For institutions built around possession, repatriation can feel like loss.

For communities whose ancestors were taken, it is the opposite.

This reversal is one of the reasons Ishi’s story remains so relevant.

The central question changed.

In 1911, the museum asked: What can this man teach science?

Today, the institution must also ask: What did science take from this man, and what responsibilities follow from that history?

That second question does not invalidate the first.

It completes it.

Ishi was a teacher.

His language, technology, and stories changed scholarship.