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## The Repatriation of the Hair: A Ceremony, Not a Transaction
The formal return of the hair and leggings from the Smithsonian on December 5, 2007, was not simply a legal transaction. It was, for LaPointe and his family, a spiritual event of considerable significance.
In Lakota spiritual belief, as LaPointe has explained in interviews, a person is not whole in the spirit world without all their parts. The hair that Horace Deeble had taken from Sitting Bull’s body in 1890 was a part of him — not symbolically, but in the sense that its absence from where he rested made his passage into the spirit world incomplete. The hair had been held for 117 years in a museum storage system, separated from the family, from the land, and from any ceremony that might have properly addressed its presence in the world.
LaPointe has described holding the hair as “painful” — the word that captures what it meant to him to know that his great-grandfather had been in this state of incompleteness since 1890. He kept the word “Grandfather” for Sitting Bull, speaking of him with the deference due an elder who is still present, in some sense, in the world.
The ceremony on December 15, 2007, led by medicine man Marvin Helper, addressed that incompleteness. The medicine man determined that the hair should be burned. The leggings, which had also been stored at the Smithsonian, were not to go to another museum. LaPointe kept them at home. Before the ceremony, however, the family provided a portion of the hair to Willerslev’s team for DNA analysis.