LEAD, SD – The great-grandson of Sitting Bull, the famed Lakota leader, has been identified through a novel method of analyzing DNA of long-dead people by examining the 19th-century Native American legend’s hair, researchers have announced.
The results, published in the journal Science Advances, conclude Ernie LaPointe, 73, of South Dakota, is the closest living descendant of Sitting Bull, who died more than 130 years ago.
The hair had been sitting in the Smithsonian since his death in 1890 and was handed over to LaPointe’s family in 2007. Eske Willerslev, a professor at Cambridge and head of the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre at the University of Copenhagen, contacted LaPointe to see if more could be done to examine the DNA on Sitting Bull’s hair. LaPointe agreed which led to 14-years of research and science to find a way to extract usable DNA from a lock of hair measuring just five to six centimeters (about two inches) in length.
According to Willersley, traditional genealogy studies focus on sex-specific genetic matches regularly focusing on the Y chromosome, which is passed down to males. LaPointe claimed to be related to Sitting Bull on his mother’s side. They eventually developed an analysis technique focusing on “autosomal DNA,” a non-sex-specific DNA that people inherit from a mother and a father.
In a news release from the University of Cambridge, La Pointe is quoted as saying “Over the years, many people have tried to question the relationship that I and my sisters have to Sitting Bull”
Sitting Bull currently has two burial sites. One at Fort Yates, North Dakota, and another in Mobridge, South Dakota, neither of which have a significant connection to the chief or the Lakota culture.
Born in 1831, Sitting Bull, whose birth name was Tatanka Iyotake, became chief and medicine man of the Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux. He is best known for uniting the Sioux tribes across the Great Plains and leading the resistance for years against U.S. government policies and settlers who were invading tribal lands.
