Social activists who mobilized to safeguard a 17-century-old Klallam burial site in Port Angeles will form a political action committee on the North Olympic Peninsula.
Keith Hunter of Neah Bay, who earlier launched the Chi-whi-tsen Village Protection Campaign, said Sunday the PAC will channel energies that arose against building a graving yard on the Port Angeles waterfront.
Those energies can be a sort of “frontlash” for social, environmental, and economic justice that includes tribal members and non-members, he said.
The state Transportation Department had hoped to excavate the site to build and float giant concrete anchors, pontoons and road decks to replace the east end of the Hood Canal Bridge.
Construction was interrupted when it encountered ancestral Klallam burials in the ancient village of Tse-whit-zen, which Hunter spells Chi-whi-tsen.
The Port Angeles project was canceled last month by state Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald and Gov. Gary Locke at the urging of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe.
