This is not a story about a lost civilization or a mysterious ancient people without descendants.

It is a story about the documented antiquity of specific living communities — the Tlingit, the Haida, the Tsimshian, and the other nations of the coast — whose biological ancestors were living on this coast 10,000 years ago, eating salmon and sea mammals, navigating the complex waterways of the archipelago in watercraft we can only imagine, developing the earliest forms of the traditions that have continued to grow and elaborate across the millennia since.

The cave that held Shuká Káa’s remains was not simply a geological feature.

It was a place in a landscape that people had been inhabiting and knowing and caring about for thousands of years before his time and for thousands of years after it.