With the museum's full consent, the Tseycum tribe will be repatriating the remains of 55 of their ancestors to Canada this week. On Monday morning, in a quiet first-floor auditorium away from the museum's crowds, tribe members performed an emotionally charged private ceremony over the 15 sturdy plastic boxes that contained the remains. The ceremony lasted two and a half hours, and the tribe members and elders from related tribes prayed, spoke, wept and sang, saying they wanted to soothe their ancestors' spirits and prepare them for a return trip from a journey that, the tribe leaders say, should never have happened at all.

"And then we said, 'Now we're going to take you home,' " Chief Jacks said, moments after the ceremony ended. "These people we are taking here have knowledge, respect, wisdom," he added. "We live by today's society, but our history walks with us."

The remains, guessed to be at least 2,000 years old, have been at the museum for about 100 years but have almost certainly never been on display, said Steve Reichl, a museum spokesman. The museum has repatriated other remains to Canada at least once before, in 2002, according to Reichl, and remains have also been returned numerous times to American Indians.

Reichl said the museum worked to streamline the Tseycums' trip. "The end result was a successful visit," he said, "and a moving ceremony."

For the Tseycum people, Monday's events marked a singular culmination of years of painstaking, and painful, detective work.

The tribe's quest to reclaim their ancestors began seven years ago, when Chief Jacks's wife, Cora Jacks, found documents and papers relaying the life story of a 19th- and early 20th-century archaeologist, Harlan Ingersoll Smith. Jacks said she learned that Smith had robbed the graves of Tseycum ancestors, who were buried on Vancouver Island under giant boulders, and sold them to major American museums, and most likely others worldwide.

Mrs. Jacks grew nearly obsessed with tracking down the remains, Chief Jacks said, poring over books, researching government archives and spending late nights searching for clues online.

Smith's selling price, said Chief Jacks, was $5 a skull, $10 for a body.

"He dug our people up and sold them to museums on all four corners of the earth," said Chief Jacks, 63, who is hoping that the Canadian government will help defray the costs of the trip. "What happened to 'rest in peace'?"