11Within days, the first of many human remains were discovered.
The tragic controversy that followed is chronicled with historical perspective in a new book, Breaking Ground: The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and the Unearthing of Tse-whit-zen Village.
It waswritten by a Seattle Times reporter, Lynda Mapes.
She spent more than a year interviewing tribal members, archaeologists, historians, city and state officials, local residents and business leaders.
More than 330 intact burials were ultimately unearthed at Tse-whit-zen, along with more than 13,000 artifacts.
“Excitement at the archaeological find of a generation gave way to anguish as tribal members working alongside state construction workers encountered more and more human remains, including many intact burials,” says a press release promoting Breaking Ground.
“Finally, tribal members said the words that stopped the state project: ‘Enough is enough.’
“Soon after, Lower Elwha Klallam tribe chairwoman Frances Charles asked the state to walk away from more than $70 million in public money already spent on the project and find a new site.
“The state, in an unprecedented and controversial decision that reverberated around the nation, agreed.”
Reactions vary
Mapes’ book begins with the history of Tse-whit-zen village — 2,700 years old — and “the 19th- and 20th-century impacts of contact, forced assimilation, and industrialization,” the press release notes.
“She then engages all the voices involved in the dry dock controversy to explore how the site was chosen, and how the decisions were made first to proceed and then to abandon the project, as well as the aftermath and implications of those controversial choices.”
Reactions to the book varies among those quoted on its pages, according to several Peninsula Daily News interviews.
Their comments range from praise for Mapes’ expansive examination of the issue to anger at her depiction to a reluctance to pick at the scab of a painful chapter in North Olympic Peninsula history.
Mapes, who covered the Tse-whit-zen story for the Times, concludes what the Peninsula Daily News also repeatedly reported — that the city, state Department of Transportation and tribal officials either ignored or failed to track down abundant evidence — including maps, an archaeological survey and oral accounts — of a once-thriving Klallam village on the shoreline of what today is Port Angeles Harbor.
More than 30 feet of industrial fill covered portions of the village.
The 22-acre parcel had been an industrial site for more than 150 years when state Transportation officials bought it from the Port of Port Angeles in 2003 to make it into a “graving yard” — a massive onshore dry dock — for use in the rebuilding of the Hood Canal Bridge.
Mapes also tells a story of two disparate Port Angeles communities – Native American and non-Native American — whom she describes as living in close proximity yet rarely interact.
She asserts that the discovery of Tse-whit-zen and the fractious aftermath were inevitable, given the lack of communication and the high level of Native American development along the harbor shoreline preceding the city’s birth in the mid-1800s.
“Unreconciled history is at the root of this,” Mapes said in an interview with the PDN.
“We have two communities who don’t know each other’s history. That’s what made this story so interesting to me.
“Everyone had a role in this.
“It was about where we are in the Northwest, very young and still working out unreconciled history.”
The discovery of Tse-whit-zen yielded potentially the richest archaeological find – more than 13,000 artifacts and 335 complete burial remains — in the United States, save perhaps the Cahokia Mounds Historic Site in Illinois, according to Lower Elwha tribal archaeologist Bill White.
$100 million
But the village’s discovery also cost taxpayers more than $100 million when the Hood Canal Bridge work had to be moved to Tacoma and Seattle.
The graving yard had an original price tag of $17 million.
It was expected to generate more than 100 family-wage jobs as part of a project to build anchors and pontoons for the replacement of the eastern half of the Hood Canal Bridge, and, it was anticipated, for future bridge projects.
Mapes, 50, whose book was published by the University of Washington Press in May, never calls the project a graving yard, referring to it instead as a dry dock.
Graving is the process of treating the submerged portion of a ship’s hull to prevent decay, and “graving yard” (also “graving dock”) was the term used by the state Department of Transportation, the agency responsible for the project, long before Tse-whit-zen was uncovered.
“The term was very distracting in the context of the story,” Mapes said.
As part of a settlement with Transportation to shut down the project, the city of Port Angeles received $7.5 million for economic development, $500,000 to recruit and retain businesses and $480,000 to hire an archaeologist who now monitors shoreline projects.
The Port of Port Angeles, which sold the property to Transportation for $2.9 million, also received $7.5 million, and a shoreline slice of the site to link port properties on both sides of it.
The Lower Elwha received the central 11 acres of the site, a low-cost lease from Transportation on 6 acres where a museum will be built, plus $2.5 million to help build it.
So far, the museum, which may be built around 2012, lacks a design, and the tribe needs more funding to begin construction.
‘The big deal’
On Aug. 6, 2003, more than 100 people, including state Sen. Jim Hargrove, D-Hoquiam, and then state Rep. Jim Buck, R-Joyce, attended a groundbreaking ceremony, dubbed “The First Shovelful,” for the graving yard.
On Aug. 11, 2003, an ancient shell midden, or waste pile, was uncovered.
More signs of a village were unearthed Aug. 16, 2003, and human remains were found four days later on Aug. 20.
The project shut down Aug. 26, restarted in April 2004, and was shut down for good Dec. 21, 2004, by then-Gov. Gary Locke.
“It was like a lot of the people did not understand what the big deal was at that point in time,” said tribal Chairwoman Frances Charles in an interview with the PDN. She the forward to Mapes’ book.
“We’ve come a long way in that aspect.
“Now they have a better understanding in the educational process, and we are continuing with educating our children now and the surrounding community,” said Charles, who said Mapes “did all right” on the book, but that tribal members who have read it have varied opinions on it.
Mapes’ research on the book included extensive use of Peninsula Daily News articles, which combined with letters to the editor total about 1,000 entries in the newspaper’s archives under the moniker “graving yard.”
She interviewed the PDN’s publisher and editor, John Brewer, for Breaking Ground and refers to the newspaper in her book five times, each time incorrectly calling the Peninsula Daily News the “Port Angeles Daily News.”
“I’m mortified that I got the name of the newspaper wrong,” Mapes said.
Brewer said her book “was a very detailed evaluation of the whole picture” that made up the controversy.
“She spent a lot of time with the Klallam history, and that’s what impressed me the most.”
Transportation response
Doug MacDonald, secretary of the state Department of Transportation at the time, later married Mapes.
He called the book “a very good diary of the project” and a deep history of Port Angeles.
But agency Project Engineer Jerry Moore, Transportation’s site manager for the graving yard project, took umbrage at Mapes’ account of an argument he had with Charles when bones were first discovered.
The argument “instantly became legend on the reservation,” Mapes writes.
Charles is quoted as saying Moore’s attitude was, “So what? Just move it.”
“I was not disrespectful,” Moore said in an interview with the PDN.
“The graving dock is buried, it’s dead, it’s gone. I busted my ass for the tribe, and all I got was stabbed in the back.”
Mapes recalls the heightened tensions that preceded the tribe’s refusal to continue to allow construction, and then-Rep. Buck’s offer to give the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe 300 acres of state land in return for continuing construction.
The tribe called it “a poor attempt at bribery,” Mapes writes.
Buck favored removing the remains at Tse-whit-zen and re-interring them elsewhere, as he would his own buried forbears if necessary, he said.
“We had legislative remedies to make them whole and the community whole. We basically got slapped down as racist.”
Unanswered question
Mapes said questions surrounding what officials knew, or should have known, about what lay beneath the Marine Drive property remains an important but unanswered question.
She notes that Klallams’ waterfront ancestral villages had been documented in the general area of the project by scholars, historians and journalists since the 19th century.
The Lower Elwha tribe had for generations passed along knowledge of a settlement at Tse-whit-zen, but tribal elders were never fully consulted, not even by the Lower Elwha tribal officials.
Mapes writes that state Transportation officials commissioned only a limited archaeological review — and never questioned the finding that nothing significant was there.
It turned out to be one of the department’s costliest mistakes ever.
In her book, Mapes also quotes Andrew May, the PDN’s gardening columnist and then president of the Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce, as referring to “the stupidity of local leaders in finding a solution.”
May said that relations between the city and tribe have “absolutely” improved.
Almost immediately upon his arrival in Port Angeles, new Harbor-Works Executive Director Jeff Lincoln met with tribal officials to discuss the Rayonier mill site, which is about two miles from the site of Tse-whit-zen.
Another large Klallam village existed where the Rayonier mill operated until it was closed in 1997, and Harbor-Works is a public development authority that wants to buy the property and have a say in what is developed there.
“He really made it clear that, as an official in that capacity, we will be working with them and that they are a vital partner in this,” May said.
For now, the tribe is focused on sifting through dirt excavated for the graving yard project before spreading it back on the property.
More artifacts, along with bone fragments, have been found.
Charles told the PDN there is still a long way to go in improving relations between the Native American and non-Native American communities.
Mapes agreed.
“Change is very slow and very hard,” she told the PDN.
“At the end of the day, this is about relations.
“It’s a function of human relations, where people are in touch and communicate comfortably.”
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Staff writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
