In Lakota belief — and in the specific understanding that LaPointe has expressed publicly — a person’s hair is part of who they are. It is not merely a biological sample or a sentimental keepsake. It carries the person’s presence and identity in a way that has spiritual weight. When Horace Deeble removed that lock of hair from Sitting Bull’s body in December 1890, he was not simply taking a souvenir. He was separating a part of the man from the rest of him — and from the ceremonial care that would have allowed him to pass fully into the spirit world.
For 117 years, Tatanka-Iyotanka was incomplete in this sense. A part of him was in a glass box in a federal archive, uncatalogued and unknown to his family, held by an institution that did not fully understand what it had or what the family would have considered their right to know.
LaPointe has described learning about the hair’s existence through the Smithsonian’s outreach in 2002 or 2003. Bill Billeck wrote to him explaining that the museum had located items associated with Sitting Bull and that the family appeared to be the lineal descendants with the right to receive them. The leggings had been known in the collection; the hair had required more research to locate and connect.
The range of emotions that LaPointe has described — the pain of knowing his great-grandfather had been in this state of spiritual incompleteness, the weight of the obligation to address it — reflects a relationship with ancestry that is not primarily historical or intellectual but lived and ceremonial.