**Documentary records:** Birth and death certificates, enrollment records, a documented family tree, and historical records that trace the lineage from Sitting Bull through his children and grandchildren to LaPointe’s mother and to LaPointe and his sisters. These records were reviewed and accepted by the Smithsonian’s Repatriation Office in the process that led to the 2007 return of the hair and leggings.
**DNA:** The fourth and most recent layer, which the 2021 study provided. LaPointe described the DNA result as “a scientific connection” — a phrase that suggests he saw it as adding a scientific dimension to evidence he already considered sufficient, rather than as the discovery of a connection he had not previously established.
His objection to some of the coverage of the 2021 study was precisely this framing problem. Headlines described him as being “identified” as Sitting Bull’s great-grandson — language that implies the relationship was unknown or unverified before the DNA test. LaPointe objected to that framing. The family had documentation for decades. The Smithsonian had verified the lineage before the DNA study existed. To say he was “identified” was, in his view, to imply that his family’s knowledge had no standing until outsiders with scientific equipment confirmed it.
That objection points to a broader issue about how DNA evidence is received in Indigenous ancestry contexts — one that the prompt for this article correctly flags: the implicit assumption that oral history, ceremonial tradition, and family documentation are less trustworthy than molecular analysis, and that real proof requires scientific corroboration. LaPointe’s four-part evidence framework does not place DNA at the top of the hierarchy. It places it alongside the other evidence, as a welcome confirmation of what the family already knew.