Tribe sues state, demands reburial of its ancestors

In a class-action lawsuit, the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe has accused the state of Washington of knowing and willful desecration of Indian graves, and demanded reburial of its ancestors.

The suit, filed yesterday in Thurston County Superior Court, demands the state allow reburial of 316 cedar boxes containing the remains of ancestors dug up during a state Department of Transportation construction project in Port Angeles. The site was home to the largest Indian village ever found in Washington.

The tribe also wants the state to return some 2,000 truckloads of material taken by state contractors to a nearby landfill, and screen a portion of that for human remains, as promised in an agreement under which the construction project proceeded.

The tribe also asks the court to designate the construction site — which is owned by the state — a historic cemetery, to be used only as a burial ground in perpetuity.

The state launched its construction project on the Port Angeles waterfront in August 2003, intending to build a dry dock for construction of pontoons and anchors to repair the east half of the Hood Canal Bridge.

Within three weeks of breaking ground, state contractors uncovered the remains of the village of Tse-whit-zen, portions of which date back 2,700 years.

The state shut the job down in December 2004, at the tribe's request, after unearthing the 335th intact skeleton, thousands of bone fragments and more than 10,000 artifacts.

Negotiations have continued for the past seven months on reburial of the remains, which the tribe wants put back on the site as close to their original resting place as possible. But talks foundered on what to do about the material at the Shotwell landfill, about six miles from the site.

Agreement had been tentatively reached to rebury the boxes at the construction site, but the state insisted on a package deal, including resolution of the dispute over the material at the landfill.

"We feel our ancestors are being held hostage in the negotiations," tribal Chairwoman Frances Charles said. The tribe felt it had no choice but to file the suit, because the statute of limitations for claiming damages for destruction of the graves ends today. "We had to protect our legal rights," Charles said.

Charles said she hoped negotiations would continue. So did state Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald and the lead negotiator for the state, Tim Thompson, a private consultant.

MacDonald said he didn't think the two sides were that far apart, and that he was surprised by the lawsuit.

"No one is holding anyone hostage. We have supported reburial for months," MacDonald said. "The material at Shotwell is a very small part of all the soil that was excavated and examined at the site, and it mostly consists of fill. We have disagreed about whether there is archaeological material mixed in with that fill. We have never actually seen any evidence of human remains in that fill, and there surely were no intact remains moved to Shotwell. It is possible that there are fragments.

"We would like to see the material returned to the site, but it has been very hard to agree on how to do that."

About 20,000 cubic yards of material were trucked to the landfill. The tribe wants the 1,400 cubic yards estimated to contain some human remains screened, and the rest sampled to recover human remains if they are present.

The state was told by the tribe and archaeologists in fall 2003 that its contractors had trucked archaeological material to the landfill.

Arlene Wheeler, a plaintiff in the suit, said she brought stone tools to a meeting with state and federal officials and laid them out on a towel. "We had to prove our point, and the only way we could do it was to get this material and bring it to them and say, 'This is what is at Shotwell. Now do you believe us?' "

Wheeler and other tribal members went to the landfill after more than 2,000 truckloads of material were taken there during the early days of construction. She said she saw chunks of shell midden — bits of shell and other organic material that are a sign of early human habitation — and stone tools.

Archaeologist Lynn Larson, an investigator for the site, said the material at the landfill probably contains human remains. "We saw marks from the equipment in the shell midden adjacent to partial burials. That led us to think the rest of the burial that wasn't there had been removed," Larson said.

In her own visit to the landfill, Larson found stone tools and chunks of intact midden that had rolled down from the piles of material that had been dumped and then flattened by heavy equipment.

In fall 2003, another principal archaeologist on the Tse-whit-zen site estimated that more than 50 percent of the known archaeological site at the time was destroyed in the early days of construction.

Information that material might have provided about the early life of the Klallam people cannot be recovered. "We know there were some structures there," Larson said. "We are not going to know the natures of those structures, who lived in that house and what they did."

To the tribe, the material also has spiritual significance.

"How would anybody out there feel," Charles said, "knowing they had not only dug up their ancestors, but just trucked them off somewhere and dumped them? Knowing there are bits and pieces laying around that are not properly cared for?"

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com