LaPointe has described wanting to exhume the bones and conduct DNA analysis to confirm they are actually Sitting Bull’s. He has said that “when the time is right” he plans to apply for a permit from South Dakota. He has said he wants a proper traditional Lakota ceremony — one that Sitting Bull never received at his death and that neither of his current burial sites has provided.
He has not specified where the remains would be reburied, beyond ruling out Standing Rock. His mother reportedly preferred the Black Hills. He has mentioned the Little Bighorn Battlefield as one possibility. The Little Bighorn Battlefield superintendent, Darrell Cook, said in 2007 that the battlefield agreed to help the family.
The twenty tons of concrete poured over the Mobridge crypt in 1953 represents a practical obstacle to exhumation, though not an insurmountable one. The more significant obstacles are legal and political: obtaining a permit from the state of South Dakota, navigating the competing claims of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Mobridge community, and ultimately determining whether the remains at Mobridge are in fact Sitting Bull’s and not those of someone else — a question that has been debated since 1953 and that could only be resolved by DNA analysis.
The 2021 study’s establishment of Sitting Bull’s genetic profile from the hair sample creates the comparative baseline that any future remains analysis would need. Without a confirmed genetic profile for Sitting Bull, comparing bones from Mobridge to living descendants would tell you whether the bones belonged to someone related to LaPointe — but with the established hair sample, a comparison becomes more specific and more meaningful.