For more than a hundred years, a lock of hair sat inside a glass box at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Nobody who passed it knew what was sealed inside those brittle, arsenic-soaked strands—not the scientists who cataloged it, not the curators who stored it, not even the institution that held it for decades without knowing whose hair it was. The hair had been taken without permission from a dead man’s body on a cold December morning in 1890, tucked away as a souvenir, and eventually forgotten. When researchers finally figured out in the mid-1990s whose hair it actually was, a question that had been sitting quietly in a South Dakota family for generations suddenly had a new answer waiting inside it.
A man named Ernie Le Point had spent most of his adult life telling anyone who would listen that Sitting Bull was his great-grandfather. Most people did not believe him. Historians doubted him. Government officials questioned him.
For decades, the paper trail he carried—birth certificates, death records, land allotment papers—was never quite enough to silence the skeptics. Then a professor at the University of Cambridge spent fourteen years building a method that had never existed before. When he finally applied it to that lock of hair, it did not just confirm a family story. It made history.
Sitting Bull was born around 1831 on the Grand River in what is now South Dakota, in a place the Lakota called Many Caches, named for the food storage pits the people had dug into the earth there. His birth name was Jumping Badger, though friends and family called him Slow—not because he was dull, but because of the calm, deliberate way he moved through the world, as if every action had already been thought through before his body carried it out. He was the son of a Hunkpapa warrior named Returns Again, a man of standing in the tribe. From the beginning, the boy was raised inside a world where bravery, ceremony, and the welfare of the people were not separate things but a single obligation.
At ten years old, he killed his first buffalo. At fourteen, he rode on his first war party, a raid against the Crow, alongside his father and uncle. When the fight was over and the boy had struck an enemy warrior at close range with his hatchet, his father held a ceremony on the spot and gave the boy his own name: Tatanka Iyotake. The phrase described a buffalo bull settling his full weight into the earth—unmovable, refusing to be pushed from where he stood.
The name fit everything that came after it. By his twenties, he had joined the Strong Heart Warrior society, one of the most respected military brotherhoods among the Lakota. By his thirties, he was not only a war leader but a medicine man and a holy man—a combination that gave him authority in battle and in ceremony, in the physical world and the spiritual one. He became the head of the Lakota nation in 1868.
That same year, the United States government signed a treaty guaranteeing his people’s land. In April 1868, representatives of the United States sat down with Lakota leaders at Fort Laramie in present-day Wyoming and signed an agreement. The Treaty of Fort Laramie recognized the Black Hills of South Dakota as part of the Great Sioux Reservation, set aside for the exclusive use of the Sioux people. The Black Hills were not simply land to the Lakota.
They were sacred ground, the center of a spiritual world. The treaty promised to close military forts along the Bozeman Trail, keep settlers out, and leave the hills untouched. Sitting Bull had not signed it. He refused to be part of those negotiations, believing the conditions only applied to those who agreed to them.
But many Lakota bands did sign, and for a few years, an uneasy peace held across the northern plains. Then came the gold. In the summer of 1874, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led an expedition of the Seventh Cavalry directly into the Black Hills in violation of the treaty. Two miners accompanying the expedition confirmed what surveyors had suspected: gold was present in the hills in quantities worth pursuing.
The announcement reached the eastern press, and within months, thousands of prospectors were flooding into land the United States government had legally guaranteed to the Sioux. The army made token efforts to remove them. Those efforts failed. By 1875, the government stopped trying entirely.
In the fall of that year, the United States offered to buy the Black Hills from the Lakota for six million dollars. Sitting Bull rejected the offer without hesitation. Washington responded by issuing an ultimatum in December 1875: all Lakota bands not on reservations by January 31, 1876, would be considered hostile. Sitting Bull did not move.
The stage was set for the most famous battle in the history of the American West. By late spring of 1876, thousands of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho were gathering along the banks of the Little Bighorn River in present-day Montana. They were drawn together by the refusal to be pushed onto reservations, by hunger, by anger, and by the spiritual pull of a man who had told them a vision was coming. Sitting Bull had performed a Sun Dance before the gathering, fasting and sacrificing.
In the ceremony, he saw soldiers falling from the sky like grasshoppers, falling upside down into the Indian camp. He told his people what he had seen. He told them the soldiers were coming and that the victory would belong to the Lakota. More than ten thousand people were camped along the river, a place the Lakota called the Greasy Grass.
On June 25, 1876, Custer led approximately seven hundred men of the Seventh Cavalry into the valley. He had no accurate understanding of how many warriors waited for him. Believing the camp might scatter before he could engage it, he divided his command into multiple columns and advanced. It was the last significant decision he ever made.
Crazy Horse led a massive force to meet the attackers head-on while Sitting Bull rallied the warriors and ensured the safety of the women and children. Custer and every one of the 210 men under his immediate command were killed. Total United States casualties across the battle reached 268 dead. Not a single man from Custer’s detachment survived.
The news reached the eastern United States on July 4, 1876, the centennial of American independence, and stopped the celebrations cold. It was the greatest military defeat the United States Army had suffered at the hands of Native Americans. It was also the last major victory the Lakota would ever win. The army did not absorb the defeat and move on.
In the months that followed, thousands of additional soldiers were deployed across the northern plains with orders to hunt down every band that had not submitted to reservation life. The buffalo herds the Lakota depended on for food, clothing, and ceremony were being systematically destroyed in a deliberate policy designed to starve resistance out of a people the government could not defeat in open battle. Sitting Bull understood what was coming. In May 1877, he led his band north across the border into Canada, to the Wood Mountain area of present-day Saskatchewan, where American soldiers had no authority to follow.
For four years, he held out. The Canadian winters were brutal, and the buffalo that had once crossed the border in enormous herds were thinning on the Canadian side as well, hunted to near extinction across the entire continent. By 1881, his people were starving. Children were dying, and there was no path left that did not lead through suffering.
Sitting Bull surrendered at Fort Buford in Dakota Territory on July 19, 1881—the last major Lakota leader to do so. He was held as a prisoner of war for nearly two years before being transferred to the Standing Rock Reservation straddling the Dakotas. He spent his final years there farming, raising horses, and refusing, in every way that remained available to him, to become the defeated man the government wanted him to be. In 1890, a spiritual revival movement called the Ghost Dance began spreading across the plains.
Followers believed performing the dance would bring back the buffalo, resurrect the dead, and restore the world the Lakota had lost. Sitting Bull allowed ghost dancers to gather at his camp. That decision cost him his life. On the cold morning of December 15, 1890, forty Indian police officers surrounded his cabin on the Grand River at dawn and told him he was under arrest.
When he refused to go quietly and a crowd gathered, shots were fired. In the chaos, Sitting Bull was shot in the chest and in the head. He died on the ground outside his own home. He was approximately fifty-nine years old.
Before Sitting Bull’s body was buried at Fort Yates in North Dakota, a man named Horace Deble made a decision no historical record ever reported. Deble was the post surgeon at Fort Yates, an army doctor with access to the body in the hours after the killing. Without any permission or authority, he cut a scalp lock from the back of Sitting Bull’s head—the braided length of hair the chief had used to hold a feather near the crown—and took a pair of the dead man’s wool cloth leggings. He kept them as souvenirs of the event.
In 1896, six years later, he loaned both items to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. What happened next was one of the stranger administrative footnotes in the history of American museums. The hair and leggings arrived as a loan, not a donation. During an era when records for loaned items were not kept with the same diligence as items the institution formally owned, the scalp lock was placed inside a glass box.
It sat there at room temperature for decades, handled and cataloged imprecisely, until the institutional memory of whose hair it actually was simply dissolved. For a long stretch of time, staff at the museum did not know the lock of hair in that glass box had come from one of the most famous people in the history of the American continent. It was not until the mid-1990s that a British anthropologist came across a reference to the loan in old records and alerted the Smithsonian to what it actually held. The museum’s repatriation office launched a formal investigation.
What they found had never appeared in any history book. The hair had been taken from Sitting Bull’s body without permission, and somewhere out there, his family had a right to have it back. Ernest Wayne Le Point was born in 1948 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He grew up in Rapid City, raised in a household where the stories his mother told about her grandfather were not mythology but family memory, passed down the way Lakota oral tradition had always carried truth.
His mother was Angelique Spotted Horse Le Point. Her mother was Standing Holy, also known as Mary Sitting Bull, the youngest daughter of Sitting Bull himself. The line was direct: great-grandfather to grandmother to mother to son. When Le Point was ten, his mother died of cancer.
When he was seventeen, his father died of a heart attack. He went to live with his sister until he was old enough to enlist. He joined the army in 1966, served in Korea, Turkey, Germany, and completed a tour in Vietnam in 1970 and 1971. He came home with an honorable discharge and the invisible damage that Vietnam left in so many of the men who served there.
He struggled with PTSD, with alcohol, with periods of homelessness. He found his way back through the traditional spiritual practices of the Lakota, through the Sun Dance, through the sacred pipe, and through the slow, deliberate work of rebuilding a life around something larger than the wreckage war had made of it. Through all of it, he never stopped saying who he was. In 1992, he spoke publicly at the induction of Sitting Bull into the Hall of Fame of American Indian Chiefs in Anadarko, Oklahoma, telling anyone willing to listen that he and his three sisters were Sitting Bull’s closest living descendants.
He had the documents. He had the oral history. He had the family tree. For most of the people who heard him, it was never quite enough.
The Smithsonian’s repatriation office spent five years investigating Sitting Bull’s family line before it was satisfied. Bill Billeck, the museum’s repatriation director, worked through birth and death certificates, land allotment papers, tribal enrollment records, and the oral history that Le Point and his three sisters had been carrying their entire lives. The investigation was thorough precisely because the stakes were real. Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, passed by Congress in 1990, institutions receiving federal funding were required to return Native American human remains and cultural items to lineal descendants.
The connection had to be demonstrated, not assumed. Billeck’s office demonstrated it. The investigation concluded that Le Point and his sisters were Sitting Bull’s closest living relatives. In 2007, the Smithsonian formally returned the scalp lock and the wool leggings to the family.
More than a century after Horace Deble cut them from a dead man’s body without asking anyone’s permission, they came home. Le Point held a ceremony in a room in the basement of his home in the Black Hills of South Dakota in December 2007. He called on the spirit of his great-grandfather for guidance the way Lakota tradition asked him to. He burned most of the hair, returning it to the earth through fire in a sacred act of repatriation the institution in Washington could never have performed on its own.
A small portion of the hair was set aside, kept for possible future study. Around that same time, a Danish scientist sitting in Cambridge read a short item in a magazine about the repatriation. Professor Eske Willerslev had spent years extracting genetic material from permafrost, from ice cores, from the bones and hair of people dead for thousands of years. In 2010, he would sequence the first complete ancient human genome from a four-thousand-year-old clump of hair frozen in Greenland permafrost.
When he read that Sitting Bull’s scalp lock had been returned to a living family member, he understood immediately what that meant. He wrote to Le Point and explained who he was and what he could do. He said he would consider it a great honor to be allowed to compare the DNA of the hair to the DNA of Le Point and his sisters. Le Point did not simply say yes.
He told Willerslev that the hair did not belong to him. It belonged to his great-grandfather. Permission would have to come from Sitting Bull himself. In December 2007, Willerslev traveled to South Dakota and sat in the darkened basement of Le Point’s home while Le Point conducted a ceremony calling on Sitting Bull’s spirit for guidance.
Le Point listened to what came back. He told Willerslev that his great-grandfather had agreed, but there were conditions. Le Point said his great-grandfather had chuckled and said Willerslev could take one inch, only one inch. The rest had to be burned.
Willerslev later described the moment as feeling like a disaster. One inch of hair more than a century old, soaked in arsenic, stored at room temperature in a glass box, degraded beyond anything a conventional laboratory would have considered workable. He took it anyway. Then he went back to Cambridge and spent fourteen years figuring out what to do with it.
The first thing his team discovered was how little of the hair was actually usable. Nineteenth-century museum curators had doused the braid in arsenic compounds as a preservative, a common practice of the era that destroyed the material at the molecular level while keeping the outer appearance intact. The hair looked healthy. Its sheen was bright.
Inside, the DNA had been shredded. When the researchers ran their initial screens, they found that more than a century of room-temperature storage combined with the arsenic treatment had degraded the sample to the point where they could recover less than one percent of Sitting Bull’s genome. Traditional DNA testing would not work. Standard genealogy approaches look for matches along the Y chromosome, which passes exclusively down the male line, or in mitochondrial DNA, which passes exclusively from mothers to their offspring.
Neither method could bridge the gap between a great-grandfather and a great-grandson across four generations without a clean, complete sample. What Willerslev developed over fourteen years was a technique that searched instead for autosomal DNA—the non-sex-specific genetic material every person inherits in roughly equal portions from both parents. Because autosomal DNA comes from both sides of a family tree rather than one, it can detect relationships regardless of which line of descent connects two people. The team extracted shotgun sequencing data from autosomal loci across what remained of the genome and compared it against dense genetic data from thirteen unrelated Lakota Sioux individuals, including Le Point.
The comparison ran across 49,347 individual SNP loci, specific locations in the genome where variation between people can be measured and compared. It was painstaking probabilistic work, assembling a picture of genetic relationship from fragments so small that a decade earlier the scientific community would have called the task impossible. But the data came back and pointed in one direction. On October 27, 2021, a paper appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances under the authorship of Eske Willerslev, his colleagues at the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre in Denmark, and Ernie Le Point himself.
The result was clear. The autosomal DNA extracted from Sitting Bull’s scalp lock matched the DNA of Ernie Le Point more closely than it matched any of the thirteen other unrelated Lakota individuals tested. The genetic signal was consistent with the relationship of a great-grandparent to a great-grandchild. Le Point was exactly who he had always said he was: Sitting Bull’s great-grandson, his closest living descendant along with his three sisters.
The researchers noted that to their knowledge, this was the first published confirmation of a familial relationship between a contemporary living person and a historical individual using such limited amounts of ancient DNA across such a distant generational gap. Four generations, less than one percent of a genome, arsenic contamination, more than a century of degradation—and it still held. Willerslev told the press that in principle, the same technique could now be applied to anyone, from outlaws like Jesse James to the Romanov family of Imperial Russia, wherever hair, bones, or teeth had been preserved and a living relative existed to compare against. The implications for forensic science, archaeology, and the repatriation of remains held in institutions around the world ran further than any single paper could contain.
Le Point, then seventy-three years old, responded the way a man responds when he has been telling the truth his entire life and the world has finally caught up to him. He said people had been questioning his relationship to his ancestor for as long as he could remember. He said those people were just a pain in the place you sit. And he said they would probably doubt these findings too.
He did not sound particularly worried about it. What a lock of hair confirmed in 2021 had legal consequences that extended well beyond the science. As Sitting Bull’s confirmed closest living descendant, Ernie Le Point now held the legal standing to pursue something his family had wanted for decades: the proper reburial of his great-grandfather’s remains. That question is not yet settled.
Sitting Bull has two official burial sites: the original grave at Fort Yates in North Dakota, where he was buried after the 1890 killing, and a second site near Mobridge, South Dakota, where in 1953, in the middle of a blizzard in the middle of the night, a group of businessmen dug up what they claimed were his bones and reburied them across the state line to boost local tourism. North Dakota later tested one of the bones removed that night. It came back as female. Nobody knows with certainty where Sitting Bull actually rests.
Le Point has said he wants his great-grandfather moved to the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana, the place where Sitting Bull’s vision came true, where the Lakota won their greatest victory. The DNA does not resolve that question. It only confirms who has the right to decide. After a lifetime of being doubted, of carrying documents and oral history and family memory through decades of skepticism, Ernie Le Point finally had something no skeptic could argue with.
Science had caught up to the truth his mother told him when he was a child. It just took a glass box, an inch of arsenic-soaked hair, and fourteen years of work nobody had ever done before to get there.