It was a program manager in the Smithsonian’s Repatriation Office — Bill Billeck — who pieced the story back together. Researching the leggings, he found a reference to Deeble as the lender. Tracing Deeble’s history, he found that the same doctor had taken the hair. And there, in the National Anthropological Archives, was a lock of Sitting Bull’s hair that had been in the Smithsonian’s holdings since 1896, stored at room temperature, in a glass box.
It had been sitting there for more than a hundred years.
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## The Law That Made Return Possible
The repatriation of Sitting Bull’s hair and leggings did not happen automatically. It required both the existence of specific legislation and years of careful institutional process.
The National Museum of the American Indian Act became law in 1989. It established the framework for the Smithsonian to return Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony to lineal descendants and affiliated tribes. The law required the museum to inventory its holdings and work with descendant communities to identify and return items that qualified.
The process was not quick. Billeck spent years — from approximately 2002, when the Smithsonian first contacted LaPointe, until 2007, when the items were formally returned — verifying the family’s lineage and establishing that LaPointe and his sisters were the closest living lineal descendants of Sitting Bull. The museum reviewed family documents, consulted the family tree, and opened a thirty-day window for competing claims. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which has a different relationship with Sitting Bull’s legacy and with the reservation land where he died, made a claim — but, by LaPointe’s account, did not provide the required documentation within the allotted time and did not ultimately pursue the claim further.