He was a healer. He composed songs. He was known for sharing food and resources with those who had less — a generosity that Lakota values placed at the center of what it meant to be a good person and a good leader.
He was also a Sun Dancer — which is, in LaPointe’s telling, how Sitting Bull wanted to be remembered above all else. Not as the man who led the attack at the Little Bighorn, not as the man who defied the United States government across three decades, not as the famous face on autographed photographs from the Wild West show. He wanted to be known as a man who performed the Sun Dance, who followed the sacred pipe, who dedicated himself to the spiritual health and survival of his people.
LaPointe carries that dimension of his great-grandfather’s legacy deliberately. He is himself a Sun Dancer. He follows the traditional way. The ceremonial dimension of his relationship to Sitting Bull is not merely historical — it is a living practice that connects him to his great-grandfather across the 130-plus years that separate their lives.
This is part of why the question of the reburial is not simply logistical. It is why LaPointe wants a proper traditional ceremony — not a monument, not a museum display, not a tourist site, but a real ceremony conducted by people who know what it means and what it requires. Sitting Bull did not receive a proper traditional ceremony when he died. His family and his community were in crisis. The conditions did not allow for it.