In the early 1900s, Franz Boas, who is considered one of the founders of American anthropology, became fascinated by a large shrine associated with Indigenous whaling rituals off the coast of British Columbia.

He had been sent a photograph of the shrine, which belonged to members of an Indigenous group called the Mowachaht. It showed a wooden structure on a small island, surrounded by a tangle of cedar and spruce, that sheltered 88 carved wooden human figures, four carved whale figures and 16 human skulls.

Boas decided to acquire it for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he was a curator. He was driven by a concept known as “salvage anthropology,” in which researchers saw collecting Native cultural possessions as a way to safeguard them from destruction as Indigenous populations plummeted.

Even at the time, the acquisition was controversial. A researcher named George Hunt traveled to Yuquot, a village near the shrine, to try to purchase it for the museum. According to letters between him and Boas that were published in “The Yuquot Whalers’ Shrine,” Aldona Jonaitis’s 1999 book on the subject, a chief agreed to sell it for $500, only to return the money the next day following objections from his community.

Hunt wrote that he eventually convinced two chiefs to split $500 in exchange for the shrine. But he added that the chiefs made him agree not to take the shrine until much of the community had left the island for the Bering Sea, where they often went seal hunting.

In 1905, the same year that the full collection arrived in New York, Boas left the museum. The museum ultimately decided not to exhibit the large shrine in its entirety. For the next 120 years, it sometimes displayed or lent out some of the carvings, and it created a small model that was on view from the early 1940s to around 2019. Mostly, the shrine was kept in storage.

Its loss was keenly felt by the community it came from, now known as the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation. For decades, there have been calls to repatriate the shrine, and talks over its fate, but those plans never came to fruition.

Until now.

On Thursday, a truck containing the many pieces that make up the shrine began its long journey to Vancouver Island, off the southwest coast of Canada, in one of the most significant international repatriations in the museum’s history.

“We’re ready for it to come home,” said Marsha Maquinna, who is eight generations removed from the Mowachaht chief who presided over the shrine in the early 1900s. “We, as a community, have lots to heal.”

The story of the shrine’s return can be attributed in large part to the museum’s changing approach to its Native collections and the human remains it holds. And it involved an unlikely pair of facilitators: a father and son from California who only recently discovered their connection to the First Nation through Ancestry.com.

Like other major American institutions, the museum had long been criticized for its history of slow progress on repatriation and outdated Native exhibitions.

Efforts to address those criticisms have been going on for years, but the museum’s new president, Sean Decatur, sent a signal that he took them very seriously last year when he closed down two major halls exhibiting Native American objects. He cited a “growing urgency” for museums to change their relationships to Indigenous cultures.

When it comes to Native human remains, funerary objects and other cultural items recovered in the United States, a law passed in 1990 set up a protocol for museums and other institutions to repatriate the holdings in consultation with tribes and descendants. New federal rules that strengthened aspects of the protocol took effect last year. But the law does not apply to international Native groups.

Of the human remains that the museum still holds, more than half of the 12,000 individuals represented are from outside the U.S. In 2023, the museum overhauled its stewardship of the human remains in its collection, emphasizing its commitment to working with communities internationally on repatriation.

Last year, talks to repatriate the shrine — known to some as the Whalers’ Shrine and to others as the Whalers’ Washing House because of its association with purification rituals — took on new urgency.

They had been going on for decades. In the 1990s, representatives from the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation visited the museum to view the collection. Amid a surge of activism around Native repatriation, calls to return the shrine grew louder.

A 1994 documentary about the First Nation, called “The Washing of Tears,” captured the view that the repatriation of the shrine would be a source of spiritual healing for a community trying to save its culture and ways of life.

“It represented our strength,” Jerry Jack, a hereditary chief, said in the documentary. He referred to the shrine by a traditional name: cheesum.

“I think that when that cheesum was taken away from us it was a real shocker for our people,” he said. “It took away our spirituality.”

In the years that followed there were waves of efforts to complete the repatriation, but plans kept stalling.

At times there were disagreements among members of the First Nation over how to carry out the return. And museum officials did not put forward many solutions.

Then, a few years ago, Albert Lara, a retiree living near Sacramento, Calif., began digging into his genealogy. Lara’s grandfather had told him stories as a child about his Indigenous heritage, but Lara, 75, was not aware of his connection to the Pacific Northwest until he sent a cheek swab to Ancestry.com. The results suggested a connection to members of the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation.

Lara reached out to First Nation officials and got in touch with Margaretta James, who was president of a local cultural society and had been involved in the repatriation efforts for more than 30 years.

His son, Alex Lara, remembers himself and his father asking James, “Is there anything we can help you with?”

James replied, “Well, as a matter of fact, there is.”

Both of the Laras had worked with Native American tribes in California during their careers — Albert with Native veterans as part of the state employment development agency — and James saw them as genuine in their desires to help.

Last April, the Laras began communicating with the museum about the shrine. A letter from the First Nation’s chief executive made them authorized representatives for the group.

In the ensuing months, a plan was put together for the most logistically complicated part of the repatriation: transporting the large shrine back to Yuquot. The First Nation decided that a delegation of its members would see it off on its more than 3,000-mile journey from New York.

On Tuesday, in a room off the natural history museum’s Northwest Coast Hall, more than two dozen First Nation members stood among the boxes and crates containing the pieces of one of their most prized cultural treasures.

They had come from a 200-person reserve near the village of Gold River, ranging in age from elders to grade school children. Many remembered how their parents and grandparents spoke about the lost shrine.

“Listening to what my dad said, anything we have doesn’t belong in a place like this,” said Jerry Jack, whose father — who has since died — called for the return of the shrine in the 1994 documentary.

Museum officials signed over ownership of the shrine to the First Nation. Decatur, the museum president, told the delegation that the shrine had been held “far too long here in New York City in this museum, far away from its true home.”

The First Nation representatives offered a series of gifts, including carved wooden masks by local artists. They sang a victory song in their language of Nuu-chah-nulth. A group of men and boys brushed the packages containing the shrine with cedar boughs as part of a cleansing ritual before their departure.

The Laras flew in from California, with Alex Lara overseeing the logistics of the shrine’s shipment. (The transport and the delegation’s trip is being paid for by the Canadian government, which recognized the shrine as a national historic site in the 1980s.)

A century ago, it took months for the shrine to travel from Vancouver Island to New York City. Now, it’ll take less than a week to make its return.

Unwilling to put their ancestors’ remains on a cross-country drive, the 16 skulls were securely placed in reinforced carry-ons that First Nation members took back with them on their flight home, accompanied by documentation to get them through security.

The shipment by truck includes six large cardboard boxes, four wooden crates — the heaviest of which is nearly 400 pounds — and the wooden structure that housed the shrine, which includes several towering poles as tall as 23.5 feet.

Those packages are scheduled to travel west by truck, and then by ferry to Yuquot. From there, according to the current plan, a helicopter service will airlift the pieces to a church, where they will be kept until the community decides on a more permanent resting place.

“It’s been generally known that it’s going to go back to the island from whence it came,” James said. “But it needs to be protected.”

Kirsten Noyes contributed research.