Domingo Tapia and Gary Anderson crossed paths for no more than a second, two lives colliding in a moment of grainy surveillance footage.

Mr. Tapia, a 38-year-old Mexican immigrant who worked as a fruit vendor, had met his brother for a few beers on a summer evening in 2017. They had passed the time and said their goodbyes.

He turned back momentarily to retrieve a bag of fruit he had forgotten at the bar, mounted his bike and glided off toward his wife and two sons, through the quiet streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. It was 1:30 a.m.

Two blocks away, Mr. Anderson, a 26-year-old fitness trainer, was standing at Fulton Street and Albany Avenue among a group of men milling around the corner, gesticulating, apparently arguing.

Suddenly, he stalked into the crosswalk, advancing at just the moment Mr. Tapia pedaled into his path. Mr. Anderson took a step, and another, and then he exploded, launching his fist into Mr. Tapia’s face.

Mr. Tapia’s balance failed. The bike spun out. His head smashed against the hard, dark pavement.

The two men didn’t know each other, and they never would. The punch had arrived like many crimes in New York — random, swift, a bolt out of nowhere.

Mr. Tapia was rushed to the hospital and placed in a medically induced coma, where he remained, motionless in a white room, a tangle of tubes jutting from his chest.

Mr. Anderson was arrested and indicted on several charges, including felony assault. For almost three years, he bounced among prisons in upstate New York, while Mr. Tapia’s wife, Esther Diaz, sat day after day at her husband’s bedside, praying for his limp body to stir.

Outside, seasons changed, his sons grew into teenagers, the city churned on. Nearly seven years slipped by, measured out by beeping monitors.

Last March, the monitors went silent.

A Typical Morning

Ms. Diaz and Mr. Tapia both immigrated from Guerrero, Mexico, but they met more than 2,000 miles from home at a restaurant in Flatbush.

Ms. Diaz had been waiting on tables amid a crush of customers when Mr. Tapia walked in. They talked through the busy afternoon, the restaurant abuzz around them. A bouquet of roses arrived the following week. They found home in each other: Ms. Diaz bright and energetic at just over 5 feet tall, and Mr. Tapia her calm and gentle counterpart.

Over the next 15 years, they built a life together in Brooklyn and welcomed a son, Pedro, and then another, José.

Mr. Tapia was an attentive father, Ms. Diaz said. He rarely stayed out late, preferring to come straight home from work to spend time with their sons. The couple never married, partly because of concerns over their immigration status — both were undocumented — but they considered themselves husband and wife. They had a gentle war over the television: She liked telenovelas, he liked video games.

On the morning of June 7, 2017, the couple got up in a hurry and rushed to ready the children for school. Ms. Diaz bathed the boys, 5 and 7, in the kitchen while Mr. Tapia showered. The apartment was a blur of activity as the children collected their bags and Mr. Tapia rushed out. The door clicked shut before she had a chance to say goodbye.

By evening, Ms. Diaz could sense that something was amiss. Mr. Tapia had not answered a text message since he left. Eight p.m. and then 9 p.m. came and went without a word, the fresh tortillas and mole she had prepared growing cold on the table.

She awoke hours later to her buzzing phone. It was Kings County Hospital.

Seven Years of Waiting

When Ms. Diaz arrived, her husband was lying in a bed, bruises blooming across the back of his dented skull. Nurses hurried around the room, preparing him for surgery. Again and again, Ms. Diaz asked Mr. Tapia who had done this to him, but he couldn’t move his mouth. Instead, he took her arm and shook it.

He emerged from surgery hours later in a medically induced coma.

For nearly a week, Ms. Diaz had no idea what had happened. Detectives at the hospital offered little help. Calls to the police turned up few answers. At one point, the hospital staff even barred Ms. Diaz from entering her husband’s room until she could produce documents proving their relationship, which took days to procure from Mr. Tapia’s family in Mexico.

Frantic, Ms. Diaz contacted Hispanic news outlets, batting away the nagging fear that publicizing her name could threaten her residency.

Not long after, the police called her into the precinct. There, seated at a table beside her brother-in-law, she watched, numb, as officers played a fuzzy surveillance video. There it was: her husband, a stranger and a single punch rendered in choppy pixels.

Within days, the story of the inexplicable assault was splashed across tabloid headlines, unnerving the neighborhood and seizing New Yorkers’ attention for its particular brutality. At a candlelight vigil, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and future mayor, offered to personally pay $1,000 to anyone who could help.

Mr. Anderson was arrested at the end of that month. He had been building his personal training roster, hopping from gym to gym, when someone recognized him.

His arrest did little to calm Ms. Diaz. For weeks, the surveillance video of the punch played on every television, dragging her back to that night. On some days, she caught glimpses of Mr. Anderson roaming the neighborhood, out on bail. She would board a train car and he would be there. She would walk down the street and there he was.

In the evenings, after finishing work as a housekeeper, Ms. Diaz would trek to the hospital, traveling on foot when she couldn’t afford a MetroCard. She fed her sons dollar pizza for dinner before coaxing them to sleep at their father’s bedside in the intensive care unit.

There were unending bus rides and stacks of medical bills. The children’s grades plummeted. Pedro, the eldest, was being steadily bullied at school. Once, he got into a fight, telling her afterward that he had been defending himself so that he wouldn’t end up like his father.

Her sons deserved better, she thought. She was giving them a miserable life.

Mr. Tapia showed little improvement. He remained on a ventilator for six months, coming off life support for only two days before his body weakened again. A neighborhood activist and friend suggested that Ms. Diaz pull the plug, but she refused. She would pray for his recovery instead.

Years went by like that, and eventually Mr. Tapia was transferred to a long-term care facility in Staten Island. He sank into a vegetative state. Ms. Diaz did her best to travel to his bedside, but time and money were in short supply and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge loomed between them, a barrier dividing the family from its father.

The pandemic came. Visits dwindled.

An Unexplained Outburst

While Mr. Tapia’s family waited for him to wake, Mr. Anderson’s struggled to understand the burst of violence from a man they had known as a generous friend and doting parent.

Mr. Anderson was raised in Bed-Stuy, the youngest in his family. His half sister Shakeya Lloyd, who shares a father with him, said he had faced difficult circumstances growing up. He turned to fitness as a respite from troubles at home.

“Nobody knew of him as a troublemaker,” Ms. Lloyd said. “I’ve never even heard him raise his voice.”

She described her brother as charitable and thoughtful from an early age, bringing bags of Christmas gifts to his grandmother’s house and organizing donation drives in the neighborhood. Mr. Anderson always had girlfriends, she said, and over the years he raised three daughters. His Instagram account is dotted with photos of the girls, wobbling on roller skates and learning to read.

By June 2017, Mr. Anderson was working as a youth coach at the local Y.M.C.A. and running his personal training business on the side. He had never been arrested. So it came as a shock when Ms. Lloyd learned that her brother had attacked a man at Fulton and Albany.

In the months that followed, lawyers, politicians and even relatives had various theories about why he had swung. Prosecutors said he had been arguing with people on the corner. Later, they added that Mr. Anderson had decided to attack someone at random. One friend called it a bad moment; most were fuzzy on the details. Ms. Lloyd said she had been disappointed.

In September 2019, Mr. Anderson pleaded guilty to felony assault and was sentenced to three years in prison as Ms. Diaz looked on from the courtroom gallery. It didn’t feel like a punishment, Ms. Diaz thought. Nothing could soothe her family’s suffering.

‘Everything Is Coming Back Again’

Mr. Anderson did time at prisons in Ulster County and Altona in upstate New York. The five-hour trip was too long for his family to make regular visits and, though he called when he could, he struggled to explain his absence to his daughters.

In 2022, he was quietly released from prison, returning to Brooklyn. Yet again, Ms. Diaz encountered him on the street. She felt as though his eyes were on her back.

Mr. Anderson worked to rehabilitate himself, his family said. He opened a gym of his own and enmeshed himself again in his daughters’ lives. But court records tell of troubles fueled by alcohol and rage.

A few months after returning home, Mr. Anderson was arrested on charges of drunken driving and sentenced to a year of alcohol treatment.

Then in June 2024, he was charged with attempted murder, accused of shooting a gun at a man with whom he had argued at a bar. Mr. Anderson was released on bond. He attended every court date, standing behind a defense table once again.

Miles away in Staten Island, Mr. Tapia was fading away. In the months before, he had undergone two emergency surgeries, but before long his organs began to fail. On March 12, 2024, his body gave out entirely and he slipped away.

His hospital room was empty. Ms. Diaz couldn’t bring herself to go.

It was nearly a year later and Mr. Anderson had just finished his latest virtual appearance in his attempted murder case when his phone screen lit up with a call from his lawyer.

The medical examiner had ruled Mr. Tapia’s death a homicide, the case had gone to a grand jury and Mr. Anderson, his lawyer told him, had been newly indicted on manslaughter charges.

The news washed over him all at once, said Ms. Lloyd, Mr. Anderson’s sister. He had already admitted to punching Mr. Tapia and served time in prison. But when Mr. Tapia died, that changed the nature of the crime. Under the law, the attack was now not just a punch, but a punch that had killed a man.

Mr. Anderson surrendered on the new charges on Feb. 5. Detectives picked him up at the courthouse and brought him to a precinct and then back to court again. He stood in still another courtroom, listening as prosecutors once again described that night in June 2017, the endless moment his family and Ms. Diaz’s could not escape.

“It’s kind of wrong,” Ms. Lloyd said. Her brother had admitted his guilt and was remorseful. “How can it kind of slap you in the face?”

His lawyer, Judith Karpatkin of the Legal Aid Society, said she could not discuss the case.

Since his rearrest, Mr. Anderson, who was released on his own recognizance, has been active on Instagram, posting cryptically about the future. Last month, a neighbor in the building said he had cleared out his gym. Now it’s just a bare room under the J train tracks in Bushwick.

“I can take all the blessings I can get. I’m going through a lot,” Mr. Anderson said during a recent live video about repentance during Ramadan, which he observes.

“The past and bringing that back is very depressing,” Mr. Anderson said in the video, responding directly to a reporter’s request to talk about the case. “I felt like I did what I had to do, and now everything is coming back again.”

He declined to speak further.

Untouched Ashes

After Mr. Tapia’s death, Ms. Diaz had his body cremated. She brought his ashes home in a smooth wooden box and placed them high on a shelf at the back of a second-floor closet, where they remained, untouched, for the past year.

“Sometimes I didn’t understand how it was possible for us to survive all of these years,” Ms. Diaz said recently at her home in East Flatbush, fingering a sun-bleached photo of her husband, one of the few she has left of him.

Next month, when she returns to court for Mr. Anderson’s case, she’s hoping for just one thing. She wants to see her husband’s killer back behind bars.

“May he feel that pain,” Ms. Diaz said.

Seven years have passed since Mr. Anderson and Mr. Tapia met on the darkened corner of Fulton and Albany. But their two families remain frozen in that deadly moment.

Mr. Anderson, now 34, is facing the possibility of returning to prison. His daughters, the eldest of whom is almost a teenager, grapple with the prospect of losing their father again.

Ms. Diaz, 41, is raising her children on her own, the box with her husband’s ashes gathering dust upstairs.

From time to time, she can hear her sons, now 14 and 13, from behind a closed door, huddled over a glowing phone screen. They watch and rewatch the grainy clip of the punch that ended their father’s life.

Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

An Ivy League university. Distinguished law firms with Fortune 500 clients. The highest levels of government in the nation’s largest city.

As President Trump seeks to extract concessions from elite institutions and punish his perceived enemies, some of New York’s most powerful people are suddenly confronting excruciating decisions.

The hard choices they face seem almost to be pulled from the pages of a college ethics textbook: Fight back and put your institution and even your livelihood in jeopardy? Or yield and risk compromising foundational values and ideals?

Some have sued, or walked away from their jobs. Others have cut deals with the Trump administration, and faced ferocious criticism for what many see as capitulation.

Mr. Trump has sought financial agreements, fealty pledges and other concessions from all across the United States, and even from other countries. But his former hometown, New York City, is a prime target: It is a capital of industrial and cultural institutions — and of the elite liberal establishment that his presidency pits itself against.

The deal-cutting has come as a shock to some leaders.

“I have been surprised at the rush at times to assuage the White House from activity that has gone on from people who I just thought would display more courage,” said David Paterson, a former Democratic governor of New York.

But the choices can be agonizing.

“It becomes a challenge for them to speak out against something they know is wrong,” said Chris Dietrich, chair of the history department at Fordham University. “If they stick their head above the parapet, they feel they could be putting a number of other people at risk.”

He compared the current moment to the McCarthy era, when many stayed silent as Joseph McCarthy, the Red-baiting senator falsely accused citizens of being Communists.

‘Pillars of America’

Last week, sold-out Broadway crowds were leaping to their feet to cheer the actor George Clooney after his rousing performance as Edward R. Murrow, the 1950s-era broadcast journalist. Mr. Murrow famously stood up to Mr. McCarthy.

Just a couple blocks away in Midtown, Brad Karp, the chairman of the top-tier law firm Paul Weiss, was writing a memo to his employees explaining why he had reached a deal with Mr. Trump to do $40 million in pro bono work for causes the White House supports.

Mr. Trump, in an executive order, had threatened to suspend the law firm’s security clearances and bar its lawyers from federal buildings, which would have severely restricted its ability to represent clients in some cases involving the federal government.

Three other elite law firms Mr. Trump threatened — Jenner & Block, WilmerHale and Perkins Coie — have fought back by suing the administration. But Mr. Karp argued that in being targeted by Mr. Trump for its ties to the president’s political and legal enemies, the firm faced an “unprecedented threat” and an “existential crisis.” He wrote that he had learned “other firms were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys.”

On Friday, another top New York law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, agreed to provide $100 million in pro bono work on issues Mr. Trump supports in an effort to avoid its own punishing executive order.

Earlier this month, Rachel Cohen, a Skadden associate, submitted her notice of resignation after putting together an open letter that was signed anonymously by others from numerous firms in hopes of pressuring their own employers to speak out.

And in response to the actions at Paul Weiss, about 140 alumni of the law firm signed a letter to its chairman, calling the decision to settle “cowardly.”

“It is a permanent stain on the face of a great firm that sought to gain a profit by forfeiting its soul,” the lawyers wrote in the letter.

The firms’ willingness to make deals followed a move by Columbia University, which in the face of being threatened with losing $400 million in federal funding, announced plans to overhaul its protest policies and security practices and make other changes in line with the Trump administration’s demands.

On Friday, a week after the plans were announced, the university’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, resigned and was replaced by Claire Shipman, a co-chair of the school’s board of trustees.

Some have welcomed the changes Columbia announced, which were already in progress before Mr. Trump’s demands as part of an effort to combat antisemitism. And Samantha Slater, a Columbia spokeswoman, defended the concessions to the White House.

“We will always uphold the university’s mission and values,” she said.

But the deal incited faculty protests and a lawsuit by faculty groups against the Trump administration saying that the planned cuts “represent an existential ‘gun to the head’ for a university,” according to the complaint.

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, said institutions like Columbia and major law firms, which he called “pillars of America,” should be role models for resistance.

“When an institution fights back, it makes it easier for everyone else to fight back,” he said. “Giant law firms and a highly endowed Ivy League university — they’re going to be here long after Donald Trump. They have the resources to sustain a fight. If you give in on this one, there will be something else.”

A City’s Identity

New York has a long history of resisting presidents whose policies or actions were viewed as politically unfavorable or damaging to the city: Mr. Murrow called out Dwight D. Eisenhower’s tolerance of McCarthyism; Martin Luther King Jr. led huge protests against Lyndon B. Johnson’s support for the Vietnam War; and Gerald Ford’s refusal to bail out the city during a fiscal crisis in 1975 likely cost him re-election.

But today, some of the city’s strongest pillars are quivering.

“Now,” said Mark Levine, a Democratic candidate for city comptroller, “we’re the center of appeasement.”

The city has been a reliable Democratic stronghold for decades, so much so that some New Yorkers were shocked by Mr. Trump’s electoral gains in November’s presidential election compared with his performance in 2020.

But it’s also a city where adoration of capitalism gave rise to Wall Street billionaires and real estate scions like Mr. Trump himself. Now, some of the city’s leaders and thinkers are wondering whether the responses to Mr. Trump expose more of New York’s true identity.

“We are a city of rollovers, institutionalists who don’t want to rock the boat,” said Richard Flanagan, a political science professor at the College of Staten Island. “Deals before principles. A capitalist city before a progressive one.”

All the backing down has made the Rev. Al Sharpton question whether New York is as tough as he thought it was.

“You never know how strong you are until you’re tested,” he said, noting that civil rights protesters have learned that upholding values often comes at a steep cost. “If people really believed in what they stood for they wouldn’t capitulate. It makes me wonder if they ever believed in the first place.”

But while Mr. Trump’s detractors call him a bully, his supporters say his actions are nothing more than deal-making — that making demands and exerting leverage are the way things get done.

And Mr. Trump has gloated over his wins.

“You see what we’re doing with the colleges, and they’re all bending and saying: ‘Sir, thank you very much. We appreciate it,’” he said on Wednesday. “Nobody can believe it, including law firms that have been so horrible, law firms that, nobody would believe this, just saying: ‘Where do I sign? Where do I sign?’”

A President, a Mayor and a Dilemma

Perhaps no one has brought the ethical dilemmas engendered by Mr. Trump’s deals and demands into sharper relief than Mayor Eric Adams.

Facing corruption-related charges, Mr. Adams, a Democrat, sought to cozy up to Mr. Trump even before the election in what was widely criticized as an attempt to make his criminal case go away.

But when those efforts appeared to pay off, and a Trump appointee at the Justice Department sought to abandon the case against Mr. Adams, prosecutors and city officials found themselves confronted with a difficult decision.

Rather than cut bait on the case, the interim U.S. attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, resigned, as did the case’s lead attorney, Hagan Scotten.

Mr. Scotten, who served three combat tours in Iraq as a U.S. Army Special Forces officer and earned two bronze stars, said in a resignation letter that only a fool or a coward would obey the order.

Ms. Sassoon, in her resignation letter, indicated that she believed Mr. Adams and the Trump administration were engaging in essentially a quid pro quo, with the mayor agreeing to help cooperate on the president’s immigration agenda in exchange for the dropped charges.

Concerns about the mayor’s indebtedness to the Trump administration led four deputy mayors to make their own difficult choice: Amid the controversy, concerned that Mr. Adams’s personal interests risked outweighing the interests of New Yorkers, they resigned.

The ramifications spread further. In Washington, five Justice Department prosecutors resigned rather than sign the motion to dismiss the case against Mr. Adams.

In the end, a veteran prosecutor, Ed Sullivan, agreed to file the request in order to save more of his colleagues from losing their jobs, according to three people briefed on the interaction. The judge overseeing the mayor’s case is still reviewing the request.

For some who have chosen to fight Mr. Trump’s demands, much hangs in the balance, and the outcome will not be clear anytime soon.

New York transit officials and Gov. Kathy Hochul have held firm during a standoff with federal officials over the fate of congestion pricing, which seeks to cut traffic and raise money for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority by charging drivers who enter Manhattan’s central business district.

As soon as Sean Duffy, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, sent a letter ordering the M.T.A. to shut down the program, the authority sued and has so far ignored the administration’s deadlines. And Ms. Hochul has invoked the action movie “Rambo” to suggest that Mr. Trump would pay for drawing “first blood.”

Donovan Richards, the borough president of Queens, where Mr. Trump was born, said officials couldn’t stop resisting a president who went against the values of many New Yorkers.

“We have to fight,” he said. “There is enough room for everybody to win here.”

Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting.

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.