Site teaching Klallam tribe `who we were, who we are' (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Posted on Wed, Jun. 01, 2005

Site teaching Klallam tribe `who we were, who we are'

BY LYNDA V. MAPES
The Seattle Times
http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/nation/11787221.htm

PORT ANGELES, Wash. - (KRT) - Phillip Charles never figured he'd find
himself making stone fish hooks and knives from deer bone.

But after six years of working a cash register, at first one mini-mart,
then another, then a gas station, Charles took a job at the
Tse-whit-zen archaeological site.

He spent six months digging his ancestors' bones and handmade tools from
the ground. The cedar burial boxes he unearthed amazed him.

"You could still see where they used a hand adze to get the perfect
flatness on them," he said. "You could still see the chip marks where
they worked on it."

Charles was one of more than 100 Lower Elwha Klallam tribal members who
worked at the site last year.

The small, rural tribe has no casino. Many Lower Elwha work for the
tribal government or fish. The only business on the reservation is a
tiny grocery and smoke shop. Unemployment is high. So the
archaeological dig proved the best employer the tribe ever had.

But these were no ordinary jobs.

For Charles and many other Klallams, the inadvertent discovery during a
state construction project of an archaeological site dating back at
least 2,700 years was both a blessing and a curse.

Parts of the village were destroyed, both in the construction project
and the archaeological excavation. Many tribal members dug their
ancestors' remains out of the ground by hand.

But the project also offered people like Charles a face-to-face
encounter with their history and helped spark a cultural rebirth of the
tribe.

The Lower Elwha are sharing what they learned at the site with other
tribes and the public in language classes, public-school curriculum and
community presentations.

For some tribal members, the learning is just beginning.

Working at the site got Charles, 27, thinking about how his ancestors
lived, how they fished and the tools they made. Actually holding bone
and stone tools his great-great-grandfather might have used inspired
Charles to try replicating them.

He quickly figured out how hard that was: Working a piece of obsidian
with the point of a deer antler, he wound up with bits of broken stone
instead of the arrowhead he was trying to produce.

But using the rough edge of a broken rock as sandpaper, as his ancestors
would have, Charles made stone fish hooks, and shaped a deer-leg bone
into a knife. Next, he made three barbed harpoon points.

Charles hasn't been able to bring himself to actually use any of the
tools. "It took me four days to make one fish hook. I don't want to
lose it."

As he worked at making the tools, he felt a connection with his
ancestors. "It feels pretty good, to kind of think the way your
ancestors did, 300 to 2,000 years ago, to actually get the ideas to do
some of these things."

Working at the site, some tribal members learned about their identity
and culture for the first time.

Teresa Sanders, with fair skin and blond hair, was raised off the
reservation.

"I never knew anything about my culture," said Sanders, 35. "People
would say I was the milkman's daughter. I hated that.

"But in the first week I was down there at the site, I knew my whole
life was going to change. This is our link, this is how we find out who
we were, and who we are."

Sanders dug burials from the site. Lying on the ground, she used a
paintbrush to carefully brush dirt from ancient bones that contained
her own DNA.

"There's a lot of time: It takes so long, you spend it thinking about
that person."

Afterward, she asked spiritual advisers to brush her off with cedar
boughs to protect her from spirits disturbed in their rest.

It helped - some.

"I started to get more and more angry as I learned about my people, all
the things that were not given to me and a lot of children because
their parents didn't talk about their culture either," Sanders said.

"I would get so overwhelmed, I'd walk off the site and just lose it. The
ancestors were expressing themselves through us all; I could feel it."

The site helped the Lower Elwha rediscover lost cultural practices.

A gap had developed in the tribe's cultural knowledge, said Frances
Charles, tribal chairwoman, because elders didn't pass on their
language and traditional practices. Beaten, punished and shunned for
clinging to their traditions in boarding schools and during the period
of forced assimilation, many Indian people stopped practicing their
culture.

Many tribal members had long been told by their relatives that, unlike
other Indians, the Lower Elwha Klallams didn't rely on traditional
medicines, use a longhouse for the winter dances or wear red paint for
spiritual protection.

Evidence at the site proved that they did.

"The ancestors themselves rose up and spoke," Frances Charles said.

The tribe is already putting its regained knowledge to work.

Many tribal members working at the site took up the traditional practice
of wearing red ochre on their hands and faces, and washing with a tea of
whiteberries for spiritual protection before leaving the site for the
day.

The Lower Elwha's language class has doubled in enrollment, with some 30
students gathered on a recent evening at the tribal center near Port
Angeles.

The classroom filled with the sounds of the Klallam language as Lower
Elwha, Port Gamble and Jamestown S'Klallam tribal members sat alongside
whites from the Port Angeles area, learning the Klallam words for
artifacts found at the village.

"Like two buckets of clams hissing," elder Adeline Smith, 87, said as
she and Bea Charles, 86, helped the class with Klallam pronunciation.

Language instructor Jamie Valadez created a unit based on the
discoveries at Tse-whit-zen for the curriculum she is writing for
eighth-grade history classes in the Port Angeles schools.

Called "Belongings of our Ancestors," the lesson plan explains how
archaeology is done and how life was lived by the tribe's ancestors:
how they cooked, what they ate, the tools they made, even the mechanics
of ancient salmon trolling.

Wendy Sampson, 25, who also works in the tribe's language program, was
handpicked years ago to carry on Bea Charles' and Adeline Smith's
knowledge.

Sampson was initially excited to leave the classroom for a time to work
at the site. But digging her ancestors out of the ground became
painful.

"At first we were saving them from being disturbed, getting them out of
the path of that bulldozer," Sampson said.

"Then it was, that's what we are doing: one more disturbance. It makes
me cry to think I'm the one down there picking the flesh off their
bones, breaking their bones one at a time and putting them in a box.
Why do we have to be doing this?"

Sampson recorded the Klallam words for bones, skull, ribs, rock, shell
and ancestor in a notebook as she worked. But there was no word for her
job at the site.

"We didn't have a word for digging people up. That just didn't happen."

Sampson said she was relieved, despite the loss of jobs, when the
state's project was shut down last December and the archaeological dig
brought to a halt.

The project was the best employer to come to this reservation community
in 20 years, said Serena Barkley, the Lower Elwha's financial officer.

Tribal members made at least $12 an hour working at the site - good pay
for the area, Barkley said. Her family lost $800 a month when the
project shut down, putting her husband out of a job. But Barkley said
she supported the closure out of respect for her ancestors.

But there are still hard feelings in Port Angeles over the shutdown.

The state Department of Transportation had planned to build a dry dock
at the site in order to build replacement pontoons and anchors for the
new east side of the Hood Canal Bridge. The state had already spent
about $60 million when it decided to walk away from the job at the
tribe's request because of the large number of graves disturbed.

The shutdown cost more than 200 jobs, including those of about 105
tribal members and about 76 construction workers.

Closing a job down because of Indian remains is a new thing in this
town, built atop ancestral Indian villages all along the waterfront.
Port Angeles Mayor Richard Headrick, the City Council and state
lawmakers from the area say they would still like to see the work
restarted.

"What Three Mile Island did for nuclear power, this has the potential to
do for any harbor-side renovation, development or redevelopment in Port
Angeles," said City Councilman Larry Williams.

"This is a precedent-setting event. If this doesn't get resolved
amicably, I think we might as well pack our bags, crawl back to
England, kiss the queen's feet and beg forgiveness."

But for many Lower Elwhas, the suggestion of restarting construction at
Tse-whit-zen ignores the sacredness, and significance of the site.

"It's that mentality: Why don't you be like everyone else now; why do
you live in your past?" Valadez said. "It's not the past. It's a living
culture."

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© 2005, The Seattle Times.