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.
Read more about this topic: Bernie Whitebear
Famous quotes containing the words forging, contemporary, indian and/or identity:
“The anvil of justice is planted firm, and fate who makes the sword does the forging in advance.”
—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)
“That nameless and infinitely delicate aroma of inexpressible tenderness and attentiveness which, in every refined and honorable attachment, is contemporary with the courtship, and precedes the final banns and the rite; but which, like the bouquet of the costliest German wines, too often evaporates upon pouring love out to drink, in the disenchanting glasses of the matrimonial days and nights.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The principal thing children are taught by hearing these lullabies is respect. They are taught to respect certain things in life and certain people. By giving respect, they hope to gain self-respect and through self-respect, they gain the respect of others. Self-respect is one of the qualities my people stress and try to nurture, and one of the controls an Indian has as he grows up. Once you lose your self-respect, you just go down.”
—Henry Old Coyote (20th century)
“The adolescent does not develop her identity and individuality by moving outside her family. She is not triggered by some magic unconscious dynamic whereby she rejects her family in favour of her peers or of a larger society.... She continues to develop in relation to her parents. Her mother continues to have more influence over her than either her father or her friends.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)