Lawney Reyes

Lawney L. Reyes (1931 – August 10, 2022) was an American Sin-Aikst artist, curator, and memoirist, based in Seattle, Washington.

The rest of his childhood and youth was spent living with his father, variously on the Colville Reservation and in Okanogan, Washington.

After graduating from Okanogan High School in 1949,[10] Reyes moved to Tacoma, Washington, where he lived again with his mother and her second husband.

Reyes served in the U.S. Army which gave him the opportunity to see much of Europe which confirmed his interest in working in a field related to "architecture design, and art".

[18] Among other things, it describes traditional tribal fishing at Kettle Falls on the Columbia River and living in Inchelium, Washington at its old site.

[20][21] Reyes' third book, B Street: A Gathering of Saints and Sinners (2008), is an exploration of the Grand Coulee area between 1933 and 1941, during the construction of the Dam.

He helped design the Daybreak Star Cultural Center at Fort Lawton in the Magnolia section of Seattle.

[2][23][24] His Dreamcatcher, installed at the corner of 32nd Avenue and Yesler Way in Seattle, honors the memory of his brother Bernie and his sister Luana.

Detail from Reyes' 1972 sculpture Blue Jay. The eye of the blue jay, depicted here — a roughly 0.25 meter detail in this 9.15 meter-wide sculpture — is a depiction of a bear holding a white man, in tribute to Reyes' activist brother, Bernie Whitebear . The sculpture is modeled on Coast Salish tradition, although Reyes and Whitebear were (inland) Sin-Aikst . [ 2 ]
Reyes' Dreamcatcher sculpture, installed at 32nd Avenue and Yesler Way in Seattle, is a public memorial to his brother Bernie Whitebear and sister Luana Reyes . The sculpture also relates to cultural diffusion among Native American tribes/nations. As noted on the plaque, dreamcatchers are originally an Ojibwa cultural artifact, but have now been adopted by Native Americans throughout the United States and Canada.