PORT ANGELES — With oil tankers on the horizon behind them, airplanes crisscrossing the sky overhead, steel pilings of the former Hood Canal Bridge graving yard towering nearby, hundreds of Northwest Natives gathered Tuesday to pray with ancestors at least 2,700 years old.
Twenty-eight cedar canoes and an Aleut baidarka floated side by side just off the shore of Tse-whit-zen, the ancestral Klallam village where archeologists unearthed hundreds of burials and thousands of artifacts of people whom non-Native Port Angeles had nearly forgotten.
One member of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe asked the spirits of Tse-whit-zen to “allow us to walk on your land. We are your descendants. We are not strangers.”
Lower Elwha member Carmen Charles circulated through the crowd of about 300 people, rubbing ceremonial red ochre beneath their eyes to ward off injuries and illnesses, the consequences of disturbing the ancestors.
Yet the thousands of visitors to the Lower Elwha reservation had come not in fear of, but in homage to, those spirits.
Tuesday’s ceremony, in a sense, was the soul of the canoe journey.
