South Dakota author Ernie LaPointe and his sisters are now the only known living descendants of the legendary Hunkpapa Lakota warrior Sitting Bull.
LaPointe, 73, who identifies as a member of the Lakota tribe, has spent 14 years trying to prove his historic progeny. Now, DNA testing has finally caught up with his search to confirm that he is the great-grandson of the legendary Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux chief.
Sitting Bull — whose given name, Tatanka Iyotake, translates to “Buffalo Bull Who Sits Down” — helped lead some 1,000 Native Americans in a resistance against a takeover by the United States in the mid- to late 19th century. It occurred, famously, during the Battle of Little Bighorn, a k a Custer’s Last Stand (and, to the Lakota and other Plains Indians, The Battle of Greasy Grass), in 1876, on what is now Montana land.
Some 145 years later, LaPointe has finally made the connection, thanks to DNA testing.
Despite having presented detailed genealogical research of his family — including birth certificates, a family tree and other historical records — LaPointe drew skepticism of his claims.
“I feel this DNA research is another way of identifying my lineal relationship to my great-grandfather,” said LaPointe in a statement, tied to the publication of his research, with the help of University of Cambridge scientists, in the journal “Science Advances” on Wednesday.
“People have been questioning our relationship to our ancestor as long as I can remember,” he added. “These people are just a pain in the place you sit — and will probably doubt these findings also.”
‘People have been questioning our relationship to our ancestor as long as I can remember.’
Ernie LaPointe
The standoff against the US’ 7th Cavalry, a battalion of 700 men led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, was a victory for the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho people, thanks to the leadership of war heroes Crazy Horse and Chief Gall — and inspired by the spiritual visions of Sitting Bull, who saw the battle play out in their favor in his dreams.
Sitting Bull died in 1890 at the hands of police at his home on the Standing Rock Reservation, after US agents ordered his arrest for fear he might inspire another uprising. Sitting Bull was ultimately buried somewhere in South Dakota, though the exact location is under dispute.
But a genuine lock of Sitting Bull’s hair had been saved before he was struck down, and genetic researchers — including Eske Willerslev, author of the new report — have since sequenced the Lakota forefathers’ DNA.
To prove LaPointe’s ancestry, Willerslev compared a fragment of Sitting Bull’s hair, a strand just 5 to 6 centimeters long, to his great-grandson’s genetic makeup — a process that took 14 years to complete.
Plucked from Sitting Bull’s scalp during his lifetime, the strand had been in preservation at Washington’s Smithsonian Museum for more than a century before ultimately being returned to LaPointe and his three sisters in 2007.
“To our knowledge, this is the first published example of a familial relationship between contemporary and a historical individual that has been confirmed using such limited amounts of ancient DNA across such distant relatives,” the researchers wrote.
‘Sitting Bull has always been my hero, ever since I was a boy.’
Ernie LaPointe
In a press release, Willerslev explained why he was compelled to work with LaPointe.
“Sitting Bull has always been my hero, ever since I was a boy,” the researcher said. “I admire his courage and his drive. That’s why I almost choked on my coffee when I read in a magazine in 2007 that the Smithsonian Museum had decided to return Sitting Bull’s hair to Ernie LaPointe and his three sisters, in accordance with new US legislation on the repatriation of museum objects.”
Willerslev then wrote to LaPointe to ask if he “could be allowed” to run DNA analysis of LaPointe and his sisters to prove their ancestry, adding that he “would consider it a great honor” to do so.
The long-degraded strand of hair offered little material to test, which limited the type of analysis available to the scientists. Rather than tracing LaPointe’s lineage through the Y chromosome — a more conventional method of DNA testing that tracks the paternal family line — Willerslev used autosomal DNA, or non-gender-specific DNA, to trace his maternal line, which is the side of his family to which Sitting Bull was related.
Willerslev and his team said they were “delighted to find that it matched.”
At the same time, their findings have served as proof of concept for autosomal DNA testing in long-dead historical figures. Meanwhile, LaPointe intends to re-enact a formal burial ceremony at a new resting place for his great-grandfather.