The formal repatriation took place on December 5, 2007, at the National Museum of Natural History. LaPointe and his wife Sonja drove from South Dakota to Washington, D.C., for the ceremony. Sonja summarized the moment: “Grandfather is coming home with us.”
On December 15, 2007 — exactly 117 years after Sitting Bull’s death — the family held a ceremony at home, led by medicine man Marvin Helper. They learned that the hair should be burned, and that the leggings should not go to a museum. LaPointe kept the leggings. The hair was treated with more complexity: before it was burned, the family gave a portion to a European DNA specialist.
That portion, and the scientific work that followed, would eventually become the 2021 study.
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## Eske Willerslev and the Fourteen-Year Problem
Professor Eske Willerslev is a Danish geneticist associated with the University of Cambridge and with the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre in Copenhagen. He is one of the most prominent practitioners of ancient DNA research in the world — his work has ranged from sequencing the genomes of Ice Age humans to reconstructing the population history of the Americas.
He has also, by his own account, admired Sitting Bull since boyhood. When he read in a magazine in 2007 about the repatriation of Sitting Bull’s hair to LaPointe and his sisters, he wrote to LaPointe to introduce himself. He explained his expertise in ancient DNA, his admiration for Sitting Bull, and his interest in comparing DNA from the hair — if the family ever wanted to pursue that avenue.