The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act: Integrating Science and Storie

The success of the consultation process and the granting of permission to study the human remains can be attributed to both parties—the government officials and the Tlingit themselves. [...] They were pleased that the scientific findings relating to the antiquity of the human remains corroborated their contention that the Tlingit have owned and occupied Southeast Alaska “since time immemorial.” Some of the Elders concluded that the individual found at the cave site had given himself to the present-day Tlingit in order that they might learn more about their ancestors. [...] However, the coastal Tlingit sought a meeting with the Canadian Indians of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations to discuss reburial plans and disposition of the artifacts found with the human remains. [...] Swanton of the Bureau of American Ethnology collected a series of Tlingit oral traditions in the early 1900s, and he was the first to record that the two major divisions of the Tlingit— the Ravens and Eagle/Wolf—may have originally stemmed from two separate populations (Swanton 1908: 407). [...] The oral accounts tell of glacial advances and flooding and the retreat of the Tlingit into the interior and to the south.