OLYMPIA — You could have cut the irony with a stone-bladed knife, but it might have snapped off at the hilt.
Lower Elwha Klallam cultural expert Arlene Wheeler and Tribal Chairwoman Frances Charles listened impassively last week while state Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald recounted the Hood Canal Bridge graving yard fiasco for the state Transportation Commission.
Work for the project had halted late in 2004 after excavators uncovered hundreds of burials and thousands of artifacts at Tse-whit-zen, the ancestral Klallam village that lay below the surface of the site on Port Angeles Harbor.
Although MacDonald invited her to speak, Charles declined to comment on the report — but said she had brought gifts for him and the transportation commissioners.
The presents: Colorful calendars in which pages depicted archaeological treasures from Tse-whit-zen, discovered and preserved while the Lower Elwha tried to stall the project that had blundered into a Native American cemetery.
Such juxtapositions are common in the story of the graving yard.
The most striking may be the transformation of a tribe that was little known to its non-Native neighbors into a political force that stopped a crucial highway project.
The others are legion.
TO WEB READERS: The details are discussed at length in the Sunday editions of the Peninsula Daily News, on sale at newsstands and other locations across the North Olympic Peninsula. Call 360-452-4507 for subscription information.
