In his account of the event, he described something that the scientific paper alone could not have conveyed: the return of a child to the earth, twelve thousand years after his death, with appropriate ceremony and in the presence of people who understood him as an ancestor rather than a specimen.

The ceremony was not a single tribal event in the sense of belonging to one specific community’s tradition.

The child was so old that no specific living community could claim him as a tribally affiliated ancestor under NAGPRA’s standards for cultural affiliation — the twelve thousand years between his death and the present day crossed every identifiable horizon of tribal continuity.

But the Montana Native nations that participated in the reburial understood the gesture differently: not as a claim of specific descent, but as an acknowledgment that this ancient child was Native American in the deepest sense, and that Native American communities had both the responsibility and the right to conduct his final return to the earth with appropriate respect.