That knowledge does not depend on genome sequencing, and it was not validated or invalidated by the USR1 findings.

What the USR1 findings provided, for those communities, was not new knowledge about their origins but a scientific finding that was consistent with what they already knew: that their people are deeply and continuously connected to the landscape of Alaska, that their presence there is ancient, and that the specific genetic character of the founding population of the Americas was already in this region more than eleven thousand years ago.

The consistency between the scientific finding and the Indigenous understanding is meaningful — not because Indigenous knowledge needed scientific validation, but because the two independent systems of knowing, working with very different methods and very different materials, arrived at a convergent conclusion about the antiquity and the continuity of human presence in this region.

That convergence is something worth noting carefully, because it speaks to the specific question of what science can contribute to Indigenous history without displacing or replacing Indigenous ways of knowing that history.