After the military, he found his way to Rapid City and eventually to the traditional Lakota practices that became the center of his adult life. He met his wife Sonja at a powwow. He became a Sun Dancer. He began keeping the sacred pipe tradition. These are practices that require significant commitment — the Sun Dance in particular involves a period of fasting and ceremonial preparation that most practitioners maintain as a lifelong annual practice.
He has described the traditional way as the framework through which he understands himself and his relationship to his great-grandfather. The knowledge his mother gave him about who they were — held quietly for years, at her request — became something he carried within a ceremonial context rather than purely as a historical claim.
When he went public with the family’s connection to Sitting Bull in 1992, at the urging of an aunt, he was acting from that position: not as a genealogical enthusiast seeking recognition, but as a person who understood the responsibility that came with the lineage and who believed that responsibility required him to speak publicly about who Sitting Bull was and how he should be treated.
—
## The Study’s Impact on Similar Historical Investigations
The publication of the 2021 *Science Advances* study did not simply resolve a question about Ernie LaPointe’s ancestry. It demonstrated the feasibility of an approach that researchers and interested parties in many other cases will likely seek to apply.
Eske Willerslev explicitly pointed to two categories of potential future application in his public comments about the study.