When Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi emerged from the ice, he was not simply a body returning from a natural deep freeze.

He was, in the understanding of the communities that claimed him, an ancestor coming home.

The glacier had held him for a time.

The glacier had given him back.

What was owed to him now — the care, the ceremony, the appropriate treatment of the dead — was the responsibility of the living people who were connected to him through the relationships that their tradition defines.

The science that has been brought to bear on his remains is one way of honoring that responsibility — of taking seriously the question of who he was, where he came from, and what his life and death can tell us.