people as subjects of study rather than as communities with rights and authority over their own cultural heritage.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The objects collected were frequently obtained in ways that would have been impossible in any other context \u2014 taken from battlefields, excavated from burial sites, purchased from individuals who had no authority to sell them, or simply removed from communities that lacked the political power to stop the removal.<\/p>\n
The repatriation frameworks established by NAGPRA and the National Museum of the American Indian Act represent the beginning of an effort to address this legacy.<\/p>\n
They are not complete remedies \u2014 the processes are slow, the resources available to tribal nations for engaging with them are often inadequate, and many institutions have not engaged with their repatriation obligations in good faith.<\/p>\n
But they establish a legal framework that recognizes Indigenous communities’ rights over their cultural heritage in ways that did not exist before 1989 and 1990.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Smithsonian’s repatriation of Sitting Bull’s hair and leggings is one data point in this broader landscape.<\/p>\n
The investigation that found the taking had lacked proper authority was conducted under a framework that requires institutions to examine how their collections were acquired \u2014 a form of accountability that was simply absent for most of the century those objects spent in museum custody.<\/p>\n
The subsequent DNA study, conducted with the family’s consent and participation, represents a different kind of intersection between science and repatriation.<\/p>\n
Rather than scientific research being used to resist or delay repatriation \u2014 the pattern that has sometimes characterized ancient DNA research in other contexts \u2014 the research here was conducted after repatriation, by researchers working with the family, in service of goals that the family had helped define.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That sequence matters.<\/p>\n
Research conducted with community consent and for community purposes is ethically different from research conducted on community members’ ancestors without their involvement.<\/p>\n
Lakota Kinship and What Science Can and Cannot See<\/p>\n
There is a dimension of the Sitting Bull DNA study that goes beyond the specific genetic findings and beyond the specific history of how his hair came to be in a museum and then returned to his family.<\/p>\n
It touches on a fundamental question about how different systems of knowledge relate to each other \u2014 and specifically about the relationship between genetic science and Indigenous kinship.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Lakota kinship is complex, comprehensive, and organized around principles that are not reducible to biological descent as understood in Western scientific frameworks.<\/p>\n
Lakota kinship systems include extensive networks of recognized relationships \u2014 among people who are biologically related, among people who are related through adoption and other forms of chosen family, among people connected through spiritual and ceremonial ties \u2014 that constitute the social fabric of Lakota community life.<\/p>\n
The concept of who counts as family, who carries specific obligations and responsibilities to other people, and who has standing to speak on behalf of a relative or an ancestor is defined within Lakota cultural frameworks in ways that do not map cleanly onto the genetic concept of biological relationship.<\/p>\n
A person’s standing in relation to Sitting Bull’s memory, in Lakota terms, is not determined by the percentage of genetic material they share with him.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It is determined by the specific relationships \u2014 biological, adoptive, ceremonial, historical \u2014 that connect them to him within a living community’s understanding of itself.<\/p>\n
The DNA study, by its nature, could only address the biological genetic dimension of this much larger concept of relationship.<\/p>\n
It found genetic evidence consistent with a specific biological relationship.<\/p>\n
It could not find \u2014 and made no claim to find \u2014 anything about the full Lakota kinship context in which the LaPointe family’s relationship to Sitting Bull is understood and recognized.<\/p>\n
This limitation is not a criticism of the study.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It is a description of what genetic analysis is capable of and what it is not.<\/p>\n
The researchers who conducted the study appear to have understood this, based on how they framed their findings.<\/p>\n
The challenge is in how those findings are interpreted and reported by people who may not hold the same understanding of the distinction between what genetics can establish and what kinship means.<\/p>\n
The concern that sometimes arises in discussions of Native DNA research \u2014 that genetic testing might be used to adjudicate Indigenous identity claims in ways that override or displace Indigenous peoples’ own understandings of their communities and their membership \u2014 is a legitimate concern even when the specific study in question does not make such claims.<\/p>\n
The Sitting Bull DNA study was careful, ethically conducted, and did not overstate its findings.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But the broader landscape of genetic research involving Indigenous peoples includes examples where the caution and ethical sophistication demonstrated in this study have been absent, and where genetic frameworks have been applied to Indigenous identity questions in harmful ways.<\/p>\n
The Ongoing Question of Sitting Bull’s Burial<\/p>\n
The dispute over where Sitting Bull’s remains actually are \u2014 and who has legitimate authority over decisions about his burial \u2014 is one of the most unresolved dimensions of the story that the DNA study has illuminated without settling.<\/p>\n
After Sitting Bull was killed at Standing Rock in December 1890, he was buried at the agency cemetery.<\/p>\n
That location was part of what is now North Dakota.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In 1953, a group that included members of a chamber of commerce and a local booster organization in Mobridge, South Dakota, conducted an operation in which they disinterred what they claimed were Sitting Bull’s remains and reburied them near Mobridge, on the South Dakota side of the state line.<\/p>\n
The operation was carried out without the consent of Sitting Bull’s family or the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.<\/p>\n
The 1953 reinterment has been disputed ever since.<\/p>\n
Questions include whether the remains that were moved were genuinely Sitting Bull’s, what condition those remains were in, and what authority the people conducting the operation had to do what they did.<\/p>\n
The site near Mobridge now has a monument, and that monument has become a point of contention in ongoing disputes about where Sitting Bull’s “real” burial site is and who should have authority over it.<\/p>\n
The LaPointe family’s position on these questions has been consistent and specific.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They have argued that the proper recognition and care of Sitting Bull’s burial is a matter for his direct descendants, not for state governments, tourism interests, or tribal governmental entities that did not represent his immediate family.<\/p>\n
They have objected to what they characterize as the commercialization of Sitting Bull’s burial site and legacy.<\/p>\n
The DNA study’s findings are relevant to these disputes in that they provide additional documentation of the family’s identity and their specific relationship to Sitting Bull.<\/p>\n
But they do not resolve the underlying questions of jurisdiction, authority, and what the appropriate outcome of the burial site dispute would be.<\/p>\n
Those questions involve law, tribal governance, state authority, and the specific interests of multiple parties \u2014 none of which are determined by a genetic relationship finding.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Hair, the Leggings, and What They Carried<\/p>\n
The repatriation of Sitting Bull’s hair and leggings in 2007 was described by Smithsonian officials as a recognition of the significance of these objects and of the improperly acquired nature of the original taking.<\/p>\n
The leggings are reported to have carried particular significance \u2014 they were the leggings Sitting Bull was wearing, or had recently worn, when he was killed, and they carried the specific weight of association with the final moments of his life.<\/p>\n
Objects of this kind \u2014 closely associated with a significant person at a moment of historical importance, held in institutional custody for more than a century, and returned after an investigation that found the taking to have been improper \u2014 carry a complicated kind of meaning.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They are simultaneously biographical objects, historical artifacts, family belongings, and subjects of scientific study.<\/p>\n
The different frameworks through which they can be understood are not always compatible.<\/p>\n
From a museum curation standpoint, they are objects with significant historical and cultural importance that have been studied and preserved for academic and educational purposes.<\/p>\n
From a scientific standpoint, the hair is a biological sample from a historically significant individual.<\/p>\n
From the family’s standpoint, they are their ancestor’s possessions \u2014 objects that were taken from him without authorization and that were rightfully theirs all along.<\/p>\n
The family’s framework is the one that the repatriation process eventually recognized as controlling.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The return of the objects to the family was an acknowledgment that the family’s relationship to them \u2014 as the descendants of the man to whom they had belonged \u2014 was more authoritative than the institutional claim based on decades of custody.<\/p>\n
That acknowledgment did not erase the history of how the objects had been held.<\/p>\n
It could not restore the century during which they had been away from the family.<\/p>\n
But it established a different relationship between the family and the objects, one in which the family had authority over what happened to them \u2014 including the authority to participate in a scientific study if they chose to, on their terms.<\/p>\n
The Scientist and the Family<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The decision by Ernie LaPointe and his sisters to participate in the DNA study \u2014 to allow a sample of their ancestor’s hair to be used in genetic research \u2014 was not made lightly or without reflection.<\/p>\n
LaPointe has spoken publicly about the family’s reasons for agreeing to the research, and those reasons are instructive.<\/p>\n
One reason was practical: the ongoing disputes about the recognition of Sitting Bull’s burial site and the family’s authority over decisions related to his legacy were taking place in institutional and legal contexts where scientific evidence carries weight.<\/p>\n
Having a peer-reviewed study supporting the family relationship provided a form of documentation relevant in those contexts \u2014 not because the family needed the science to know who they were, but because the institutions they were dealing with treated scientific evidence as particularly authoritative.<\/p>\n
Another reason was related to the method itself.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The technique developed to recover DNA from badly degraded material has implications for repatriation more broadly.<\/p>\n
If the method can confirm family relationships between museum-held remains and living descendants, it could be a tool that strengthens repatriation cases for other families and communities.<\/p>\n
Participating in the development and validation of such a method had potential benefits beyond the specific LaPointe family case.<\/p>\n
A third reason, perhaps the most fundamental, was the family’s sense of Sitting Bull’s own wishes and their responsibility to him.<\/p>\n
LaPointe has spoken about the family’s belief that Sitting Bull would have wanted the truth about his family documented and recognized \u2014 that he would have supported the effort to establish clearly who his descendants were, particularly in a context where that recognition had practical consequences for how his legacy was treated.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This third reason is not scientifically verifiable.<\/p>\n
It is a form of family knowledge \u2014 the LaPointes’ sense of who their great-great-grandfather was and what he would have wanted.<\/p>\n
It is exactly the kind of knowledge that the DNA study cannot produce but that the family had always possessed.<\/p>\n
The relationship between the science and the family knowledge in this story is ultimately one of complementarity rather than competition.<\/p>\n
The family knew who they were.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The science provided additional documentation in a specific idiom.<\/p>\n
Both forms of knowledge are real, and neither supersedes the other.<\/p>\n
The Bigger Question the Study Raised<\/p>\n
The Sitting Bull DNA study received attention from the scientific community for the methodological advance it represented, and from the general public for the story of Sitting Bull’s family and the repatriation that preceded the research.<\/p>\n
Both forms of attention were appropriate.<\/p>\n
But the study also raised, for researchers and ethicists working at the intersection of genetics and Indigenous affairs, a set of questions that extend well beyond the specific findings.<\/p>\n
The most important of these questions is about consent, authority, and the purpose of research.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Sitting Bull study was conducted with full family consent and participation.<\/p>\n
It was designed to answer questions the family found worth answering, using methods appropriate to the material, and it was published in ways that carefully framed the findings without overstating them.<\/p>\n
In these respects, it represents a model of how genetic research involving Indigenous communities and ancestral remains can be conducted ethically.<\/p>\n
But the existence of a well-conducted study does not answer the question of what standards should apply to less carefully conducted research.<\/p>\n
The field of ancient DNA research has a history that includes studies conducted on human remains without meaningful engagement with the communities those remains came from \u2014 studies where the scientific interest of the researchers was treated as sufficient justification for the research, regardless of how the communities felt about their ancestors being studied.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That history has produced a growing body of ethical guidelines and frameworks \u2014 including the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance and various institutional guidelines developed by anthropological and genetic research associations \u2014 that attempt to center Indigenous community interests in research involving Indigenous peoples.<\/p>\n
The Sitting Bull study’s approach is broadly consistent with these frameworks, and its existence as a well-publicized example of ethically conducted research involving ancestral remains may itself contribute to the development of better norms in the field.<\/p>\n
The question of what the scientific community owes to Indigenous communities in exchange for the research access that studying ancestral remains provides is one that does not have a single settled answer.<\/p>\n
The Sitting Bull study suggests one model: research conducted with genuine partnership, full and informed consent, and careful attention to how findings are framed and communicated.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Whether that model becomes the norm or remains the exception is a question about the future of the field.<\/p>\n
The Hair That Came Home<\/p>\n
The object at the center of this story \u2014 a lock of hair cut from Sitting Bull’s body in December 1890, held in institutional custody for more than a century, returned to his family in 2007, and subsequently the subject of a genetic analysis that supported what the family had always known \u2014 is small enough to hold between two fingers.<\/p>\n
Its smallness is part of its significance.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It survived a century of institutional custody.<\/p>\n
It preserved, in degraded but recoverable form, genetic material that could be compared to that of a living descendant.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But the hair’s significance was never primarily scientific.<\/p>\n
It was the hair of a man whose life had been extraordinarily significant \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Sitting Bull was killed on a reservation where the U.S. government had required him to live.<\/p>\n
His belongings were taken from his body without authority by people acting in the context of that same governmental power.<\/p>\n
His hair spent more than a century in a federal museum collection.<\/p>\n
The investigation that found the taking to have lacked proper authority came more than a century after the fact.<\/p>\n
The repatriation came more than a century after the taking.<\/p>\n
What the LaPointe family carried through that century was knowledge \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That knowledge was not created by the DNA study.<\/p>\n
It was confirmed by it, in one specific technical sense, for purposes that the family found worth pursuing.<\/p>\n
The hair came home.<\/p>\n
The knowledge had never left.<\/p>\n
The Incomplete Reckoning<\/p>\n
The story of Sitting Bull’s hair is, ultimately, a story about an incomplete reckoning.<\/p>\n
The repatriation was real and meaningful.<\/p>\n
The DNA study was carefully conducted and scientifically significant.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The recognition of the family’s identity as direct descendants of Tatanka Iyotake was, in every meaningful sense, overdue.<\/p>\n
But the reckoning is incomplete because the conditions that produced the original taking have not been fully transformed.<\/p>\n
The legal frameworks governing how museums hold and repatriate Native American remains and belongings remain imperfect and unevenly enforced.<\/p>\n
The scientific community’s relationship with Indigenous communities around research involving ancestral remains remains contested and in development.<\/p>\n
The specific disputes about the recognition of Sitting Bull’s burial and the authority of his family over decisions related to his legacy remain unresolved.<\/p>\n
The DNA study did not settle these questions.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was not intended to.<\/p>\n
What it did was provide a specific piece of documentation, in a specific scientific idiom, that is relevant to some of them \u2014 while being clear, in its framing and its findings, about what it established and what it did not.<\/p>\n
That clarity is itself a form of respect.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Tatanka Iyotake was born into a world where the Hunkpapa Lakota were among the most powerful peoples on the northern Great Plains.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He lived through the transformation of that world by forces that the Lakota could resist but ultimately could not stop.<\/p>\n
He was killed on a reservation by Indian Police carrying out a federal agency’s order, and his belongings were taken from his body by people who had no right to them.<\/p>\n
More than a century later, a lock of his hair came back to his family.<\/p>\n
The science confirmed what the family had always known.<\/p>\n
The reckoning continues.<\/p>\n
\u2014 END \u2014<\/p>\n
\u2014 EXTENDED SECTIONS \u2014<\/p>\n
The Last Years on Standing Rock and What They Meant<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The period between Sitting Bull’s surrender in 1881 and his death in 1890 is often treated in popular accounts as an epilogue \u2014 a sad coda to the more dramatic story of the Little Bighorn and its aftermath.<\/p>\n
That framing does justice neither to the man nor to the period.<\/p>\n
Sitting Bull spent time between 1882 and 1883 at Fort Randall, South Dakota, under military confinement \u2014 essentially a prisoner, though the designation was never formally applied.<\/p>\n
He was then moved to Standing Rock, where he spent the remaining years of his life.<\/p>\n
The reservation was administered by James McLaughlin, an agent who had complex and often hostile feelings toward Sitting Bull and who worked consistently to undermine his influence within the community.<\/p>\n
McLaughlin’s opposition to Sitting Bull was partly personal and partly ideological.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He represented a specific vision of what reservation life should accomplish: the transformation of Lakota people into settled farmers, Christians, and English speakers, integrated into the economic and social structures of mainstream American life.<\/p>\n
Sitting Bull represented, in McLaughlin’s view, an obstacle to that transformation \u2014 a man whose continued authority among his people depended on maintaining the traditional patterns of Lakota life and governance that the reservation system was designed to displace.<\/p>\n
The specific conflict between McLaughlin and Sitting Bull over the Ghost Dance movement in 1890 needs to be understood within this longer history of antagonism.<\/p>\n
McLaughlin had been looking for an opportunity to remove Sitting Bull from the reservation for years.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Ghost Dance provided a pretext \u2014 a justification for an arrest order that McLaughlin had wanted to issue on other grounds long before the dance began to spread.<\/p>\n
Sitting Bull’s relationship to the Ghost Dance was ambiguous.<\/p>\n
He did not become a formal adherent of the movement, and the historical record does not support a clear picture of what he believed about its religious content or its political implications.<\/p>\n
He permitted Ghost Dance ceremonies to take place near his camp, which was enough for McLaughlin to cite as justification for the arrest order.<\/p>\n
The broader context of the Ghost Dance \u2014 a religious movement that spread across multiple reservation communities in 1889 and 1890 \u2014 is relevant to understanding why federal authorities responded to it with the alarm they did.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The movement, which had originated with a Paiute man named Wovoka and had spread rapidly across the Plains, promised a spiritual renewal in which the world would be transformed, the buffalo would return, and the suffering of reservation life would end.<\/p>\n
Different communities interpreted the movement differently; some versions were purely spiritual and explicitly peaceful, while others incorporated elements that alarmed reservation agents and military commanders.<\/p>\n
The military response to the Ghost Dance, which culminated in the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 29, 1890 \u2014 two weeks after Sitting Bull’s death \u2014 was catastrophic.<\/p>\n
An estimated 250 to 300 Lakota people, many of them women and children, were killed by the Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation.<\/p>\n
The massacre effectively ended the Ghost Dance movement and stands as one of the most notorious episodes of violence in the history of the American West.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Sitting Bull was already dead by the time of Wounded Knee.<\/p>\n
His death and the massacre were connected by the political and military response to the Ghost Dance, but Sitting Bull did not live to see the final outcome of the movement that had been the immediate pretext for his arrest.<\/p>\n
Understanding this history is part of understanding why his belongings mattered \u2014 why the hair and the leggings were not merely objects of curiosity but objects freighted with the specific history of how his life ended and what the circumstances of that ending meant.<\/p>\n
The Wild West Show Years and the American Image of Sitting Bull<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The period during which Sitting Bull appeared in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show \u2014 the summer of 1885, for approximately four months \u2014 has received significant attention in accounts of his later life, in part because it seems so incongruous with everything else about him and in part because it illustrates something important about how the American imagination related to Native leaders of the Indian Wars era.<\/p>\n
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was an elaborate touring entertainment that presented dramatized versions of frontier life \u2014 buffalo hunts, sharpshooting exhibitions, cavalry charges, and depictions of Indian attacks and army responses \u2014 to audiences in cities across the United States and, later, in Europe.<\/p>\n
The show was enormously popular and was one of the primary vehicles through which many Americans formed their ideas about the American West, about Native people, and about the meaning of westward expansion.<\/p>\n
Sitting Bull’s participation in the show was negotiated through an agent, with fees paid directly to him, and was limited to a single tour.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He did not reenact battles or play a villain in dramatized confrontations.<\/p>\n
He appeared in the show’s opening procession and made himself available for photographs and, reportedly, for the payment of autographs to audience members who sought them.<\/p>\n
The reasons for his participation are not entirely clear from the historical record.<\/p>\n
He reportedly used the money he received, and the additional money from autograph payments, to give to the poor children he encountered in the cities the show visited \u2014 an account that fits with descriptions of his character from those who knew him, but which is difficult to verify in its specifics.<\/p>\n
He may have been interested in seeing the larger American society in which his community was increasingly embedded.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He may have seen the tour as an opportunity to observe and understand forces he needed to contend with.<\/p>\n
What is documented is that he found the experience of Eastern American cities and the poverty he saw there disturbing.<\/p>\n
He is reported to have expressed surprise and distress at the existence of severe poverty in the midst of the wealth displayed in American cities \u2014 an observation that his traveling companions noted as characteristic of the way he thought about social obligation and the proper relationship between people of different circumstances.<\/p>\n
His relationship with Annie Oakley, the show’s star sharpshooter, was one of the more genuinely warm personal connections of the tour.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He gave her a Lakota name \u2014 accounts vary on the specific name and its translation, but versions including “Little Sure Shot” have appeared in multiple sources.<\/p>\n
Whether the relationship reflected genuine personal warmth or was shaped by the performance context of the show is difficult to assess.<\/p>\n
What the Wild West show years make clear is that Sitting Bull was a person who attracted intense projection from people who did not know him, who was capable of navigating situations that were entirely outside his previous experience, and who maintained his own perspective and priorities even in contexts designed to cast him in a specific predetermined role.<\/p>\n
Those same qualities characterized the rest of his life and shaped the complexity of the legacy that his descendants have had to navigate.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Science of Reading Degraded Material<\/p>\n
The methodological contribution of the Sitting Bull DNA study to the broader field of ancient and historical genetics deserves closer examination than the popular coverage of the study typically provides, because it illuminates both what the researchers accomplished and why it was genuinely difficult.<\/p>\n
Hair preserved for more than a century presents a specific set of challenges that differ from the challenges of other types of ancient biological material.<\/p>\n
Bone and teeth \u2014 the materials most commonly used in ancient DNA research \u2014 preserve DNA in the mineral matrix of the tissue itself, which provides some protection against the environmental factors that cause degradation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Hair shaft material lacks this mineral matrix, and the keratin structure that makes up most of the hair does not preserve DNA in the same way.<\/p>\n
The DNA that does survive in hair is concentrated primarily in the hair root \u2014 the bulb at the base of the hair shaft where active cell division was occurring when the hair was last growing.<\/p>\n
The shaft itself contains trace quantities of nuclear DNA and somewhat more mitochondrial DNA \u2014 the DNA found in the mitochondria, which are cellular organelles rather than the nucleus itself.<\/p>\n
Mitochondrial DNA is circular rather than linear, is present in many copies per cell compared to nuclear DNA’s two copies, and survives degradation somewhat better as a result.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Earlier genetic research involving hair from historical figures \u2014 including some research on Sitting Bull’s hair in earlier decades \u2014 was typically limited to mitochondrial DNA analysis, which could establish maternal lineage connections (because mitochondrial DNA is inherited through the mother) but could not address the full range of familial relationships.<\/p>\n
The technique applied in the more recent study was specifically designed to go beyond mitochondrial analysis and recover autosomal DNA \u2014 the nuclear DNA on the non-sex chromosomes that carries information about both paternal and maternal lineages and can be used to assess a broader range of familial relationships.<\/p>\n
The recovery of usable autosomal DNA from hair preserved for more than a century required a combination of technical approaches.<\/p>\n
Library preparation \u2014 the process of converting DNA fragments into a form suitable for sequencing \u2014 was adapted to work with the very short fragments that survive in degraded material.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Computational analysis of the resulting sequence data was calibrated to account for the characteristic chemical modifications that occur during DNA degradation.<\/p>\n
And statistical methods for relationship inference were applied to the resulting genetic information to compare the hair sample’s autosomal profile with Ernie LaPointe’s.<\/p>\n
The fact that this worked \u2014 that the combination of laboratory technique and computational analysis could extract enough useful genetic information from badly degraded hair to make meaningful relationship inferences \u2014 is the scientific contribution of the study that will matter beyond this specific case.<\/p>\n
Researchers studying museum collections of historical biological material, archaeologists working with ancient specimens, and forensic scientists working with degraded biological evidence in legal contexts all have interest in methods that can extend the range of material amenable to genetic analysis.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The specific application of the method to Sitting Bull’s hair was, in a sense, a proof of concept for a capability that has much broader relevance.<\/p>\n
The researchers selected this case in part because the combination of a well-documented individual (Sitting Bull), a family whose relationship to him was established through oral history and documentary records (the LaPointe family), and a biological sample that presented genuine technical challenges (the degraded hair) made it an ideal test case for the method.<\/p>\n
That the test produced results consistent with the established family history was simultaneously a scientific validation of the method and a confirmation of what the family had always known \u2014 two different kinds of significance that the study carried at once.<\/p>\n
Museums, Remains, and the Ongoing Work of NAGPRA<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990 was a landmark in the relationship between museums and Native American communities, but the law’s implementation in the decades since has been uneven in ways that matter for understanding the context of the Sitting Bull repatriation.<\/p>\n
NAGPRA established a framework for consultation, inventory, and repatriation, but it did not establish enforcement mechanisms strong enough to compel compliance from resistant institutions.<\/p>\n
In the years following the law’s passage, many institutions moved slowly \u2014 completing inventories over years or decades rather than the shorter timelines the law contemplated, defining “affiliated” in narrow ways that excluded communities with genuine cultural connections, and in some cases actively resisting repatriation claims on grounds that the evidence of affiliation was insufficient.<\/p>\n
The result, more than three decades after NAGPRA’s passage, is that substantial quantities of Native American human remains and associated objects remain in museum and federal agency collections awaiting repatriation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Estimates of the number of individuals whose remains had not yet been repatriated as of the early 2020s ranged into the hundreds of thousands \u2014 a figure that is itself uncertain because the inventory process has not been completed at all institutions.<\/p>\n
The federal government’s own agencies \u2014 including the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Park Service, and other bodies that hold or manage collections of Native American human remains \u2014 have been among the less responsive institutions under the law, a pattern that has drawn criticism from tribal nations and from advocacy organizations working on repatriation issues.<\/p>\n
The Biden administration issued regulations in 2023 attempting to strengthen NAGPRA’s implementation, addressing some of the specific ways in which institutions had used ambiguities in the law to delay or avoid repatriation.<\/p>\n
Those regulatory changes reflected more than three decades of experience with the law’s implementation and the specific points at which the framework had proven insufficient.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Smithsonian’s repatriation of Sitting Bull’s hair and leggings in 2007 was an example of the framework functioning reasonably well \u2014 an investigation conducted in good faith, a finding that the taking had lacked proper authority, and a repatriation that followed from that finding.<\/p>\n
The family had advocated for the repatriation through the Smithsonian’s established process, and the process had produced the right outcome.<\/p>\n
But the Smithsonian’s relative responsiveness should not obscure the broader pattern of institutional resistance that has characterized NAGPRA implementation at many institutions.<\/p>\n
Nor should the specificity of Sitting Bull’s name and cultural significance \u2014 the fact that he is one of the most recognizable figures in American history \u2014 obscure the fact that the vast majority of NAGPRA repatriation cases involve people whose names are not known, whose lives are not documented in historical records, and whose descendants must navigate a bureaucratic process without the cultural prominence that may have helped move the Sitting Bull case forward.<\/p>\n
The Photographs That Survived<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
One dimension of the Sitting Bull story that connects to the broader question of how his remains and belongings have been held and studied is the existence of a significant number of photographs of him \u2014 photographs taken during his time at Fort Randall, during his years at Standing Rock, during the Wild West show tour, and on other occasions.<\/p>\n
These photographs are part of the historical record of his life and are among the most widely reproduced images in the history of American photography of Native people.<\/p>\n
They show a man of dignified bearing, often dressed formally, aware of the camera and its implications.<\/p>\n
They are images made with his participation \u2014 he did not object to being photographed and on some occasions actively sought photographs that he could sign and distribute.<\/p>\n
The photographs are relevant to the DNA and repatriation story in a few specific ways.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
First, they provide visual documentation that connects the historical record of Sitting Bull’s life to the objects and biological material associated with him \u2014 documentation that is relevant in repatriation investigations and in any assessment of the chain of custody of objects claimed to be his.<\/p>\n
Second, they illustrate the extent to which Sitting Bull himself understood the importance of controlling his own image and legacy, an understanding that his descendants have continued in their advocacy regarding his burial site and the recognition of their family’s identity.<\/p>\n
Third, and perhaps most interestingly, the photographs have sometimes been used in attempts to draw genetic or physiological inferences about Sitting Bull \u2014 a practice that researchers working with the family have engaged with carefully, given the complex ethics of drawing biological conclusions from historical images of individuals who may not have consented to such analysis.<\/p>\n
The DNA study did not rely on photographic evidence for its genetic findings.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The genetic analysis was conducted on biological material, compared against living reference samples.<\/p>\n
But the photographs remain part of the broader evidentiary record that contextualizes the study’s findings and the family’s long-maintained claim.<\/p>\n
The Community That Carries the Memory<\/p>\n
The Hunkpapa Lakota community that Sitting Bull was part of \u2014 the community that his descendants are part of \u2014 is not a historical artifact.<\/p>\n
It is a living community, maintaining its language, its cultural practices, its governance, and its relationships to the land and the people who have defined Lakota identity across generations.<\/p>\n
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which has governmental authority over the Standing Rock Reservation, is the contemporary institutional form of the community that Sitting Bull lived and died in.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The tribe has its own relationship to Sitting Bull’s legacy \u2014 both as a historical figure of enormous significance to the community and as a subject of ongoing disputes about burial sites, commemorative sites, and cultural patrimony.<\/p>\n
The relationship between the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s governmental claims and the LaPointe family’s individual family claims is one of the more complex dimensions of the contemporary story around Sitting Bull’s legacy.<\/p>\n
These two claims are not necessarily in opposition \u2014 family claims and tribal governmental claims can both be valid and can both be relevant in different contexts \u2014 but they have sometimes been in tension in the specific context of disputes about the burial site and related questions.<\/p>\n
The DNA study did not adjudicate this tension.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It provided scientific documentation of the family relationship that LaPointe and his sisters had claimed, which strengthens the family’s standing in institutional contexts where such documentation matters.<\/p>\n
It did not determine what the tribal government’s rights or authority are in relation to Sitting Bull’s burial or legacy.<\/p>\n
The broader Lakota Nation \u2014 including the seven council fires and the communities and reservations across the northern Great Plains that constitute it \u2014 maintains the cultural and historical memory of Sitting Bull in ways that go beyond any specific legal or scientific framework.<\/p>\n
He is part of the living historical consciousness of the Lakota people, a figure whose life and death and legacy are understood through frameworks that predate and exceed the DNA study, the repatriation legislation, and the museum collection that held his hair for a century.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That living historical consciousness is, ultimately, the context that gives meaning to all the other dimensions of the story.<\/p>\n
The science mattered.<\/p>\n
The repatriation mattered.<\/p>\n
The legal frameworks mattered.<\/p>\n
And all of them existed within a larger context of a people’s relationship to their own history \u2014 a relationship that no external institution created and that no external institution can fully understand.<\/p>\n
What Changed and What Did Not<\/p>\n
The return of Sitting Bull’s hair and leggings to his family in 2007, and the subsequent DNA study that supported the family’s identity as his direct descendants, changed some things and did not change others.<\/p>\n
Being clear about the distinction is important for understanding what the story means.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What changed: The family has the objects.<\/p>\n
They have physical custody of materials that were taken from their ancestor without authority more than a century ago.<\/p>\n
That custody is meaningful \u2014 not as a simple restoration of what was taken (nothing can restore what the century of separation cost), but as a recognition of who the objects belong to and who has authority over them.<\/p>\n
What changed: The scientific record now includes a peer-reviewed study confirming, in the specific idiom of genetic analysis, a familial relationship that family history and documentary records had established through other means.<\/p>\n
That documentation is available in contexts where scientific evidence carries institutional weight.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What changed: The Smithsonian’s investigation and finding \u2014 that the taking of Sitting Bull’s belongings had lacked proper authority \u2014 is part of the institutional record.<\/p>\n
That finding does not undo the taking, but it represents the institution’s own accounting of what happened and why it was wrong.<\/p>\n
What did not change: The family’s knowledge of who they are and where they come from.<\/p>\n
That knowledge was not created by the DNA study and did not require it.<\/p>\n
It existed before the study, and its epistemic status \u2014 its validity as a form of knowing \u2014 was not transformed by the fact that it is now accompanied by genetic documentation.<\/p>\n
What did not change: The broader conditions that made the original taking possible \u2014 the power asymmetries of the reservation era, the institutional appetite for Native material culture and human remains, the frameworks that treated Native people as subjects of study rather than as communities with rights over their own cultural heritage.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Those conditions have been partially addressed by NAGPRA and related legislation, but they have not been fully transformed.<\/p>\n
What did not change: The unresolved questions about Sitting Bull’s burial site and about who has authority over decisions related to his legacy.<\/p>\n
The DNA study provided relevant evidence, but it did not resolve disputes that involve law, jurisdiction, tribal governance, and the specific competing interests of multiple parties.<\/p>\n
The hair came home.<\/p>\n
The family’s claim was confirmed in a new idiom.<\/p>\n
The reckoning continues \u2014 incomplete, contested, and ongoing, as reckonings with deep historical injustice tend to be.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Last Question the Hair Carries<\/p>\n
Objects carry histories that their holders may not know and that the holders of record have sometimes preferred not to examine.<\/p>\n
Sitting Bull’s hair carried a specific history \u2014 of the man himself, of the violence and contested authority of his death, of the institutional appetite that removed it from his body, of the century it spent in museum custody, and of the family that maintained its knowledge of what the hair was and who it belonged to throughout that century.<\/p>\n
When the LaPointe family agreed to allow a small sample to be used in the genetic study, they were making a decision about how to deploy an object that was now, after long delay, in their custody.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They were deciding that the specific form of documentation the study could provide was worth the specific use of the biological material it required.<\/p>\n
That decision was theirs to make, as it had never been the decision of the people who removed the hair from Sitting Bull’s body in December 1890.<\/p>\n
The study produced findings that were scientifically meaningful and carefully framed.<\/p>\n
The peer-reviewed publication added to the scientific literature on degraded DNA analysis.<\/p>\n
The coverage brought the story of the repatriation and the family’s long-maintained identity to audiences who had not been aware of it.<\/p>\n
And Tatanka Iyotake remains who he was: a Hunkpapa Lakota man of extraordinary significance to his community, to the Lakota Nation, and to the broader history of the relationship between Native peoples and the United States.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
His hair is back with his family.<\/p>\n
His descendants know who they are.<\/p>\n
The DNA confirmed what they had always known.<\/p>\n
What the story of the hair does, if read carefully, is illuminate the structures that made all of this \u2014 the taking, the century of custody, the repatriation, the scientific study, the ongoing disputes \u2014 necessary.<\/p>\n
Those structures are not historical curiosities.<\/p>\n
They are the contexts within which Indigenous communities continue to navigate the relationship between what they know and what institutional frameworks require them to prove.<\/p>\n
The hair was small enough to hold between two fingers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The history it carried was the history of a people’s relationship to a country that has not yet fully reckoned with what it did to them.<\/p>\n
The science confirmed the family connection.<\/p>\n
The reckoning continues to be theirs to claim.<\/p>\n
\u2014 FINAL END \u2014<\/p>\n
The Ghost Dance, the Army, and the Convergence That Killed Him<\/p>\n
To fully understand why the circumstances of Sitting Bull’s death mattered \u2014 and why the objects taken from his body carried the weight they did \u2014 it is necessary to understand more completely what was happening on the Plains reservations in the fall of 1890, and how a religious movement became the context for a political assassination.<\/p>\n
The Ghost Dance had reached the Lakota reservations in the spring and summer of 1889, brought by emissaries who had traveled to Nevada to meet with Wovoka, the Paiute prophet whose visions had originated the movement.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Lakota interpretation of the Ghost Dance differed in some respects from the version practiced in other communities: it incorporated the use of Ghost Shirts \u2014 garments believed to offer spiritual protection \u2014 and some Lakota practitioners interpreted the movement’s promises in ways that gave it a more explicitly political edge than Wovoka had originally intended.<\/p>\n
The reservation context in 1889 and 1890 made the spread of the Ghost Dance particularly understandable.<\/p>\n
The Dawes Act of 1887 had initiated the allotment of reservation lands, a process that was already threatening the land base of reservation communities.<\/p>\n
The Sioux Act of 1889 had taken approximately 9 million acres from the Great Sioux Reservation and divided the remainder into smaller, separate reservations.<\/p>\n
The terms of that agreement \u2014 the food rations that the government had promised in exchange for the land cession \u2014 were being reduced by Congress just as the movement was spreading.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Lakota communities in 1890 were experiencing real hunger, real dispossession, and real reason for despair.<\/p>\n
The Ghost Dance offered a spiritual framework for that despair and a promise of transformation.<\/p>\n
Its spread was rapid and, from the perspective of people living under those conditions, entirely comprehensible.<\/p>\n
Reservation agents and military commanders did not approach the Ghost Dance with comprehension.<\/p>\n
They approached it with alarm and, in some cases, with panic.<\/p>\n
The movement’s rapid spread through multiple reservation communities, the fervent commitment of its practitioners, and the interpretations that gave it a political edge were read by these officials as the signs of an imminent uprising.<\/p>\n
That reading was wrong.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Ghost Dance was a religious movement, not a military plan.<\/p>\n
But the wrong reading had real consequences \u2014 it produced the conditions for Sitting Bull’s arrest, his death, and eventually for the Wounded Knee Massacre.<\/p>\n
James McLaughlin, the Standing Rock agent, was not the only official convinced that Sitting Bull needed to be removed.<\/p>\n
General Nelson Miles, commanding the Military Division of the Missouri, had his own ideas about how to address the situation.<\/p>\n
He sent Buffalo Bill Cody to Standing Rock with a specific mission: to approach Sitting Bull personally and persuade him to come in, using their acquaintance from the Wild West show to create an opening for a peaceful resolution.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
McLaughlin, who did not want Cody interfering with his own plans for handling Sitting Bull, moved to block Cody’s mission.<\/p>\n
He sent word to officials in Washington that Cody was drunk and should be recalled, and Cody was ordered away from Standing Rock before he could speak with Sitting Bull.<\/p>\n
Whether a meeting between Cody and Sitting Bull would have changed anything is unknown.<\/p>\n
What followed from Cody’s removal was McLaughlin’s arrest order, the confrontation at Sitting Bull’s camp on December 15, and the deaths that resulted from it.<\/p>\n
The Indian Police who carried out the arrest were themselves Lakota men \u2014 members of a force established by the reservation system to maintain order on the reservation using Native agents who, it was hoped, would be more effective at managing Native communities than non-Native officers would be.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The use of Indian Police to arrest Sitting Bull placed Lakota men in the position of carrying out a federal agency’s order against one of the most significant figures in their own community \u2014 a position that was, by any measure, difficult and morally complicated.<\/p>\n
The confrontation at Sitting Bull’s camp involved his supporters and his family as well as the Indian Police.<\/p>\n
When shots were fired, the violence was between people who had complex relationships with each other \u2014 not a clean confrontation between opposing sides but a chaotic, close-range exchange in which people on both sides died.<\/p>\n
Sitting Bull was shot by Indian Police officers.<\/p>\n
The specific sequence of events that led to the shots being fired has been described differently in different accounts, and the disputed nature of the sequence reflects the chaos of the confrontation and the different perspectives of those who survived it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What is clear is that the man who had been, for decades, the most influential voice in Hunkpapa Lakota leadership was dead at approximately fifty-nine years old, killed in an arrest ordered by a federal reservation agent, carried out by Lakota men employed by the agency, on the reservation where the federal government had required him to live.<\/p>\n
And in the hours after his death, people who had no legitimate authority over his possessions took things from his body and his surroundings \u2014 things that would spend more than a century in museum custody before being returned to his family.<\/p>\n
The Eske Willerslev Research Group and Its Broader Work<\/p>\n
The research group led by Eske Willerslev that conducted the Sitting Bull DNA study represents one of the most significant concentrations of ancient DNA expertise in the world, and situating the Sitting Bull work within that broader research program helps clarify its scientific significance.<\/p>\n
Willerslev, who holds positions at both the University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen, has been one of the central figures in the development of ancient DNA research over the past two decades.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
His group has produced landmark studies on a range of topics in human and ecological history: the reconstruction of genomes from permafrost-preserved specimens tens of thousands of years old; the characterization of the first complete ancient human genome from a Pleistocene-era Greenlandic individual; studies of ancient population movements in Europe, Asia, and the Americas; and work on the ancient environmental DNA preserved in permafrost and lake sediments that can reveal ecological histories without requiring the recovery of macroscopic biological material.<\/p>\n
The common thread in this diverse body of work is the development and application of methods for recovering genetic information from material that has been partially degraded by time and environmental exposure.<\/p>\n
The methodological innovations that make ancient DNA research possible have developed in parallel with the specific scientific questions Willerslev’s group and others in the field have pursued, and the Sitting Bull study represents one application of this methodological toolkit to a historical \u2014 rather than archaeological \u2014 specimen.<\/p>\n
The distinction between historical and archaeological specimens is relevant in the context of the broader ancient DNA research landscape.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Most ancient DNA studies involve material from periods and contexts where the individuals whose remains are being studied are not connected to living communities through documented genealogical relationships.<\/p>\n
Archaeological specimens from ten thousand years ago cannot easily be linked to specific living people.<\/p>\n
Historical specimens \u2014 material from individuals who lived in the documented historical period and who have known or claimed living descendants \u2014 present a different set of questions, both scientific and ethical.<\/p>\n
The scientific questions are, in some respects, easier to address: the relationships being tested are more recent, the genetic distances involved are smaller, and the comparison of a historical specimen with living reference samples from claimed relatives is a more straightforward analytical task than reconstructing the ancestry of populations from archaeological material.<\/p>\n
The ethical questions are, if anything, more complex.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Living descendants have specific interests in how their ancestors’ biological material is used, specific perspectives on what research questions are worth asking, and specific concerns about how the findings will be framed and used.<\/p>\n
The framework for engaging with these interests in historical DNA research is still developing, and the Sitting Bull study \u2014 conducted with full family participation and careful attention to how findings were communicated \u2014 represents one model for how that engagement can work.<\/p>\n
Willerslev has spoken publicly about the importance of Indigenous community engagement in research involving ancestral remains, and his group’s work with the LaPointe family appears to have reflected a genuine commitment to centering the family’s interests and perspectives in the research design and in how the findings were communicated.<\/p>\n
That approach distinguished the Sitting Bull study from some earlier ancient DNA research that engaged with Indigenous concerns as an afterthought rather than as a foundational element of the research design.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Care Principles and the Future of Indigenous Data<\/p>\n
The ethical framework that has developed around research involving Indigenous communities and Indigenous data \u2014 including genetic data derived from ancestral remains \u2014 has been partially codified in what are known as the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.<\/p>\n
These principles, developed through engagement with Indigenous communities and researchers, provide a framework for thinking about how data generated through research involving Indigenous peoples should be governed, with attention to collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics.<\/p>\n
The CARE Principles are complementary to the more familiar FAIR Principles for scientific data sharing \u2014 which emphasize findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability \u2014 but they address the specific context of Indigenous data with attention to community interests that the more generic FAIR framework does not.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Applying these principles to the specific context of genetic research involving historical remains \u2014 the kind of research the Sitting Bull study exemplifies \u2014 raises questions that the scientific community is actively working through.<\/p>\n
Who has authority to decide whether ancestral remains should be used in genetic research?<\/p>\n
What are the conditions under which such research is appropriate?<\/p>\n
How should findings be communicated in ways that serve community interests rather than merely scientific interests?<\/p>\n
What happens to the genetic data generated, who has access to it, and how is it governed over time?<\/p>\n
The Sitting Bull study appears to have addressed many of these questions through the family’s active participation in the research.<\/p>\n
The family decided to participate.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The family’s interests shaped the research questions.<\/p>\n
The findings were communicated in ways that acknowledged the family’s prior knowledge and the limitations of what the science could establish.<\/p>\n
But the existence of a well-conducted example does not resolve the broader policy questions about what standards should apply across the full range of research involving Indigenous ancestral remains.<\/p>\n
Those standards are still being developed, contested, and refined through the engagement of researchers, Indigenous communities, institutional review boards, and governmental bodies.<\/p>\n
The Sitting Bull study’s contribution to that conversation is not just the specific DNA findings it produced.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It is the demonstration of a research approach that centered Indigenous community interests from the beginning and produced results that served those interests \u2014 a demonstration that can inform how other researchers approach similar questions in other contexts.<\/p>\n
The Meaning the Family Made<\/p>\n
In November 2021, the peer-reviewed study of Sitting Bull’s DNA was published in the journal Science Advances.<\/p>\n
The publication was covered by science journalists and by general news outlets as a significant finding, and the coverage brought attention to the broader story of the repatriation, the family’s identity, and the DNA method.<\/p>\n
Ernie LaPointe has spoken in interviews about what the study meant to him and his family.<\/p>\n
His accounts emphasize several things: the confirmation of what the family had always known, the potential relevance of the documentation in ongoing disputes about Sitting Bull’s burial and legacy, and the importance of the broader question of how Sitting Bull is remembered and by whom.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
LaPointe has also been clear about what the DNA study did not mean: that the family’s identity depended on the science, that the study created their relationship to Sitting Bull, or that scientific documentation is what gives their claims legitimacy.<\/p>\n
The family knew who they were before the study.<\/p>\n
The study added a layer of documentation.<\/p>\n
Those are different things.<\/p>\n
The distinction LaPointe draws is important and reflects a broader principle: Indigenous identity, kinship, and cultural belonging are not determined by genetics.<\/p>\n
They are determined by the living relationships, community recognition, cultural practices, and family histories through which Indigenous people know and maintain their identities.<\/p>\n
Genetics can provide one form of additional documentation in specific contexts, but it is not the foundation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This principle is relevant beyond the Sitting Bull case.<\/p>\n
The history of federal Indian policy in the United States includes a long and damaging tradition of using biological concepts \u2014 specifically blood quantum, the percentage of “Indian blood” an individual carries \u2014 as a mechanism for determining tribal membership and access to federal recognition and benefits.<\/p>\n
Blood quantum requirements have no parallel in how any other community in the United States defines its membership, and they have been criticized by many tribal nations and scholars as an externally imposed standard that undermines Indigenous peoples’ right to determine their own membership on their own terms.<\/p>\n
The use of DNA analysis in the context of the Sitting Bull study is categorically different from blood quantum determinations: it is a scientific tool used with community consent to document a specific claimed relationship, not an externally imposed standard for determining who counts as Indigenous.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But the potential for genetic testing to be misused in the context of Indigenous identity determinations \u2014 for genetic results to be treated as the authoritative determinant of who “really is” Native American \u2014 is a concern that Indigenous communities and their advocates have raised in response to the growing availability and declining cost of genetic testing.<\/p>\n
The Sitting Bull study’s careful framing \u2014 its consistent emphasis that the DNA evidence is consistent with and supportive of the family relationship rather than determinative of it, and its acknowledgment that oral history and documentary records had established the family connection before the genetic analysis \u2014 is a meaningful model for how such studies can be communicated without feeding into problematic frameworks of genetic determination of Indigenous identity.<\/p>\n
The Long View<\/p>\n
Sitting Bull lived through one of the most dramatic and traumatic periods of transformation in the history of the Lakota people \u2014 a period in which the patterns of life that had defined Lakota society for generations were disrupted by forces that arrived with extraordinary speed and that the Lakota resisted with extraordinary tenacity.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The buffalo herds that had sustained the Plains economy were gone within a decade.<\/p>\n
The territory that the Lakota had traveled across for generations was carved into reservations within two decades.<\/p>\n
The children who had grown up in tipis on the open plains were, within a generation, being sent to boarding schools to have their language and culture systematically removed from them.<\/p>\n
Sitting Bull navigated this transformation with a consistency of purpose and identity that was, given the circumstances, remarkable.<\/p>\n
He was not opposed to all change or all adaptation \u2014 his participation in the Wild West show was itself a form of adaptation to circumstances that had no precedent in his own experience or in the experience of his community.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But he maintained, throughout his life, a commitment to Lakota sovereignty and Lakota ways of being that refused to accept the terms offered by the federal government and its reservation system.<\/p>\n
That consistency of purpose made him a target.<\/p>\n
It made him dangerous, in the eyes of federal officials, precisely because he was effective: because people listened to him, because his authority was real rather than merely symbolic, and because his continued influence represented an obstacle to the kind of compliance and assimilation that the reservation system was designed to produce.<\/p>\n
His death was, in the most direct sense, the result of that danger.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The arrest order that produced the confrontation at his camp was ordered by an agent who had wanted to remove him for years and who saw in the Ghost Dance movement the opportunity to justify doing so.<\/p>\n
The death was not incidental or accidental \u2014 it was the intended outcome of an arrest ordered by people who expected, or at least accepted, that resistance was likely.<\/p>\n
What happened to his belongings after his death \u2014 the taking, the century of museum custody, the repatriation, the DNA study \u2014 is a continuation of that story in a different register.<\/p>\n
The struggle over what his legacy means, who has authority over it, and how it is documented and remembered is a continuation of the same contest that defined his life: between Lakota authority over Lakota lives and history, and the federal frameworks and institutional apparatus that have consistently sought to define that history on terms favorable to the dominant culture.<\/p>\n
The hair came home.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The family’s identity is documented in a new idiom.<\/p>\n
The struggle continues, as it has continued for the entire period since December 1890, and as it will continue until the reckoning is more complete.<\/p>\n
That is not an ending.<\/p>\n
It is a description of where things stand \u2014 which is, in a story like this one, the most honest thing that can be said.<\/p>\n
\u2014 FINAL END \u2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The object was small enough to hold between two fingers. A lock of hair, cut from a man’s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1441,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1442,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1440\/revisions\/1442"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}