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.

As New York City voters tilt slightly toward the center, the left-leaning Working Families Party hopes that a slate of four mayoral candidates will be better than the one moderate rival currently leading the polls, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

The party on Saturday voted to endorse a slate of four candidates for mayor: Zohran Mamdani, an assemblyman from Queens; Brad Lander, the city comptroller; Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the City Council; and Zellnor Myrie, a state senator from Brooklyn.

Ana María Archila and Jasmine Gripper, co-directors of the New York Working Families Party, said in a statement that the city deserved a mayor who could “leave behind the scandal and corruption of the past and lead with integrity.”

The four candidates “each have a record of fighting for working families, a vision to make New York City safe and affordable for all and the courage to stand up to Trump,” they added.

The slate is the first of a two-part endorsement process that the party has embraced for the June 24 primary. In May, the group plans to throw its support behind a single candidate that its leaders believe is best positioned to defeat Mr. Cuomo.

In the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary, the three candidates backed by the Working Families Party failed to make the final round under the city’s new ranked-choice voting system. This year, the group has adjusted its endorsement process in an effort to better leverage its influence.

Candidates vying for the party’s support this year were asked to commit to working collaboratively with one another, and to encourage their supporters not to rank either Mr. Cuomo or Mayor Eric Adams. Six Democrats applied for the party’s endorsement and all agreed to those terms.

Party leaders have not yet decided on a concrete strategy for how to consolidate support around their first choice, but they have weighed obligating other candidates seeking the group’s endorsement to cross-endorse the party’s top choice.

“Our task, and that of every W.F.P.-endorsed candidate, is to remind New Yorkers of Cuomo’s real record, and to communicate to voters they don’t have to settle,” the group wrote in a memo outlining its strategy this month. “They can elect a new mayor who will stand up for working families, not the billionaires.”

The memo defined the contest as “working-families champions vs. the power-hungry, scandal-ridden politicians,” themes that all four candidates hit on in a series of statements on Saturday.

Mr. Lander said he wanted to work with the party to “deliver a safer, more affordable, better-run city so that all working families can build their lives here as I have.”

Ms. Adams referenced growing up in a union household. “That’s where I come from, who I fight for and who I’ll always be accountable to,” she said.

Mr. Myrie said he was “running to make New York more affordable, livable and safe for everyone” by building more affordable housing and creating enhanced child care options.

Mr. Mamdani mentioned Mr. Cuomo and President Trump directly and said that he was “fighting for a city that working people can actually afford.”

The party’s four-headed endorsement is part of a broader strategy among progressives seeking to thwart Mr. Cuomo, even as he garners more endorsements and support from key voting blocs.

On Sunday, the former governor is expected to receive the backing of Representative Gregory Meeks of New York, a onetime ally of the mayor who also serves as chairman of the Queens Democratic Party. Mr. Meeks helped Ms. Adams form a coalition to win the speaker’s role.

“New York has a crisis of affordability, of quality of life and of leadership, and Governor Cuomo is the only person in this race with the proven track record of results to tackle these issues head on,” said Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo.

But the former governor’s foes, including the Working Families Party, hope to seize on a variety of issues of Mr. Cuomo’s own, such as the sexual harassment accusations that led to his resignation in 2021. Mr. Cuomo denies wrongdoing.

The party’s endorsement could also hurt progressive candidates who failed to receive it. They include Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens who has struggled to raise money.

Mr. Lander has aggressively attacked Mr. Cuomo but has not risen in the polls. Ms. Adams was a late entrant to the race and lacks name recognition. Mr. Myrie is also struggling in that department.

Mr. Mamdani, whose online persona and relentless focus on affordability in his campaign message, has made strides to counter Mr. Cuomo’s momentum and could add new voters to his coalition as part of that effort. Several recent polls show him second, well behind Mr. Cuomo but leading the progressive lane with impressive fund-raising numbers.

The FlynnStoned Cannabis Company, a dispensary in Syracuse, N.Y., is the size of a large clothing store. Its wooden front doors have iron handles with finials in the shape of cannabis leaves. Inside, nuggets of cannabis flower, infused candies and vaporizers are laid out in glass cases spread over two stories. A lounge under a skylight on the third floor hosts concerts and yoga classes.

It is, by nearly any measure, one of the success stories of New York’s nascent legal marijuana industry. And the man behind FlynnStoned, a 43-year-old high school dropout and roofing entrepreneur named Michael Flynn, appears poised to build a weed empire, with FlynnStoned dispensaries from Brooklyn to Buffalo.

But Mr. Flynn’s hard-charging approach has drawn ire from communities where he is seeking to open more stores. And a recent deal-making spree, in which he has cut branding agreements with dispensaries all over the state to use his name, has drawn the attention of regulators, who are investigating whether he is violating the spirit, and perhaps the letter, of the state’s legalization law.

“They’re trying to stick a pitchfork in me,” Mr. Flynn said.

Mr. Flynn, who has tattoos on his fingers that spell “HIGH VIDA,” is in some ways the type of person whom the state’s legalization efforts were intended to support. His conviction for marijuana possession 25 years ago put him at the front of the line for a state license to sell recreational cannabis products, part of New York’s effort to right the wrongs of the war on drugs.

And in some ways, the success of his business is a bright spot in the state’s troubled marijuana rollout. As others struggled to get off the ground, hamstrung by a combination of complex rules and a slow bureaucracy, FlynnStoned made $30 million in revenue in its first year.

His ambitions have also encountered some familiar roadblocks. Would-be neighbors in New York City have sought to block new stores over concerns about crime and exposing children to marijuana.

At the same time, community boards and state regulators worry that his entrepreneurial attempt to sell the rights to the FlynnStoned name to about 30 dispensaries around the state amounts to preying on marijuana license holders who are less fortunate.

“It seems to not be in the spirit of giving the helping hand to those who were previously adversely impacted by anti-cannabis laws,” said Jesús Pérez, the district manager of a community board on Manhattan’s East Side, where Mr. Flynn is building a dispensary in what was the city’s last Hallmark store. “Just red flag after red flag seems to have come up about this that the community was not comfortable with.”

A Lifelong Calling

Mr. Flynn sees selling marijuana as his destiny.

“I just feel like I’ve been put on Earth to do this,” he said in a recent interview. “I’m just going to keep doing it as long as I’m having fun.”

He said he had started selling weed when he was 12, after his parents divorced and his father disappeared from his life. Left unsupervised, he got hooked on drugs. At 15, he moved out, bouncing among apartments and flop houses before dropping out of school. By the time he was 24, he was carrying hockey bags full of weed across the border from Canada, charging about $2,400 a pound in Syracuse, his hometown, and $4,000 a pound in Florida.

He was convicted of low-level marijuana possession when he was 18, paid a fine and avoided jail. Five years later, he quit drugs and took up roofing.

He started his first business, The Roofing Guys, in 2006. He set himself apart by offering customers financing and, as his main competitors fell to the wayside, he got rich.

“I was so addicted to drugs, alcohol and the party life,” he said. “I turned that around and got addicted to success.”

It has afforded him a different life with his wife, Angela, a high school classmate who gave him a Home Depot credit card in her name to help start the business. The couple have five children and live on a custom-built estate in the middle of a cornfield near Syracuse.

When New York legalized recreational cannabis in 2021, Mr. Flynn’s demonstrated ability to run a business and his marijuana conviction helped him win a license to open one of the state’s first legal dispensaries.

On Instagram, he shared video from the ribbon-cutting ceremony in June 2023 interspersed with photos of his lime-green Lamborghini Aventador and a diamond necklace bearing his store’s name encircling a green marijuana leaf. The video was set to a song called “Blow Up” by the rapper J. Cole, who sings, “This is a song for my haters/ Y’all got me feeling like the greatest.”

As FlynnStoned grew, so did the opportunities its founder began to see fanning out before him.

Building the Brand

Under New York’s legalization law, one shop owner is not allowed to control more than three dispensaries.

Mr. Flynn, regulators say, may have found a way to skirt that law.

In the wake of FlynnStoned’s success, other dispensary owners began reaching out to Mr. Flynn for help and advice, he said. Soon, he started to make deals with some of them.

Those deals allowed other dispensaries to use the FlynnStoned name in exchange for a small cut of their revenue, he said. Mr. Flynn added that he also connects the business owners with friends who are investors but “not Wall Street guys.”

“At first it was advice and help, and then it became, well, why don’t we just build the brand and help ourselves, too?” he said.

Mr. Flynn said the branding agreements do not make him an owner or investor. He declined to say how much revenue he takes, except that it was “not that much.”

But state officials have begun scrutinizing the deals, seeking to prevent big players from taking advantage of small, local business owners whom legalization was supposed to benefit. James Rogers, the director of a new unit within the Office of Cannabis Management that investigates potential ownership violations, said licensees were free to sign agreements that make their businesses work. But he said his team would unwind deals that give investors too much control.

“It’s the predatory behavior that we’re after,” he said.

The agency declined to say whether it was investigating Mr. Flynn, though Mr. Pérez, the community board official, said that was what he had been told by state officials. Mr. Flynn also said the agency was blocking some of the deals.

Robert Grannis, a 54-year-old farmer, got a license in 2022 and plans to open a FlynnStoned store in Binghamton. He said he had sought Mr. Flynn’s help after the state failed to provide the financing and real estate that it had promised to help early licensees open dispensaries.

Mr. Flynn initially offered to buy his license, Mr. Grannis said, but they settled on a branding deal, and Mr. Grannis took on an investor who paid for renovations. He declined to discuss the terms.

Mr. Grannis said the deal gave him peace of mind because he had heard horror stories of people building out their stores only for regulators to deny or delay their openings. Unlike liquor stores, cannabis licensees receive their final licenses only after their stores are built.

He said that what Mr. Flynn was doing in the cannabis industry was no different than what Starbucks did for coffee or McDonald’s did for hamburgers.

“We’re not doing anything but the American dream,” he said.

Axel Bernabe, a lawyer who helped to write the state’s legalization law and the rules for the market, helps Mr. Flynn structure the deals. Some industry insiders have criticized his involvement, but Mr. Bernabe said there is nothing wrong with what he or Mr. Flynn is doing.

“This idea that this is super shady is mudslinging business,” Mr. Bernabe said, adding, “It’s a play on building your brand, and everybody’s trying to do that.”

An Unexpected Turn

The deals had proceeded smoothly until Mr. Flynn began expanding in New York City, drawing vociferous backlash.

Residents protested his plan to put a dispensary in the former Hallmark store, near the United Nations. In Greenwich Village, where he is converting what had been an adult video store into a FlynnStoned, the community board dug up videos of him and others smoking at his Syracuse store, which is not allowed. A petition to stop him from opening another location in the Greenpoint Savings Bank building in Brooklyn also gained hundreds of signatures.

“I’m not anti-pot, but I am anti-dispensary,” said Tanya Arias, a Realtor who has lived around the corner from the Hallmark store site for 20 years. “It’s not a store that’s going to service the needs of our community.”

Mr. Flynn’s own words may cause him the most trouble. In September, he told the East Side community board that he was the sole owner of the forthcoming dispensary, that he had already signed a lease and that the Hallmark store’s owners had not paid their rent in months.

None of it was true.

He said he had not expected the opposition, but he bristled at questions that he felt were intrusive. “Whatever I said in that community board was just whatever I had to say to get the hell out of there,” he said.

Kuljot Bhasin, 63, who owned the Hallmark store with his wife, Amrita, sued Mr. Flynn for defamation. They are seeking at least $4 million in damages. Mr. Flynn’s defense lawyers said their client had not spoken maliciously.

“To come and disparage us to make himself look good to the board, that infuriated us,” Mr. Bhasin said in an interview.

Mr. Bhasin, a Sikh American immigrant, said he plans to reopen the business in a new location. But a part of him hopes that Mr. Flynn’s plans fall through, he said, so that he might be able to return to the shop where he sold cards and gifts for 22 years.

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.