The communities of the Northwest Coast and the subarctic interior — the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, the Tlingit peoples of the Alaska Panhandle and northwestern British Columbia, and the many other First Nations whose traditional territories intersect with the landscape through which Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi traveled — have always understood themselves as continuous communities.

Not communities that arrived recently or that have been present for only as long as the historical record extends, but communities whose presence in their homelands reaches back through time further than any instrument of documentation can measure.

The discovery of Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi and the subsequent research — the dating, the isotopes, the DNA — provided specific, material evidence of one person’s presence in this landscape and one person’s biological connection to living people in the same broad community.

It did not provide the communities with knowledge they lacked.