"But we're stuck between a rock and a hard place because settler institutions control the disposition of Sitting Bull's remains." "Any time we participate with a scientist in reaffirming genetic definitions of what it means to be Indigenous, we are de facto helping to uphold their definitions over our own," TallBear said. She added that these types of studies are complicated because they risk further exploiting Indigenous communities. "We have detailed genealogies that we keep through oral history and now also tribal genealogical documentation." "To my knowledge, there’s never been any real challenge to Ernie LaPointe and his siblings' direct descent from Sitting Bull," TallBear, who is a member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, said.
Kim TallBear, an associate professor in the faculty of Native studies at the University of Alberta, said that while confirming Sitting Bull's family lineage may help LaPointe win the dispute over his great-grandfather's final resting place, the study's findings likely don't represent an "aha" moment for the Lakota and other tribal communities. But since LaPointe claimed to be related to Sitting Bull on his mother's side, Willerslev said his team could not rely on these more traditional methods. Typically, genealogy studies focus on sex-specific genetic matches, such as zeroing in on the Y chromosome, which is passed down to male descendants, or specific DNA in the mitochondria that is passed from mothers to their offspring.
The researchers compared autosomal DNA from Sitting Bull's hair sample to DNA samples from LaPointe and other Lakota Sioux to establish the familial connection. It took the scientists 14 years to develop a technique to search for "autosomal DNA," which is non-sex-specific DNA that people inherit from both their mother and father. "There was very little DNA in the hair - way too little for established methods of DNA analysis," he said.
Willerslev said the hair had badly degraded after being stored at room temperature at the National Museum of Natural History for more than a century. Obtaining enough usable fragments of Sitting Bull's DNA from the small hair sample proved challenging.
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