These living communities are the cultural heirs of Shuká Káa — not simply in a metaphorical or general sense, but in the specific genetic sense that the ancient DNA evidence supports.

The ancestors of the people who developed the Tlingit clan system and the Haida artistic tradition were people of the same founding coastal population that Shuká Káa belonged to.

The cultural achievements of the Northwest Coast peoples are achievements that grew from a root that extends back 10,000 years into the early Holocene.

Understanding the history of these peoples requires holding this deep time perspective alongside the more recent history of contact, colonization, disruption, and recovery that is the more familiar part of the story.

The communities that Europeans encountered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — the communities whose populations were devastated by disease, whose lands and resources were taken through colonial mechanisms, whose children were sent to residential schools in a program explicitly designed to destroy their cultures — were not recent arrivals or simple peoples without complex histories.