Lummi Nation sues Whidbey Telecom over Point Roberts burial site damage

A federal lawsuit has put Whidbey Telecom at the center of an accusation that crews disturbed Lummi Nation burial grounds at Point Roberts and then kept digging anyway. The tribe says the land has carried cultural meaning for more than 5,000 years, and that repeated trenching turned a sensitive site into a chain of preventable harm.

The 52-page complaint, filed April 27 in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, names Whidbey Telephone Company doing business as Whidbey Telecom, Whatcom County, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Commerce. It alleges a “cascading series of preventable and unlawful failures” that led to the disturbance, exposure, degradation, loss and continued mishandling of ancestral human remains and associated cultural materials.

According to the filing, crews trenched through burial grounds repeatedly, failed to stop work after encountering archaeological materials and extensive human remains, and left exposed remains vulnerable to weather. Reporting on the case described trenches that were roughly 1,000 to 2,000 feet long. The lawsuit says those problems were not isolated mistakes, but repeated choices across projects that ran from 2020 through 2025, with some work beginning in 2023 and 2024.

The dispute reaches beyond one construction zone because the fiber work at issue was publicly promoted as a major broadband expansion. In June 2023, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration awarded Whidbey Telephone Company an $11,782,208.20 grant for the Point Roberts Middle Mile Infrastructure Project. The federal project description says the build includes 47.6 miles of new terrestrial underground fiber and 63.1 miles of undersea fiber, and was expected to benefit Point Roberts, Lummi Nation communities and Naval Air Station Whidbey Island.

Whatcom County Public Utility District No. 1 also separately received a $3.15 million grant for Point Roberts fiber buildout, a project described as serving 1,274 Point Roberts residents with about 25 miles of fiber by the end of 2024. The new lawsuit is likely to sharpen scrutiny of how utilities, counties and federal agencies handle excavation on culturally sensitive land, especially when public money is involved. It puts a hard question in front of infrastructure planners: whether stop-work rules, tribal consultation and archaeological monitoring are strong enough before trenching begins, or only after damage has already been done.

For Island County readers, the case lands close to home because Whidbey Telecom is a familiar local company with deep ties to Whidbey Island. The outcome could influence how future broadband and utility projects are planned across the region, particularly where construction crosses land with long Indigenous history and active cultural significance.