SNOHOMISH – Archaeologists have discovered 96 locations believed to contain human remains at a pioneer cemetery site here, prompting the Tulalip Tribes to object to building a senior center on the site.
“We don’t know how many of them are Indian. That’ll have to be determined by DNA and the courts,” said Hank Gobin, the Tulalip’s cultural resources director.
The Tulalips want the remains left where they are.
The tribe, which believed all of those buried at the parcel already had been moved, says it may challenge the senior center plan in court, Gobin said.
“You’re doing all this for a senior center? You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Don’t you have a sense of history of the first people of this land?” he said.
The city completed inspections Thursday of what is buried at the eastern end of a 1.5-acre parcel where pioneers were interred until the early 1900s, and where the Snohomish Senior Center wants to build a 6,000-square-foot building.
The center, which has about 280 members, operated in a small house on the property until it recently moved to a church temporarily.
The remains amounted to much more than what the city had expected, said Brad Nelson, the city’s support services director. A majority of the bones were found beneath the senior center parking lot at a spot where ground-penetrating radar in the late 1990s couldn’t check, Nelson said.
The parcel is ideal for the new center, City Councilman Larry Countryman said Friday. It’s close to a bus stop, library, drugstore and park. Senior housing complexes could be built nearby, he said.
The only other proposed site for the center is city-owned property in the city’s western end along the Snohomish River, Countryman said. But the city wants economic development there, and the land is difficult for seniors to get to, he said.
The state should have relocated all the graves when it built a highway through the area in the 1940s, Countryman said.
“We all assumed it was all transferred,” he said.
The city plans to inform Snohomish County Superior Court on what it has found in the spring, and let an archaeologist identify the remains, Nelson said. It may cost more than the $160,000 earmarked for the project.
The city hopes to transfer American Indian remains to the Tulalip Tribes, remains identified with individual names to their families, and unclaimed ones to the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery just west of the city, Nelson said.
The remains will be treated with reverence, said Maureen Loomis, vice president of the senior center board. But seniors need a place to congregate and enjoy activities, she said.
“It’s a wonderful thing. It’s needed very much here,” she said of a new senior center.
The center has raised about $900,000 from grants, donations and fundraising events by seniors, and secured service and construction materials worth $100,000 for the new $1.2 million center, executive director Karen Charnell said. Seniors hope to move into the new building in late December 2006.
Reporter Yoshiaki Nohara: 425-339-3029 or ynohara@ heraldnet.com.
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