The governance frameworks that were developed around the Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi project — the formal research agreement, the community DNA study, the First Nations authority over research decisions and final disposition — are models that the broader challenge of glacial archaeology will require.

But applying those models at scale, across a vast landscape of retreating ice with limited monitoring capacity and with the urgency imposed by the pace of climate change, will require significant investment by governments, institutions, and communities.

The Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi project demonstrated that meaningful, respectful, scientifically productive research on glacially preserved Indigenous heritage is possible.

It demonstrated that communities can govern such research in ways that produce significant findings without sacrificing the ethical principles that the treatment of ancestors requires.

And it demonstrated that the findings of such research — however carefully conducted and however significant scientifically — are most fully understood in the context of the living communities whose heritage they represent.