The result is a model of how this kind of research can be done — with the descendant community in the decision-making position, with the research serving purposes the community identifies, and with the results presented in terms that do not compromise Indigenous authority over their own historical narratives.
This is not the universal standard of ancient DNA research. Many cases have proceeded less carefully. The federal debates around NAGPRA and the Smithsonian’s repatriation frameworks reflect ongoing arguments about what consent means when the individuals whose remains are held in museums are dead, and their descendants may be difficult to identify or may themselves disagree about what should happen.
What the Sitting Bull case demonstrates is that when the descendant community has clear, legally recognized authority over the materials, and when the researcher earns the community’s trust through sustained engagement over many years, the science and the community’s interests can align rather than conflict.
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## Sitting Bull as a Spiritual Leader, Not Just a Warrior
One of the consistent frustrations that Ernie LaPointe has expressed about how his great-grandfather is remembered is the reduction of Tatanka-Iyotanka to a military figure — a warrior chief defined by his resistance to the United States Army and, in many popular accounts, by the Battle of the Little Bighorn specifically.
This framing, LaPointe says, is incomplete in ways that matter.
Sitting Bull was, throughout his life, primarily a holy man — a wichasha wakan. His spiritual authority was the foundation of everything else he was. His visions were not window dressing for military strategy; they were central to his leadership and to the way his people understood him and followed him. The Sun Dance that preceded the Little Bighorn was not a ritual performance; it was the most demanding ceremonial practice in Lakota religious life, involving days of fasting, physical suffering, and prayer, and it produced the vision of soldiers falling into camp that shaped the way his people entered that summer.