Sioux chief Tatanka-Iyotake, better known as Sitting Bull, has gone down in history. Because in 1876 he led his people against the soldiers around General Custer and defeated them in the legendary Battle of the Little Big Horn. Now, for the first time, scientists have succeeded in isolating the genome fragments of Sitting Bull from a lock of hair they have kept and using this DNA to prove that the Sioux Indian Ernie Lapointe is actually the chief’s great-grandson. This now gives him the right to decide on the final resting place of Tatanka-Iyotake and to secure it.
Born in 1831, Sitting Bull is one of the most famous Native American war chiefs. The leader and medicine man of the Hunkpapa Lakota-Sioux was one of the driving forces behind the resistance that the Sioux opposed to the conquest and displacement by the Europeans in the form of the US military. He played a special role as one of the war chiefs who led the united tribes of the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho into battle against the US Army under General George Custer in 1876. At the Battle of Little Big Horn, the Indians succeeded in defeating the US soldiers and killing Custer. This battle is considered to be the greatest victory of the Indians in the fight for their land and their freedom – which they nevertheless lost in the end. Sitting Bull lived with his tribe on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota after the final victory of the Whites, where he was murdered under unclear conditions in 1890.
A lock of Sitting Bull hair
Shortly before the Sioux chief’s bones were buried, a coroner cut off the dead Sitting Bull’s scalp lock – a lock of hair from the top of the head to which the Sioux typically attached a feather – and stole the chief’s leggings. He later gave both on loan to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC. It was only in 2007 that these two relics were given to the Sioux and in particular to Ernie Lapointe and his sisters. According to birth certificates, family trees and historical documents, they are the living great-grandchildren of the Sioux chief. “But over the years, many people have tried to question the relationship between me and my sisters and Sitting Bull,” explains Lapointe. This became a problem mainly because he was previously denied any say in the two alleged burial sites of Sitting Bull.
This is where well-known DNA researcher Eske Willerslev from the University of Cambridge comes in. He and his team are specialists in isolating genetic material even from very old bones and other relics and inferring origin or family relationships from them. “Sitting Bull has been my hero since I was a boy,” says Willerslev. “That’s why I almost choked on my coffee when I read in a magazine in 2007 that the Smithsonian Museum wanted to return Sitting Bull’s hair to Ernie Lapointe.” The researcher wrote to Lapointe, explaining that he was aging on the analysis Specialized in DNA, and asked if he should try to extract DNA from Sitting Bull’s lock of hair to prove that he was related. Lapointe agreed and Willerslev, first author Ida Moltke from the University of Copenhagen, and her colleagues got to work.
Success despite extremely low DNA yield
However, it turned out to be extremely difficult to isolate enough genetic material from the hair, as the team reports. This is because the scalp lock had been stored at room temperature for more than a century and possibly treated with arsenic for preservation. As a result, the material was badly degraded and the team was only able to extract and sequence very few small fragments of DNA. In addition, the usually simpler comparison using the gene code of the Y chromosome was out of the question because Lapointe is descended from Sitting Bull through his mother and the Y chromosome is only passed on through the male line. The mitochondrial DNA, which is in the “power plants of the cell” and is often better preserved, is only passed on from mothers to daughters and therefore did not work at Lapointe. The scientists therefore had to fall back on the normal nuclear DNA and use special computer-aided methods in order to be able to compare the few DNA fragments with the genetic make-up of Lapointe, his sisters and, for control purposes, other Sioux.
But it succeeded: “We managed to obtain a sufficient amount of autosomal DNA from Sitting Bull’s hair sample and to compare it – and to our enthusiasm they matched,” reports Willerslev. It is now also genetically proven that Lapointe and his sisters are the great-grandchildren of the famous Sioux chief Sitting Bull. According to US law, they also have power of disposal over the chief’s remains. Lapointe would like to use this to transfer the bones of Mobridge, a place not in the heartland of the Sioux, and to bring them to a place that is more closely linked to the culture of his tribe. For Willerslev and his colleagues, the isolation of the DNA from such a severely degraded sample and the technique developed for the comparisons, on the other hand, represent a decisive step forward in the investigation of old DNA. Because the new approach enables the identification of even more distant family relationships with very little DNA. “In principle, one could also examine completely different relationships – from Jesse James to the family of the last Russian tsar,” explains Willerslev.
Source: First author Ida Moltke (University of Copenhagen) et al., Science Advances, doi: 10.1126 / sciadv.abh2013