On a late summer day, many years ago, a young man set out on a voyage
through the mountains. He never reached his destination. When his
remains were discovered by three British Columbia hunters, roughly three
hundred years after he was caught by a storm or other accident, his
story had faded from even the long memory of the region's people. First
Nations elders decided to call the discovery Kwäday Dän Ts'ìnchi--Long
Ago Person Found. The discovery of the Kwäday Dän Ts'ìnchi man raised
many questions. Who was he and how did he die? Where had he come from?
Where was he going, and for what purpose? What did his world look like?
But his remains, preserved in glacial ice for centuries, offered
answers, too--as did the traditional knowledge and experience of the
Indigenous peoples in whose territories he lived and died. In this
comprehensive and collaborative account, scientific analysis and
cultural knowledge interweave to describe a life that ended just as
Europeans were about to arrive in the northwest. What emerges is not
only a portrait of an individual and his world, but also a model for how
diverse ways of knowing, in both scholarly and oral traditions, can
complement each other to provide a new understanding of our complex
histories.
