Reconciliation is simple, really, says Nontombi-Naomi Tutu: You just listen to the other person, then you speak your piece.
It’s so simple that people have spent the course of human history trying to get it right.
Tutu, 45, daughter of Nobel laureate Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu, will try to teach the knack of reconciliation in her presentation at 7:30 p.m. Saturday in the Port Angeles High School Auditorium, 304 E. Park Ave.
Her topic: “Tse-whit-zen, the Graving Yard and Searching for Common Ground.”
Tse-whit-zen is the ancestral Native American village that contractors and archaeologists uncovered at the former site of the Hood Canal Bridge graving yard on the Port Angeles waterfront.
Starting in August 2003, workers unearthed 335 intact burials, thousands of isolated bones, and more than 13,000 artifacts by December 2004.
That’s when the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe urged the state Department of Transportation to close the project.
The state acceded, sparking a controversy about the $58.8 million that had been spent on the project and the 100 jobs that were lost when it ended.
Since then, some city, civic and labor leaders and legislators have been critical the tribe, but the Lower Elwha have maintained that they will not negotiate their ancestors.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands more burials remain on the 22.5-acre site.
‘Another option’
Tutu says reconciliation is possible.
“I’m not attempting to solve it,” she said this week from Nashville, Tenn., where she helps direct the newly formed Office of International Programs at Tennessee State University.
“I’m coming to give people another option, rather than closing yourself off in one corner,” she told the Peninsula Daily News.
“The option is to listen to the story of the people whom you consider on the other side, and allow them to hear your story and your concerns.”
Tutu has labored in far rockier soil than Port Angeles — post-apartheid South Africa.
“The world thought we were going to end up with a bloodbath and cycle of violence,” she said of the period following the end of white supremacy.
“We found another way. It wasn’t a perfect way; but it was a way that had not been tired anywhere else, a way of healing and building a society.
“I always say if we can do it in South Africa, you can do it anywhere in the world if the will is there.”
NONTOMBI-NAOMI TUTU now spends much of her time speaking across the United States, organizing workshops and leading retreats.
She will attend a $50 per person welcome dinner Friday in Port Angeles.
On Saturday, she will visit Tse-whit-zen, meet with tribal officials, and speak that evening in the Port Angeles High School Auditorium, 304 E. Park Ave.
Tickets for the 7:30 p.m. talk cost $8, $10 and $12, depending on seating location. They are available at Port Book and News bookstore, 104 E. First St., Port Angeles; Pacific Mist Books, 121 W. Washington St., Sequim; and the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribal Center, 2851 Lower Elwha Road, Port Angeles.
Further information is available by calling 360-457-9290 or e-mailing artsnw@olympus.net.
