OLYMPIA — The former Hood Canal Bridge graving yard in Port Angeles would be forever a burial ground if the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe succeeds in its suit against Washington state.
The tribe Friday sued the state to return ancestral remains and artifacts, rebury them at the ancestral Tse-whit-zen village, and declare the site to be a historical cemetery.
Declaring the site a cemetery would bar using it except for burial purposes, according to the lawsuit filed in Thurston County Superior Court.
The filing came just a week shy of two years since the first human remains were discovered on the Port Angeles waterfront, where the state had hoped to build replacement components for the crumbling east end of the bridge.
Statute spurs suit
Tribal Chairwoman Frances Charles said the suit’s timing was spurred by a statute of limitations that would have expired Saturday under the state’s Indian Graves and Records Act.
“We were running against the clock,” she said Saturday.
It took attorneys three days, she said, to draft the 23-page complaint.
The suit also came just days after the 2005 Tribal Canoe Journey — the Paddle to Elwha — in which thousands of members of Northwest Native tribes and Canadian First Nations paid homage to Tse-whit-zen and the ancestors buried there.
And it arrived in the midst of negotiations between the tribe and the Washington State Department of Transportation about the future of the 22.5-acres on Marine Drive just east of the Nippon Paper Industries USA mill.
“I’m disappointed about going into litigation,” Transportation Secretary Douglas MacDonald said Saturday, “because I thought that the discussions to agree on the reburial issue had been going well.”
MacDonald said, however, that the lawsuit might speed a progress report on the talks to people in Port Angeles.