Whether other cases will proceed in ways that are as ethically careful as the Sitting Bull study remains to be seen. The model of a descendant community holding legal authority over the genetic material, with research proceeding only with that community’s explicit consent and on terms the community sets, is not the universal default in ancient DNA research. The Sitting Bull case benefited from a combination of specific legal structures — the National Museum of the American Indian Act’s repatriation framework — and the specific relationship that Willerslev built with LaPointe over many years.
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## The Larger Reckoning: How Museums Came to Hold What They Hold
The history of how the Smithsonian Institution came to hold a lock of Sitting Bull’s hair is, in miniature, the history of how American and European institutions came to hold enormous collections of Indigenous human remains, cultural objects, and sacred materials over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
That history is not a simple story of theft and misconduct, though it contains episodes of both. It is a story of the collision between an expanding settler colonial state and Indigenous peoples who were being dispossessed, relabeled, and systematically studied by the institutions of the society that was displacing them.
Army surgeons like Horace Deeble operated within a military-scientific complex that saw the bodies of fallen Indigenous leaders and warriors as legitimate objects of study and collection. The Smithsonian and other major scientific institutions of the era were actively acquiring Native American skeletal remains — sometimes through legitimate purchase from people who had no right to sell them, sometimes through excavation of burial sites, sometimes through collection from recently killed individuals. The expressed purpose was often scientific: to advance understanding of human biology, cranial morphology, racial typology. The science was frequently bad, and the ethics were worse, but the collection impulse was considered respectable.