PORT ANGELES — Deep inside a Cold War-era building where bare lights shine on a stained concrete floor, a tomb stands empty.
Sturdily built wooden racks which once held more than 300 handmade cedar boxes are bare, the racks’ burdens buried Sept. 14 and Sept. 15 at Tse-whit-zen.
The boxes hold the intact and isolated remains of persons who once lived in the crook of Ediz Hook.
Meanwhile at that ancestral village and cemetery, members of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe plan to continue leveling the site of the former Hood Canal Bridge graving yard on Marine Drive in Port Angeles.
Then they’ll landscape it with grass and flowering native plants.
“We want it to look like a nice, kept-up cemetery,” Tribal Council member Russell Hepfer said.
Eventually, the Lower Elwha plan to build a cultural center and museum on land it leases at low cost from the state at 1507 Marine Drive.
Ultimately, they’d re-create Tse-whit-zen as it stood before it was razed for a sawmill early in the last century.
It is the biggest Native American village found in the state since the Ozette village, once inhabited by the Makah, was unearthed in the mid-1970s.
The tribe has no set schedule for the projects.
“It’s not ‘Indian time,'” Hepfer said.
“It’s when everything is ready.”
