The Pacific Coast of northwestern British Columbia and southeastern Alaska, in the centuries when Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi lived, was a world of extraordinary richness and complexity — a world that the physical evidence from his remains suggests he may have been part of, at least intermittently.

The Northwest Coast was one of the most densely populated and culturally complex regions of pre-contact North America.

The abundance of marine resources — salmon, halibut, herring, eulachon, shellfish, marine mammals — supported populations that, in many areas, were as dense as those of settled agricultural societies in other parts of the world.

This productivity, and the relative abundance and reliability of the food supply, freed people from the constant imperative of food acquisition that dominated life in many other hunter-gatherer societies, allowing the development of complex social institutions, elaborate material culture, and sophisticated ceremonial life.

The Tlingit, whose territory extended from Yakutat Bay in Alaska south through the Alaska Panhandle and into adjacent areas of what is now northwestern British Columbia, were among the dominant powers of this coastal world.