Real Change News | A past that’s no longer buried

October 14, 2009
Vol: 16 No: 45

Feature

A past that’s no longer buried

by: Jane Sheridan , Contributing Writer

How an extraordinary discovery pitted a tiny Olympic Peninsula tribe against a multimillion dollar construction project

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The unearthing of an Indian graveyard on the Olympic Peninsula six years ago set in motion events that propelled a Native American tribe and state government through months of negotiation to a long-awaited reckoning.

Contractors building a dry dock on the Port Angeles waterfront were stopped in their tracks when they began uncovering long-buried artifacts and bone fragments in what quickly became a major archaeological site. They had inadvertently stumbled on the ancient village of Tse-whit-zen, one of the largest and oldest Indian villages ever found in the Pacific Northwest.

On this land, inhabited for many thousands of years by the Lower Elwha Klallam (meaning “strong people”) tribe, more than 10,000 artifacts and the remains of hundreds of long-buried ancestors would be found, some dating back to 700 B.C., 1,000 years before European exploration.

The complex events surrounding the discovery and eventual outcome are chronicled in Lynda V. Mapes’ new book, “Breaking Ground: The Lower Elwha Tribe and the Unearthing of Tse-whit-zen Village” (University of Washington Press, 2009). This painstakingly researched, sensitively told story — Mapes describes it as “a labor of love” — reads like a suspenseful mystery, weaving together Northwest history, state politics, development interests, and the responses of the tribe as it comes to terms with the tangible record of its heritage.

Mapes, who covers the tribal beat for the Seattle Times, based her book on a series of articles she wrote for the paper from 2004 - 2005. Personally invited by tribal members to document their story, she gained special access to their rich culture and spiritual heritage: legacies that lie at the very heart of this enthralling story.

Mapes will talk about “Breaking Ground” at the Seattle Bookfest on Sun., Oct. 25. For more information: http://www.seattlebookfest.com.

What first brought the story to your attention?

I remember getting an AP story that a photographer here at the paper put on my desk. It was one paragraph. Something about 15 skulls found in a pit, and he wrote on it, “Don’tcha think we oughta take a look at this?”

Why did you decide to write the book?

I didn’t start it (laughs). It wasn’t even my idea. I had spent a lot of time and effort writing a series for the paper which came out in the spring of 2005, and one day comes an email from the University of Washington Press. It was an invitation from the woman who ended up being my editor on the book.

You write about Port Angeles: The town and the tribe didn’t really intermingle at all. The cemetery and the village had been forgotten — even by tribal members.

Yes. And that was something that was very painful. Because that was really about their own trauma. They had been taught not to talk about their history, that they would be punished for it, sometimes even literally. Either because if they talked about it people would go and defile or rob the graves, or they would be punished about speaking about their culture in a place where it wasn’t welcome.

You came fairly late into the story. How did you hear about it?

I got a phone call from tribal members at Skokomish — I’d worked on other stories with them — who knew people at Elwha and had gone out there to visit and see just what was going on down at the graving dock, as it was also called. It had already been going on for 16 months by the time I showed up.

The State Department of Transportation had chosen the location to build a dry dock for towing very large components to the repair site for the Hood Canal Bridge. It was a major construction project, it was an archaeological site, it was a burial recovery zone. There were people everywhere, doing everything: from brushing soil off bones and graves to sorting absolutely museum quality artifacts.

Was the tribe contacted before construction began on the dock?

Yes, but in a perfunctory manner. The department hired its own archaeological consultant to take a look at the site. It was a very standard review. The consultant made a phone call out to the tribe, they didn’t get a call back, and that was the end of it. The tribe got their routine letter from the state, and they responded with a form letter of their own, several months later, after the site had already been selected. It said that they basically didn’t have any problems with it, they knew that their people had had presence in the area, but they didn’t say, “Don’t do it.”

Why did the construction stop so soon into the project?

In August 2003, within 10 days of starting construction, they found fragments of a human jaw bone. Actually, the very first discovery was of midden, which is this combination of shell and other organic material that can be a sign of human habitation. And very quickly they began finding all sorts of things. Very few human remains at this point, but tools and artifacts and other indicators of a potential site.

What were people’s reactions to these finds?

It was very painful. Everyone admits that the pre-construction survey was perfunctory, short. So a much larger survey was done. What they found was very obvious evidence that this site had been disturbed time and time and time again.
They found evidence of human remains in the backfill of trenches, with modern materials: coaxial cable, even a soda can. And the truth of the ground still was not discovered. It still did not become clear what they were really walking on.

Why do you think the tribe contacted you when they did?

I think it was sheer numbers [of gravesites]. For the tribe, first there were 80, then there were 100, then there were 200, then 250, then 300. Ultimately, my own involvement here wasn’t completely irrelevant. They got to a point where they felt like they needed to reach out to a wider world. And this story had been covered extensively by the Peninsula Daily News, which is the paper out there in Port Angeles, but for some odd reason the story just wasn’t getting out.

Did the discovery of human remains represent a turning point in the project?

No, it didn’t. No one really knew where it was all headed. You might think it was a turning point, in the sense that maybe people then had deep second thoughts. The state was warned from the very beginning by the tribe that it could happen — that they had to be open to the idea that maybe this whole thing could fall apart. But they didn’t ask to stop it.

What happened after the project was put on hold?

They began a very long time of negotiation — some of it unprecedented — to include the crafting of a mitigation agreement between the state and the tribe. This was new, and very controversial. The state made a payment to the tribe, basically for their trouble. And the tribe then set forth exactly how the work would go forward, and that too was very unusual. The state agreed to employ tribal members, more than 100 of them, to work right alongside archaeologists and contractors to move the bones and the belongings of their people out of the path of construction.

Then the construction started up again.

They had hope that things could finally be set right. But instead, within 10 days of reopening the site, they encountered the first intact, previously undisturbed burial. It was a [body] wrapped in a cedar mat. And it was a deep shock to everyone. No one — not the tribe, not the state, not the city of Port Angeles — had any idea what was ahead of them.

That’s when we wrote the story, and it came out the following Sunday, and by that time word had really gotten out in Indian country about what was going on out there. It’s interesting, tribes are very competitive about certain things: fishing, gambling, economic enterprises. They’ll compete with each other just as non-Indian business entities will compete. But boy, when it comes to culture, and especially when it comes to sacred matters like this, boy do they ever come together.

So at that point the tribe and the state were in another holding pattern.

Yes, and then the Centennial Accord occurred, an annual meeting with the governor, the entire cabinet of Washington State government, and tribes from around the state [in December 2004]. At that meeting tribes spoke out very clearly that they were not happy with the project continuing out at Port Angeles. That they were very uncomfortable at the number of human remains that had been disturbed. No one expected what happened next. They stood with tribal chairwoman Frances Charles from the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe and asked then-Governor Gary Locke to end the project.

It was very surprising. This is usually a very routine meeting where the talk is about health care and community oriented policing and that kind of thing. And the project was not stopped that day. But the tribes were very much heard, and
then, within two weeks, the state closed the whole site down permanently. They were $90 million into it and they shut it down.

You described the role played by federal and state politicians, as well as officials from the Department of Transportation, in that final decision to stop the digging.

I remember talking to then-Governor Gary Locke the day he pulled the plug, and it was interesting. He’s of Chinese American descent and had an appreciation for ancient history, and he himself had gone out to visit the site and said, “What would future generations say of us if we had continued on?” [He concluded] that the value to history of what was saved, by stopping the project, was worth far more than the money that had been spent.

I had the feeling from your book that this whole episode, this whole reclaiming of that burial ground, brought the tribe together and started a process wherein they began to embrace their history in a way that they had not done in quite a while.

A lot of good things came out of this. The state learned a whole new way of doing this kind of work — which is going to help everyone in the future. Tribes learned how present they have to be in their communities: to not only stand up for themselves but to stand up for the communities that they themselves are part of.

And very preciously, it has brought to the forefront the beauty, the complexity, the richness of this culture. There was suddenly a greater interest in learning the language, and curriculum has been created by the tribe for use not only in their afterschool programs, but also the public schools in Port Angeles. [In June 2009, using funding from the state, the tribe broke ground on a new cultural center on the Tse-whit-zen site.]

I was interested in your account of the late Bea Charles and of Adeline Smith, the Lower Klallam elders who had known about the cemetery.

They were important in the story because they had the knowledge passed on to them of the place called Tse-whit-zen, and the burial ground. Bea Charles had been told a story by one of her elders: One day the Elwha people would almost pass away, but then they would come back strong. And she felt that this was the time. They had always been called the strong people and this was their time to take a stand and just say not again. This place had been disturbed and disturbed, and it had happened over and over for more than 100 years. And she was the one who said those words that stopped the project: “Enough is enough!”

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Comments

I read this story with interest and compared and contrasted it with other articles, interviews, and information available on the subject. I have some observations to share with the reporter and others.

I was surprised to read the response to Ms. Sheridan’s question about the role played by federal and state politicians et al in the final decision to stop digging. It’s well known that the decision was made by Gov. Gregoire, not Gov. Locke.

But the response is also very revealing. The response states “...the value to history of what was saved by stopping the project was worth far more than money that had been spent.” Unfortunately, the real tragedy of this saga is that the archaeological collection, which is currently stored at some not inconsiderable expense at the Burke, goes unanalyzed. The value to history lies not only in leaving remains in situ at the site of Tse-whit-zen, but in analyzing the collection and telling the rest of the story.

To Real Change, keep up the good work.

Geoff Baillie | submitted on 10/22/2009, 2:41pm

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