He was buried at Fort Yates, North Dakota. The burial was hasty and, by LaPointe’s account, without the traditional Lakota ceremony that the circumstances of his life had warranted. He was not complete in the spirit world as he deserved to be. He was not at rest in the way his tradition required.
That incompleteness — in the Lakota understanding that a person must be whole to cross fully into the spirit world — is central to how LaPointe and his family understand the obligation they carry. It is why the repatriation of the hair, and the questions about where his remains lie and what should be done with them, are not merely historical or sentimental matters. They are spiritual ones.
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## The Hair That Spent a Century in a Box
After Sitting Bull’s death, Army surgeon Horace Deeble was at Fort Yates. Deeble took two items from Sitting Bull’s body: a lock of his hair and a pair of wool leggings — navy blue with red trim. These were personal effects taken from a dead man without his consent or his family’s knowledge. They were, in the framing that later prevailed, items that should never have been separated from his remains or his family.
Deeble kept them. When he died in 1896, he had no relatives to pass them to, so the items went to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. And there they stayed.
The leggings entered the Smithsonian’s collection with documentation of their provenance — they were catalogued as Sitting Bull’s. The lock of hair had a different journey. It went to the National Anthropological Archives, a separate Smithsonian repository, and its story was effectively lost for the better part of a century. Museum staff in the mid-1990s knew they held the leggings but did not know how they had been acquired. The hair was largely unknown.