The nature and extent of those consultations, and the specific concerns and perspectives that tribal representatives have brought to them, have not been published in detail — consultation processes often involve confidential communications that are not appropriate for public disclosure.

What can be said is that the framing of the White Sands research in public communications has generally been more careful about Indigenous perspectives than earlier generations of archaeological reporting typically were.

The language of “discovery” — implying that the footprints represent something unknown until researchers found it, rather than something that has always been part of the landscape that Indigenous peoples have known — has been used with some care, and in some contexts explicitly challenged.

Indigenous oral traditions from across the Southwest describe an ancient, intimate, and spiritually significant relationship with the land that does not begin with European contact or with any horizon that Western archaeology has previously identified.

The Pueblo peoples of New Mexico trace their presence in the region through the accounts of their ancestors and the evidence of their ancient villages and sacred sites.

The Navajo Nation’s emergence narratives describe the Diné as having come from within the earth itself, at the center of a sacred geography that encompasses the land they now occupy.