LaPointe has said he wants, eventually, to bring his great-grandfather to a proper resting place with a proper ceremony. He does not know yet exactly where that will be. His mother preferred the Black Hills. He has considered the Little Bighorn Battlefield. He has ruled out Standing Rock. The timeline, as he has put it, is when the time is right.
Sitting Bull wanted to be known as a Sun Dancer.
His great-grandson is also a Sun Dancer. He carries the sacred pipe. He follows the traditional way. He has spent decades doing what he understood the lineage required — maintaining the connection, speaking publicly about his great-grandfather when he believed it was necessary, fighting for the return of the hair and leggings, allowing the DNA study when he believed it would serve the family’s purposes, and continuing to insist that what the family knew did not require scientific certification to be true.
The science was welcome. The knowledge was never in doubt.
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## Sitting Bull’s Place in Lakota History: Beyond the Battlefield
The popular American imagination has placed Sitting Bull primarily in a military context — as a war leader, a strategist, a defiant opponent of U.S. Army operations. This framing, while not entirely wrong, collapses a rich and complex person into a single-note opposition figure, and it obscures the dimensions of his life that Lakota people, and LaPointe specifically, consider most important.
Sitting Bull’s political role within Lakota governance was not that of a general in any Western sense. He was not a commander who issued orders down a military chain. He was a principal chief and a holy man — a person whose authority derived from the combination of his spiritual standing, his reputation for wisdom and courage, his generosity, and the trust that the people around him placed in his judgment.