When the formal repatriation happened in December 2007, it was the beginning of a process, not an end. The family received the items. They brought them home to South Dakota. On December 15 — exactly 117 years after the day Sitting Bull was shot — medicine man Marvin Helper led a ceremony. He determined that the hair should be burned. The leggings should not return to any museum.
Before the hair was burned, a portion was set aside for Eske Willerslev’s team. LaPointe has described giving the portion directly to “a European DNA specialist” — consistent with Willerslev, who is Danish. He has not described the pre-burning portion as a reluctant concession to science. He describes it as a deliberate decision, made with a specific purpose: the DNA data could eventually be used to confirm the identity of the remains at Mobridge, which is the practical step that would need to precede any reburial in a more appropriate location.
The burned hair did what Marvin Helper determined it needed to do spiritually. The portion given to Willerslev did what LaPointe hoped it could do practically. Both purposes were, in his framing, legitimate — one belonging to the ceremonial dimension of his relationship to his great-grandfather, one belonging to the legal and material question of what would eventually happen to the bones.
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## How Lakota Oral Tradition Works as Evidence
The dismissal of Indigenous oral tradition as unreliable evidence is one of the oldest and most persistent failures of mainstream American historical practice. It is also, as LaPointe has pointed out, a form of epistemic prejudice that has had concrete consequences for Indigenous people seeking recognition of their lineage, their land, their treaty rights, and their cultural heritage.