On the problematic side, DNA has been presented by some commercial testing companies and popular accounts as a mechanism for establishing or denying Indigenous identity — as if a certain percentage of Indigenous genetic ancestry (an ill-defined concept in the first place, since DNA tests identify genetic similarity with reference populations, not tribal affiliation) is either sufficient or necessary to establish a person’s claim to be Native American. This approach confuses genetic ancestry with cultural identity, tribal citizenship, and political status.
Tribal citizenship in the United States is determined by tribal nations themselves, through their own enrollment criteria. Some tribes use blood quantum requirements. Others use lineal descent. Others use community-based criteria that are not primarily genealogical. None of these determinations are made by a genetic test, and none should be. As the prompt for this article correctly notes: “No DNA test decides tribal citizenship, belonging, sovereignty or cultural legitimacy.”
The 2021 Sitting Bull study was careful, in how it was framed, not to make claims that DNA could not support. It confirmed a biological relationship between a historical sample and a living individual, within the limits of what a probabilistic analysis of degraded ancient DNA can establish. It did not characterize LaPointe’s Lakota identity, his tribal citizenship, or his cultural authority. The researchers treated the DNA result as what it was: one piece of evidence, added to a framework of other evidence that had already established the family’s relationship to Sitting Bull through non-genetic means.
Willerslev himself described the result as “an additional line of evidence to strengthen his claim” — language that implies the claim already existed and was being strengthened, not created. That framing is appropriate and was clearly deliberate.