Bernie Whitebear - Forging A Contemporary Indian Identity

Forging A Contemporary Indian Identity

After leaving the army in 1959 and returning to the Seattle-Tacoma area of Washington State, he took a job at Boeing and remained in the Army Reserve. He soon changed his name to "Bernie Whitebear" and renewed his friendship with Satiacum and others who were fighting for native fishing rights on the Puyallup River and elsewhere in Western Washington, a fight that they would eventually win when the 1974 Boldt Decision made the Washington's tribes co-managers of the state's fisheries.

The fishing rights struggle gave Whitebear a much stronger sense of conflicts between Indians and the white population than he had had growing up around Okanogan. During this period, the struggle over the rights to fish for salmon occasionally reached the level of physical violence. Satiacum was prominent among those who continually upped the ante, deliberately netting fish in places where he knew it would provoke anger from sports fishermen. According to his brother and biographer Lawney Reyes, Whitebear, Satiacum, and a few other of their friends "spent a lot of time together partying and drinking" and styled themselves as a "fraternal organization" called the "Skins", with three Tacoma taverns as their "lodges". "When the Skins gathered," Reyes wrote, "others gave them a wide berth." In Reyes's brother's view, through this period, Whitebear was "learning much about the problems of urban Indians" and developing an anger that he would soon put to constructive use. Through the early 1960s, he began searching for a way to change the dominant American culture's perception of Indians, and to support the recovery and retention of culture that was becoming lost as Indians were losing their specific tribal knowledge and traditions.

In the summer of 1961, along with his various family members, he was among those who successfully opposed a federal government proposal to "terminate" the Colville Reservation by paying US$60,000 to each tribal member to relinquish their rights as American Indians.