OLYMPIA — The Lower Elwha Klallam tribe failed to protect Tse-whit-zen from digging at the Hood Canal Bridge graving yard, the state said Monday, answering the tribe’s lawsuit to return remains and artifacts to the ancestral village site.
Nevertheless, resolution of the conflict will probably come from negotiations led by the Federal Highway Administration, state Transportation Director Douglas MacDonald said.
Filed Monday in Thurston County Superior Court, the state’s response to the lawsuit denies any intentional desecration of Native American graves or knowledge of removal of remains to the Fields Shotwell Recycling Facility west of Port Angeles.
Rather, the state alleges, the tribe breached its duties to follow provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966.
It is under that act that the highway administration — known as FHWA — likely will conduct negotiations before the end of this year, MacDonald said.
Although FHWA has set no schedule for the talks, “I don’t think that discussion is very far off,” MacDonald told the PDN.
The tribe called a halt to construction at the graving yard last December after excavators and archaeologists had uncovered more than 300 intact burials and thousands of skeletal fragments and artifacts in the preceding 1½ years of construction of a huge onshore dry dock for building components of a new floating bridge portion over Hood Canal.
Negotiations over what will happen to the 22.5-acre site on Marine Drive started almost immediately between the tribe and state Department of Transportation.
Yet despite optimistic comments from both sides on the talks’ progress over the summer, the tribe filed its lawsuit Aug. 12. It explained that the statute of limitations on the state’s Indian Graves and Records Act was about to expire.