More immediately: the legal argument that had kept Kennewick Man from the tribes for nearly two decades — the argument that his skull’s morphology suggested he was not ancestrally connected to modern Native Americans — had been scientifically invalidated.

Congress would eventually act on this new scientific reality.

SECTION 13: THE RETURN — AND WHAT IT MEANT

In January 2017, Kennewick Man came home.

Congress had amended the relevant section of NAGPRA in late 2016, making explicit that human remains found in the United States could be considered Native American regardless of whether a specific cultural affiliation to a modern tribe could be demonstrated — closing the legal loophole through which the scientists’ lawsuit had succeeded.

The Army Corps of Engineers formally transferred the remains to a coalition of five tribal nations: the Umatilla, the Yakama, the Nez Perce, the Colville, and the Wanapum — the same five nations that had filed the original repatriation claim in August 1996, twenty-one years earlier.

In February 2017, the remains were taken to a location that the tribes have kept private and buried in a ceremony that was not open to the public or the media.

The tribes asked the outside world to respect this privacy.

They did not announce the location.

They did not describe the ceremony.