For this tribe’s members, the history they found at the museum was their own.

Members of the Tseycum First Nation were in New York this week for a special visit to the American Museum of Natural History, where they reclaimed the remains of ancestors that had been taken from their lands about a century ago and ended up as part of the museum’s vast holdings.

A reinterment is planned for tomorrow, Chief Vern Jacks said.

“Our people don’t belong in boxes in a museum,” he said. “This is our life, we still respect our dead.”

The quest started some years ago, when Chief Jacks’s wife, Cora, was going through some papers and came across a reference to an archeologist who had traveled in the area and had taken bones from graves that ended up in museum collections.

“I realized how important it was to determine where those remains were,” she said. Further search led to the realization that some of them were in New York, at the museum.

The tribe reached out to the museum, and was pleased with the reaction.

“They were amazing,” Cora Jack said. “They were extremely helpful from the first time we contacted them.”

A senior vice president for communications and marketing at the museum, Charles McLean, said there was a process in place to address issues of repatriation. He said there had been at least one other occasion where the museum had returned remains.

“The museum is certainly willing to consider requests from legitimate sources for the repatriation of remains,” he said, although he pointed out that remains make up a very tiny part of the 30 million items in the collection.

Members of the tribe came to the museum on Monday. They held a ceremony, singing and praying over the boxes that contain their ancestors’ remains.

“I think everybody here at the museum was very gratified at the outcome,” Mr. McLean said. “It was a very moving ceremony.”

Other ceremonies will be held tomorrow in Canada to return the remains to their resting places, Cora Jacks said. “It’s important they be able to come home and rest in peace.”

She said the whole experience was important for the tribe’s young people. “It gives the young people a sense of how to correct something.”

The quest isn’t entirely over yet. The tribe says there are other remains at the Field Museum in Chicago, and there are plans to start the process with that institution. The museum didn’t return a call seeking comment.

Cora Jacks said they would then be turning their attention to Europe, where they believe some remains are as well.