He served in Korea, Turkey, Germany, and Vietnam, earning an honorable discharge in 1972. He married a woman named Sonja, whom he met at a Rapid City powwow. He became a Sun Dancer, following the traditional Lakota way and the rules of the sacred pipe. He was, by his own description and by the accounts of those who know him, a man living within his cultural tradition — not primarily as a claimant to a famous name, but as a Lakota person carrying the obligations that came with his lineage.
The family connection to Sitting Bull ran through his mother’s side. The lineage is matrilineal in its tracing — it connects LaPointe to Sitting Bull through daughters and mothers, not through the paternal line. This fact would later become technically significant when scientists tried to figure out how to test the relationship using DNA: the standard tools of genetic genealogy were not designed for this kind of tracing.
LaPointe has described learning about his ancestry primarily from his mother, who told him family stories and asked him to hold them close. She asked him not to reveal the connection publicly, and for years he kept it private. An aunt urged him in 1992 to make the family’s descent public, and he did — opening him to the skepticism that would follow.
“Over the years,” he said in 2021, “many people have tried to question the relationship that I and my sisters have to Sitting Bull.”
His sisters — three of them, whose names appear in a 2007 AP account as Marlene Little Spotted Horse Andersen, Ethel Little Spotted Horse Bates, and Lydia Little Spotted Horse Red Paint — share the relationship he has claimed. They are, collectively, the people the Smithsonian Institution identified as the closest living lineal descendants of Sitting Bull, after a five-year research process by the museum’s Repatriation Office beginning in 2002.