Whatever happens to his remains, LaPointe has said, there will be a ceremony.
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## LaPointe’s Military Service and the Path Back to Tradition
The biography that Ernie LaPointe has shared publicly traces a path from early loss, through military service, and back to the traditional Lakota way that he now holds as central to his life.
He was born in 1948 on the Pine Ridge Reservation, one of the most economically stressed reservations in the United States, located in the southwestern corner of South Dakota. His early childhood was shaped by his parents: his mother Angelique, who carried the family’s knowledge of their connection to Sitting Bull, and his father Claude, whose last name LaPointe carries. Both died before he reached adulthood — his mother of cancer when he was ten, his father of a heart attack when he was seventeen.
He was raised in Rapid City after his parents’ deaths, largely by his half-sister Marlene — the woman who is identified in later records as Marlene Little Spotted Horse Andersen. She was one of the sisters who would eventually share with him the Smithsonian’s determination of their status as Sitting Bull’s closest living lineal descendants.
At eighteen, LaPointe joined the military — a path taken by many young men from reservation communities in the 1960s, for reasons that often included economic necessity as much as patriotism. He served in Korea, Turkey, Germany, and the United States, and then did a tour in Vietnam from 1970 to 1971. He received an honorable discharge in 1972.