The analysis was completed.

The paper was published.

And then the child was returned to the earth.

That sequence of events reflects a negotiated balance between scientific inquiry and Indigenous sovereignty over ancestral remains — a balance that was, in this case, worked out through genuine consultation rather than imposed by one party on the other.

Whether the balance was exactly right is a question that different participants in the process have answered differently.

Some Native scholars and activists have argued that the research should not have been conducted at all without more specific tribal consent, or that the remains should have been repatriated immediately without genome analysis.