The frameworks developed in the context of the Anzick case — meaningful consultation with Native communities, repatriation of remains after analysis, transparent communication about what the research can and cannot show — have influenced subsequent projects, but they have not produced a single agreed-upon standard.

Different communities have different views about appropriate research, and those views deserve to be taken seriously and engaged with honestly by the research community.

The child in the Montana hillside was not waiting to be a scientific subject.

He was waiting, in the simplest and most literal sense, to be returned to the earth.

That return happened in 2014, with ceremony, in the company of people who understood themselves as his relatives across twelve thousand years of American history.

The science that preceded that return was real and important.