Youth
Whitebear's mother, born Mary Christian, was Sin Aikst (now known as Lakes tribe, one of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation); his father, Julian Reyes, was Filipino, but had largely assimilated to an Indian way of life. Born in the Colville Indian Hospital in Nespelem, Washington, he was named "Bernard" after his great uncle (brother of his maternal grandmother), Chief James Bernard, a Sin Aikst leader in the early 20th century. Around 1970, as he became an activist, he changed his name to honor his mother's father, Alex Christian, known as Pic Ah Kelowna, "White Grizzly Bear".
His early childhood was a spent largely on the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington. His parents separated in 1939 and subsequently divorced; his mother would later re-marry to Harry Wong, with whom she and Julian Reyes had, in 1935–1937, run a Chinese restaurant during the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam. While his older brother Lawney Reyes and sister Luana Reyes attended the Chemawa Indian School in 1940–1942, he was too young to do so, and lived with foster grandparents, the Halls.
The rest of his childhood and youth was spent living with his father, variously on the Colville Reservation and in Okanogan, Washington, where he graduated from high school in 1955. Being from a musically inclined family, he took up the trumpet, eventually becoming the lead trumpet of the Okanogan High School band. He was popular in his otherwise all-white high school, although some of his classmates' parents didn't approve of them socializing with (or, especially, dating) an Indian.
After attending one year of school at the University of Washington, he spent a bit over a year living with his mother in Tacoma, Washington. There he first met, and fished with, Bob Satiacum. Drift netting for salmon in Tacoma's Commencement Bay and the rivers that fed into it, they were repeatedly harassed by white sport fishermen and by the Coast Guard. In September 1957 he enlisted in the United States Army, where he served first in the 101st Airborne Division as a Green Beret paratrooper.
Read more about this topic: Bernie Whitebear
Famous quotes containing the word youth:
“The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
““You are old, Father William,” the young man cried,
“And life must be hastening away;
You are cheerful, and love to converse upon death:
Now tell me the reason, I pray.”
“I am cheerful, young man,” Father William replied;
“Let the cause thy attention engage;
In the days of my youth I remembered my God,
And He hath not forgotten my age.””
—Robert Southey (1774–1843)
“I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)