They know the specific character of the marshes and the uplands and the caves and the seasonal patterns of resources that define the region.

They know stories — preserved through oral tradition in the way that communities whose writing is the land itself preserve knowledge — about the people who have lived in this landscape and what that landscape has meant to them.

When the DNA confirmed what the Tribe had always maintained — that the Spirit Cave Man was their ancestor — it did not tell them something new.

It told a different audience something that the Tribe had been saying for more than twenty years, in a language that audience was willing to accept.