The phrase “some historians would say you cannot trust the natives’ oral history” — which appears in the headline of a Business Insider article about LaPointe’s response to the DNA study — captures the frustration he expressed. He was not claiming that the DNA study proved him right for the first time. He was saying that the DNA study provided the kind of proof that skeptics had insisted on, and that the family’s prior evidence had been dismissed not because it was insufficient but because of where it came from.
This is a live issue in Indigenous genealogy and repatriation contexts broadly, not just in the LaPointe case. Institutions, courts, and government agencies that deal with Indigenous identity and land claims routinely apply evidentiary standards that disadvantage oral and ceremonial knowledge in favor of written documentation — which was often kept by the very colonial institutions that systematically disrupted Indigenous communities and records.
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## Sitting Bull’s Children and the Question of Living Descendants
Sitting Bull had multiple wives over the course of his life — a practice common among Lakota men of his standing — and he had children from several of these relationships. The number of children he had and how many survived to adulthood is not always precisely documented in the historical record, and different sources give somewhat different accounts.
What is established is that he had daughters who survived him and through whom the family line continued. The specific lineage that connects Ernie LaPointe to Sitting Bull runs through his mother, Angelique LaPointe Spotted Horse, and through the maternal line connecting her to Sitting Bull’s daughter or daughters.