Ernie LaPointe had been saying it for years: that he was the great-grandson of Tatanka-Iyotanka — Sitting Bull — the Hunkpapa Lakota leader who had died in 1890 with a bullet wound to the head and his young son Crow Foot dead beside him.
He said it when people doubted him. He said it when historians questioned the reliability of his family’s oral account. He said it when competing claimants disputed the family’s relationship to one of the most famous figures in American history.
He had documents — a family tree, birth and death certificates, historical records assembled across his lifetime. He had the stories his mother told him before she died of cancer when he was ten years old. He had the ceremonies and the connections that, in Lakota tradition, constitute the living record of who a person is and where they come from.
And then, in October 2021, a team of scientists from the University of Cambridge published a study in the journal *Science Advances*. The researchers had extracted autosomal DNA from a lock of Sitting Bull’s hair — a small piece, barely five or six centimeters, that had spent more than a century in a Smithsonian storage box — and compared it with DNA from Ernie LaPointe and other Lakota Sioux individuals.
The results supported what LaPointe had always said.
—
## The Man Who Already Knew
Ernie LaPointe was born in 1948 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and raised in Rapid City. His mother, Angelique LaPointe Spotted Horse, died when he was ten. His father, Claude LaPointe, died of a heart attack when LaPointe was seventeen. He was raised in part by his half-sister, Marlene Little Spotted Horse, until he joined the military at eighteen.