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.)
“Americans have internalized the value that mothers of young children should be mothers first and foremost, and not paid workers. The result is that a substantial amount of confusion, ambivalence, guilt, and anxiety is experienced by working mothers. Our cultural expectations of mother and realities of female participation in the labor force are directly contradictory.”
—Ruth E. Zambrana, U.S. researcher, M. Hurst, and R.L. Hite. “The Working Mother in Contemporary Perspectives: A Review of Literature,” Pediatrics (December 1979)
“High from the summit of a craggy cliff,
Hung o’er the deep, such as amazing frowns
On utmost Kilda’s shore, whose lonely race
Resign the setting sun to Indian worlds,
The royal eagle draws his vigorous young”
—James Thomson (1700–1748)
“During the first formative centuries of its existence, Christianity was separated from and indeed antagonistic to the state, with which it only later became involved. From the lifetime of its founder, Islam was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience.”
—Bernard Lewis, U.S. Middle Eastern specialist. Islam and the West, ch. 8, Oxford University Press (1993)