Indigenous traditions tend to understand ancestry in terms of place, relationship, and spiritual continuity — a connection to a homeland and to the people who have lived there, which does not require biological identity in the genetic sense.

Being the descendant of a people means being in relationship with their land, their traditions, their dead — not necessarily sharing a precisely measurable percentage of DNA.

Neither framework is wrong.

They are simply different ways of understanding what it means for a people to have a past.

The tragedy of the Kennewick case is that for years, these two frameworks were treated as mutually exclusive — as if the only way to answer the question of who this ancient man was required first deciding which framework was valid.

The DNA breakthrough would eventually show that both frameworks were pointing at the same truth.

SECTION 10: THE TURNING POINT — ANCIENT DNA COMES OF AGE

By 2012, the field of ancient DNA analysis had undergone a revolution.

The extraction and analysis of genetic material from ancient human remains — material that degrades over time, contaminated by bacteria and fungi and the hands of researchers, compromised by thousands of years of chemical processes in the soil — had seemed nearly impossible just a decade earlier.

Ancient DNA was fragmentary, damaged, almost incomprehensibly difficult to work with.