What the Sitting Bull case illustrates is both the possibility of repatriation working — items coming back to the family they belonged to, ceremony occurring, scientific research proceeding with the family’s consent — and the structural problems with a system in which items like Horace Deeble’s collection needed a law and five years of institutional research to find their way home at all.
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## The View From Standing Rock
The relationship between the LaPointe family’s claims and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is one of the more complex dimensions of this story, and it deserves treatment that does justice to the legitimate interests on multiple sides.
Standing Rock — the reservation straddling the North Dakota and South Dakota border along the Missouri River — is where Sitting Bull spent the last years of his life. He lived on the Grand River within Standing Rock’s territory from the early 1880s until his death in 1890. He is buried, by most accounts, on or near Standing Rock land, at the Fort Yates site that he occupied until the 1953 exhumation. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has deep connections to Sitting Bull’s memory, to the land, and to the history of the period.
LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, who served as the tribe’s tourism director around the time of the 2007 repatriation, was quoted expressing concerns about the LaPointe family’s authority to make decisions about Sitting Bull’s remains given that LaPointe is not enrolled at Standing Rock. This concern reflects a real tension: a lineal descendant may have legal authority over biological remains under NAGPRA-adjacent frameworks, but that authority is not the same as the authority that tribal communities hold over their ceremonial sites, their lands, and their cultural heritage.