My great-great-grandmother, Lillie Green, was a full-blooded Choctaw. Her legacy is something I carry with pride, a connection to this land that predates the bureaucracy that now controls all of us. But today, in Washington State, that heritage feels less like a shared history and more like a bureaucratic weapon wielded by a select few. We are witnessing a troubling shift where the preservation of history has morphed into a financial shakedown, and Washington’s State Environmental Policy Act, or SEPA, has become the hammer used to enforce it.
The intent behind protecting cultural resources is a good one. We should respect the past and try to preserve important artifacts. However, the current application of these laws in Washington has created a two-tiered system of justice that discriminates against private property owners who do not hold an official tribal card. This is most visible in the weaponization of the “archaeological survey,” a mandatory hurdle that is rapidly expanding from major state infrastructure projects to private residential developments.
At the heart of this issue is how the state defines risk. The Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, known as DAHP, maintains a massive database and a predictive model that categorizes land based on the probability of containing artifacts. If your private property falls into a “high-risk” zone—which covers vast swathes of the state, particularly near water or on flat land ideal for building—local planning departments are pressured to condition your building permits on a professional archaeological survey.
This is where the process begins to feel less like preservation and more like a tollbooth. These surveys are not free state services. The financial burden falls entirely on the property owner. You are effectively guilty until you pay to prove you are innocent. A typical cultural resource survey for a single-family lot can easily run between $3,000 and $10,000, while larger commercial projects face bills climbing into the tens of thousands. This fee goes to private cultural resource management firms or sometimes directly to tribal consultants. The tribes are thus highly incentivized to force these archaeological surveys in every possible case and then give property owners a “preferred” list of their consultants to be paid.
The power dynamic is heavily skewed. Under Executive Order 21-02 and various local interpretations of SEPA, state agencies and local governments defer almost automatically to tribal demands. If a tribe asserts that a survey is necessary, the permit is stalled until the check is written. For the average homeowner trying to build an addition or a family trying to break ground on a new home, this is a devastating surprise expense. It creates a reality where the “right” to build on your own land is contingent on paying what many see as a gatekeeping fee to entities that face little to no oversight on these specific requests.
Furthermore, the penalties for non-compliance are severe, designed to instill the fear that state employees reportedly feel. Disturbing an archaeological site without a permit can result in a civil penalty of $5,000 plus the cost of site restoration, which can be astronomical. This legal framework silences opposition. Builders and planners know that challenging a tribe’s request for a survey is a losing battle that will only result in indefinite delays and skyrocketing costs.
We must ask ourselves if this is truly about artifacts or if it is about stealing from the public to enrich friends of the tribe. When a system mandates that a private citizen pays thousands of dollars to a specific group of consultants to certify that their backyard does not contain an arrow tip, and when that requirement is enforced with the full weight of the state government, it crosses the line from preservation to exploitation. My grandmother’s heritage was about a connection to the earth, not a lien on it. True respect for history should not come at the cost of discriminatory practices that hold the present hostage.