It was a confirmation of something that Indigenous knowledge and oral tradition had maintained: that the people of the Northwest Coast and interior subarctic have been in these lands for a very long time, that their connections to each other and to their landscape are deep and continuous, and that the ice and the mountains and the rivers that define their homeland hold the presence of the ancestors in specific and tangible ways.

The Champagne and Aishihik First Nations understood Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi not as an archaeological specimen to be analyzed and then placed in a museum collection, but as an ancestor whose return to visibility — after centuries in the ice — required acknowledgment, respect, and eventual ceremony.

The community’s traditional knowledge holders contributed perspectives on who he might have been, what his crossing of the mountains might have meant, and what obligations the living community had toward him.

Oral traditions of the region describe crossings of the Tatshenshini-Alsek mountains and the specific routes and landmarks associated with those crossings.