LaPointe’s sisters — identified by the Smithsonian as Marlene Little Spotted Horse Andersen, Ethel Little Spotted Horse Bates, and Lydia Little Spotted Horse Red Paint — share his status as lineal descendants but are not, based on available reporting, equally prominent in public discussions of the burial and repatriation issues.
The community at Mobridge, South Dakota, has its own investment in the gravesite on the bluff above the Missouri River. The Sitting Bull Monument Foundation acquired the site, cleaned it up, and has planned cultural and educational programming. LaPointe has said the family was not consulted about those plans and has objected to commercial elements.
These overlapping claims — of family, of tribal community, of local institutions, of the state — represent the full landscape of contested authority around a man who has become, in death as in life, a symbol whose ownership no single person or institution can claim. The DNA study did not resolve that landscape. It added one data point: that Ernie LaPointe’s family connection to Sitting Bull, as his family had always maintained, was consistent with the biological evidence that could be recovered from a century-old lock of hair.
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## Why He Objected to Being “Identified”
One of the most revealing moments in LaPointe’s public response to the 2021 study was his objection to the language many outlets used to describe it.
Numerous headlines said some version of: “Sitting Bull’s great-grandson identified.” To LaPointe, this framing was not a neutral description. It implied that the relationship had been unknown or unverified before the DNA test — that the family’s knowledge, documentation, and the Smithsonian’s own lineal-descendant determination somehow did not count as identification until a genetic laboratory confirmed it.