LaPointe has been clear that he wants his great-grandfather understood as a Lakota man with Lakota values and a Lakota spiritual identity — not as the romantic rebel of American popular culture, not as a generic symbol of Native resistance, but as a specific person with a specific tradition, a specific community, and a specific understanding of what his life was about.
The Sun Dance is at the center of that understanding. A Sun Dancer does not perform the ceremony for audiences or for historical record. It is a private, demanding, spiritually serious commitment made to the community and to the sacred. Sitting Bull’s identity as a Sun Dancer was the most fundamental thing about him, in his own understanding and in his family’s memory of him.
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## Repatriation Law’s Unfinished Business
The 2007 return of Sitting Bull’s hair and leggings to the LaPointe family represented one successful outcome of a repatriation framework that was still, in 2021 and remains today, far from complete.
The National Museum of the American Indian Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act created legal obligations that institutions were slow to meet. The pace of repatriation has been one of the persistent frustrations of Indigenous community advocates in the decades since the laws’ passage.
Part of the problem is institutional capacity. Inventorying large collections, conducting the research necessary to identify affiliated tribes or lineal descendants, and engaging in the consultation processes required by the laws takes time and resources. Many institutions, particularly smaller colleges and regional museums, lacked the dedicated staff and budget to work through their repatriation obligations systematically.