They require expert witnesses — anthropologists, geneticists, historians — whose testimony must be carefully prepared and managed through years of litigation.

They require the sustained organizational capacity to maintain a legal strategy across changing political environments, changing court compositions, and changing presidential administrations.

The tribes involved in the Kennewick case — the Umatilla, the Yakama, the Nez Perce, the Colville, the Wanapum — are not wealthy institutions.

They are communities that have survived the economic devastation of colonization, the disruption of their traditional economies, and a century of federal policies designed to undermine their land base and cultural coherence.

They have built their governmental and cultural infrastructure largely through their own efforts, often against active federal resistance.

For these communities to sustain a complex federal lawsuit for nine years while simultaneously maintaining their governmental functions, their cultural programs, their treaty-guaranteed fisheries, and their community services required a level of organizational commitment and sacrifice that rarely appears in the legal or scientific literature about the case.

It is also worth noting what the legal battle cost emotionally.

The testimony and legal arguments generated by the scientists’ lawsuit required tribal representatives to sit in courtrooms and listen to arguments about whether their ancestors were really their ancestors — whether their unbroken presence in their homeland was sufficient to establish the relationship that their own traditions, their own knowledge, and their own identity told them was beyond question.

Armand Minthorn, the Umatilla religious leader who became one of the most publicly visible tribal voices in the Kennewick case, has spoken about what it meant to sit through this process — to have the federal court system tell his people that their claim to their ancestor required scientific validation.

“We didn’t need a DNA test to know who he was,” he said in one interview.