[4][5] Around 1970, as Reyes became an activist, he changed his name to honor his mother's father, Alex Christian, known as Pic Ah Kelowna (White Grizzly Bear).

His parents separated in 1939 and subsequently divorced;[7] his mother would later marry Harry Wong, with whom she and Bernie's father had run a Chinese restaurant in 1935–1937, during the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam.

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 the Coast Guard.

[16] 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.

[17] Through the fishing rights struggle, Whitebear developed a deeper sense of historic conflicts between Indians and the white population than he had attained growing up around Okanogan.

[18] 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.

[19] 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".

[29] At this time, Seattle's estimated 25,000 urban Indians had "no health services, no organization, no money and no meeting place except an old church on Boren Avenue".

[30] Alaskan Native Bob Lupson had helped to organize a free clinic for Indian People at Seattle's Public Health Hospital (later the Pacific Medical Center); other key figures in the clinic were Lyle Griffith, an Oglala Sioux who was then a medical resident at the University of Washington, and his wife Donna Griffith, and later New Yorkers Peter and Hinda Schnurman, Jill Marsden from England, and pharmacist Eveline Takahashi.

[34][35] Shortly after this, Whitebear became deeply involved in a movement for Seattle Indians to acquire a share of the land to be declared surplus at Fort Lawton, as the government downsized this army post.

[38] It was peaceably agreed that those who wished to take more extreme action would not use the name "Kinatechitapi",[37] but the resulting tensions led to Warren losing the next election for the Service League presidency to Joyce Reyes.

Meanwhile, ongoing protests around nearby Fort Lewis, including by American Indian soldiers, were tying native rights to opposition to the Vietnam War.

American Indians were attacking active military forts along with one of the nation's leading opponents of United States involvement in the Vietnam War."

Negotiations, confrontation and even a Congressional intervention combined in November 1971 to give them a 99-year lease on 20 acres (81,000 m2) in what would become Seattle's Discovery Park, with options for renewal without renegotiation.

[34] At UIATF, he successfully oversaw fundraising (including a million dollar grant from the state) and construction for what would become the Daybreak Star Cultural Center.

[45][46] Reyes later became a curator of art and author, writing a personal memoir and a biography of his brother (Bernie Whitebear: An Urban Indian's Quest for Justice, 2006).

[47][48][49] He continued to build the UIATF as an institution, with programs ranging from the La-ba-te-yah youth home in the Crown Hill neighborhood to the Sacred Circle Art Gallery at Daybreak Star.

It supports a "social-service agency with more than 100 staffers, an annual budget of $4 million, and eight federally funded programs serving Indians - infants to elderly.