The name has established, in the vocabulary of the project, that the person found in the ice is a person — not a specimen, not an artifact, not an archaeological find — and that he belongs to a human and cultural world that the living communities of the region can name in their own language.

The persistence of the name across all the contexts in which the discovery has been discussed is itself a statement — about who has the authority to name, about what kind of language is appropriate for discussing an ancestor found in a glacier, about the relationship between the scientific enterprise and the cultural communities within whose world the scientific findings exist.

Southern Tutchone is a living language — spoken today by members of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations and taught in language revitalization programs supported by the First Nation government.

The use of a Southern Tutchone name for the man from the glacier is not merely a gesture toward cultural sensitivity.