For some years, we negotiated with the National Museum of Man to have the masks returned to us. Finally, in the early 70s, the museum agreed to return its portion of the collection on the condition that we build a museum in which to house them. "We have not had such a thing among our people. It is like a storage box, like a box of treasures the old people used to have." The objects in the Potlatch Collection have been arranged in this big house space, more or less in the order that they would have appear in a potlatch, and they're not in cases. The feeling some of us had when the pieces were returned, was that they had been locked up so long in a strange place, that it seemed wrong to lock them up again. The Center was to be far more than a museum. It was in fact a box of treasures, and a focus for all our efforts to strengthen the culture, language and history that were almost lost. We named it the U'mista Cultural Center.