When the ice began to release him — as the glacier retreated in the warming decades of the late twentieth century — it was releasing him into a world that had changed in ways he could not have imagined.

But some of the people in that world, it would eventually be found, carried in their cells a biological connection to him that bridged the centuries.

The Name Given By The People Of This Land

The remains were not simply catalogued and processed as an anonymous archaeological specimen.

From the beginning of the official response to the hunters’ report, the Indigenous communities with traditional connections to the region were central to the process — not as consultees after the fact, but as authorities with governance rights over the treatment of an ancestor found in their territory.

The Champagne and Aishihik First Nations hold the primary traditional territory in the region where the remains were found.