In April 1953, a group connected to the Mobridge, South Dakota, Chamber of Commerce — the Dakota Memorial Association, led by a businessman named Walter Tuntland — exhumed the remains from Fort Yates and reburied them across the Missouri River from Mobridge, on a bluff overlooking the river. The exhumation was done during a snowstorm, reportedly with a decoy vehicle used to obscure the operation. North Dakota officials had refused to grant a burial transit permit; the group proceeded anyway. The remains were placed in a steel crypt and covered with approximately twenty tons of concrete — reportedly to prevent another removal.
The 1953 reburial is contested in multiple respects. Almost immediately after it occurred, people began questioning whether the bones exhumed from Fort Yates were actually Sitting Bull’s. The site had been poorly maintained, and the identification of the specific remains was not rigorously documented. A thigh bone reportedly taken by two soldiers in the early 1900s was said to be held by the North Dakota Historical Society — a detail that complicates any simple accounting of what was at Fort Yates when the 1953 exhumation occurred. Some members of the Lakota community disputed whether the bones at Mobridge were genuinely Sitting Bull’s.
LaPointe has said he believes his great-grandfather’s remains are at Mobridge. But he has also said that any reburial would first require DNA testing to confirm the match — and that the Smithsonian’s comparison of the hair’s genetic profile with existing records provides a starting point for that comparison, while a definitive confirmation would require extracting DNA from the Mobridge remains and comparing it with the now-established genetic profile from the hair and from LaPointe himself.