BLAINE — Near the northernmost tip of Washington state, off a simple two-lane road cutting through industrious fields and down a nondescript dirt driveway, there is a labor of reverence and responsibility.

Over the birdcalls and the occasional train whistle, you can hear it before you see it. Shake, shake, shake, plink, plink, shake.

A group of Lummi tribal members stand on a high mound, meticulously sifting through buckets of fill dirt to find the bones of their ancestors — as they have for the past six years. This is a burial ground by circumstance, not intention.

The remains were disturbed seven years ago during excavation for a Blaine city wastewater-treatment plant at Semiahmoo Spit. Bizarrely, an archaeologist working for a city-hired contractor neglected to tell the city or the tribe the site was rife with human remains. He hauled some off to Denver in his pickup. Others inadvertently were hauled away in fill dirt — 400 truckloads worth — to this site.

For six years, five days a week, about a dozen workers have come here, about 10 miles from Semiahmoo Spit. Donning bandannas and marking their faces with deer marrow, they start at 6 a.m. and work through noon. The workers haul buckets of dirt from marked and monitored mounds. One at a time, they pour them into wooden boxes with screened bottoms. They shake them, rake through them with their trowels and gloved fingers, break up clods and pick out bits of human bone.

Shake, shake, shake, plink, plink, shake. Then it's quiet as the sifter, suspended from a tall, wooden tripod, is dumped and a new bucket is poured. Then the shaking starts again.

Standing at this place and watching the workers' painstaking and reverent care is to wonder at the great cultural disparity that bedevils human progress in the Northwest. When eyes from Western culture and eyes from cultures with roots stretching back thousands of years look at the land, they see different things. When they consider the presence of human remains, they feel different things.

Perhaps a modern parallel is the sense of sacredness the families of the people who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 feel about that place.

An October discovery of more than 200 overlooked bones in a utility hole on the 9/11 site's west edge opened old wounds with families demanding an expanded search be run by an independent group like the federal Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command. But in the 9/11 case, the grief is only five years old, the loved ones recent enough to be recorded in videos — not preserved through oral histories passed down over centuries.

The Lummis understand the 9/11 families' fears and sense of not being in control. As gestures of support, the Lummi Nation sent intricately carved healing poles to the 9/11 sites in New York in 2002, Pennsylvania in 2003 and the Pentagon in 2004.

Progress and the past can collide mightily, if care is not taken. In 2004, the state Department of Transportation walked away after spending $90 million on a dry-dock site at Port Angeles after some 335 skeletons were unearthed. A mediated agreement with money and land is helping the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe put things right. The state, local governments and tribal leaders are taking pains to avoid a repeat once the Alaskan Way Viaduct project is begun.

Here, the Lummis have physical evidence of their ancestors occupying and fishing off Semiahmoo Spit dating back at least 4,000 years. In 2004, the Lummi received a financial settlement from the contractor, Golder Associates, to settle a federal lawsuit. The rogue archaeologist was sanctioned by the Registry of Professional Archaeology.

Still, the tribe is trying to put back what was undone. The money is paying for the recovery and also will likely go toward a memorial and a park with interactive features to rebuild the cultural understanding and respect that was breached.

By 11:30 a.m. the day I visited, the workers had found more than 100 pieces of bone and a couple of artifacts — a projectile point and what supervisor Ralph Tom thought might be a cedar splitter. Examined and placed in boxes, the bones periodically are reburied at the original site, which is within sight of the luxuriously modern Semiahmoo Resort.

Shake, shake, shake, plink, shake.

Tom estimates his workers will be sifting for another four years, five days a week, six hours a day.

Kate Riley's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is kriley@seattletimes.com