The research was conducted with constant awareness that the remains were not the property of science or the state but the ancestor of a living community with governance rights over his treatment.

This framework did not prevent significant scientific work from being done.

It shaped the science — directing it toward questions that the community found meaningful and away from analyses that the community found inappropriate or intrusive.

The result was research that was both scientifically productive and ethically grounded in a way that earlier archaeological investigations of Indigenous remains rarely were.

For scientists working on the project, the governance framework required adjustments in how they approached their work.

For the First Nations communities, it required sustained engagement with a scientific process that was, in many respects, foreign to their own ways of knowing the past.