The study was published in *Science Advances*, the open-access journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, with a DOI of 10.1126/sciadv.abh2013. The senior author was Eske Willerslev, working from both St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge and the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre. The work was funded by the Danish National Research Foundation.
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## The Museum Collection Ethics Question
The hair and leggings that Horace Deeble took from Sitting Bull’s body in 1890 and sent to the Smithsonian were, by the legal standards that prevailed in 1896, within the norms of how museums and collectors of that era acquired Indigenous materials. Those norms were not the product of good ethics. They were the product of a system in which the bodies, belongings, and cultural materials of Indigenous peoples were considered available for collection, display, and scientific study without the consent of the people from whom they were taken.
The human cost of this collection regime was enormous. Thousands of Native American human remains, along with vast quantities of cultural objects, ended up in museum collections across the United States and Europe — many of them taken in conditions of coercion, deception, or outright theft. They sat in storage for generations, catalogued under systems designed for the convenience of non-Indigenous scholars, inaccessible to the communities who had made them or who descended from those whose remains were held.
The political and legal movement to change this situation gained decisive force in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The National Museum of the American Indian Act (1989) created the framework for Smithsonian repatriation. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) — which applies to other federally funded institutions, not the Smithsonian, which is governed by its own statute — created parallel requirements for federal agencies and institutions receiving federal funding.