Whether and when that comparison happens is a decision that belongs to LaPointe and his family, within whatever legal and institutional framework governs such an exhumation. The science exists. The legal authority rests with the family. The timeline is theirs to determine.
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## Conclusion: What the DNA Did and Didn’t Answer
The 2021 study in *Science Advances* did something that had not been done before with ancient DNA: it extended probabilistic kinship analysis to a degraded historical sample, at a degree of family relationship — great-grandparent — that previous methods could not reliably reach, and it provided results that supported the relationship claimed by a living person whose family had maintained that claim across generations.
The result was real and meaningful. It added a scientific dimension to evidence that existed through other means. It helped establish a genetic profile for Sitting Bull that may eventually be used to confirm the identity of remains. It demonstrated the potential of a method that could be applied to other historical cases.
What it did not do was create the relationship between Ernie LaPointe and Tatanka-Iyotanka. That relationship existed before the study was conceived, maintained through the oral accounts his mother gave him, the documentary records his family assembled, the ceremonies that tied him to his great-grandfather’s legacy, and the institutional determination made by the Smithsonian after years of research.
Sitting Bull was, in his own time, a man who was defined by those who wished to control him: as a renegade, a troublemaker, an obstacle to the progress of American settlement. The people who shot him at Fort Yates and buried him hastily and allowed his grave to deteriorate for sixty years were acting within a framework that saw him as an inconvenient presence rather than a man whose life and death deserved the same respect extended to other leaders of his stature.