That determination was not a rubber-stamp. The Smithsonian opened a formal thirty-day window during which competing claims could be submitted. At least one competing claimant — including, according to LaPointe, an individual or group connected to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe — filed a claim within that window. The Smithsonian gave competitors extra time. Ultimately, no competing claimant provided documentation that the Smithsonian found sufficient to override the family’s claim.
LaPointe has been blunt about this history. He gave the Standing Rock claimants extra time beyond the formal deadline to produce their documentation, and they did not produce it. He says his family’s connection to Sitting Bull was never in doubt within the family — only among outsiders who defaulted to skepticism about Indigenous oral tradition and family memory.
This history matters for understanding what the 2021 DNA study actually contributed. The Smithsonian’s institutional determination — made in 2007, based on documentary evidence reviewed over five years — was the legal and institutional basis for the repatriation. The DNA study, published fourteen years later, was not produced to satisfy the Smithsonian or any legal requirement. It was produced because Ernie LaPointe chose to allow it, because Professor Willerslev had spent years developing a method capable of working with the degraded material, and because the result would be useful for the separate purpose of eventually confirming the identity of the remains at Mobridge.
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## The Spiritual Dimension of the Hair
To approach the return of Sitting Bull’s hair purely as a legal transaction or a genealogical event is to miss the significance that LaPointe and his family have consistently described.