Bernie Whitebear - Youth

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.