The discovery occurred on the British Columbia side of what was, in traditional terms, the territory of the Champagne and Aishihik people — Yukon First Nations whose lands extend across the borderline that the post-contact political geography has drawn across a landscape they have inhabited for millennia.

It was the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations who gave the man his name: Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi.

The name is in Southern Tutchone, the language of the Champagne and Aishihik people.

It translates, most commonly, as “Long Ago Person Found” — a name that places the individual in a temporal relationship to the present (long ago), in a spatial relationship to the finding (person found), and in a human category (person, not specimen or body or artifact) that reflects how the community understood who had been discovered in the ice.

The name is not a scientific designation.