Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,904

This is the grave of Luana Reyes.

Born in Portland, Oregon in 1933, Reyes was half-Filipino, half-Sinixt, but she grew up much more with her Native identity than her Asian one, as her father basically lived as her mother wanted. Mostly, she grew up on the Colville Reservation in northeastern Washington, a large piece of land where a lot of tribes were thrown after the genocidal conquest in the late 19th century, most famously the Nez Perce. The Sinixt were another of those tribes and I think her mother had grown up there. They moved back in 1935 in order to run a Chinese restaurant for workers building the Grand Coulee Dam, which borders the reservation. They had a Chinese partner. Her mother later her left her husband and married the Chinese guy. The family was very, very poor, often with electricity and food itself was sometimes in question.

Like many Native people in these years, Reyes went to an Indian school, the Chemawa School outside of Salem, Oregon. She then went to high school back in Okanogan, Washington. After her graduation in 1951, she went to work in Tacoma, where her mother was living. She spent the next twenty years there working any number of jobs. She worked in some sort of financial office in San Francisco for some years in the 50s and then moved to Seattle in 1962.

Now, Reyes had a younger half-brother named Bernie Whitebear. He was a big time Native activist and one of the things he had done was run the Seattle Indian Health Board. When he left in the early 70s, Reyes took over and she really professionalized it. Some of this was as a result of what Whitebear had done in terms of Native activism, in conjunction with so many other people fighting for Native recognition and the government funding they deserved. So the money was coming in, yes, but it would have stopped had Reyes not been such an outstanding administrator who was able to vastly expand its services and manage all the grants and the growing staff that they funded. In the ten years that she ran it, from 1972-82, the staff grew from 5 to 190 and became a model for other Native health institutions around the country.

Whitebear is definitely the most famous person in the family, largely because he was central to the Fort Lawton occupation in Seattle, but he and his sister really did work together as pioneers in indigenous rights and nationalism that would make serious demands on the state for the necessary funding to fix some of the problems in their community, not through begging, but through demanding, protesting, and fighting. This was the era of federal investment in Black communities as the 1960s protests of civil rights turned into their 1970s institutionalization. Even the Nixon administration had to listen to local communities. And then you had the endless legal documentation of all the broken treaties and, increasingly, courts to back them up. So the timing was right for someone like Reyes to take advantage of all this and make real change in Native America. Plus there was funding for this kind of thing now designated from Congress by Title V of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, one of the parts of that law that receives less attention.

Reyes had bigger ambitions too. She wanted to transform Native health around the country. She founded the American Indian Health Care Association, which exists today as the National Council on Urban Indian Health. Not surprisingly, much of her work was on indigenous peoples in the cities, where Termination and the government resettlement programs under the genocidal Eisenhower administration had forced thousands off their land and into the cities, where they struggled with poverty, alcoholism, homelessness, and many other problems. The Puyallup nation hired Reyes to run their health program and then she left for Washington, D.C. to become director of headquarters operations at the national offices of the Indian Health Service, rising over time to become deputy director of the entire thing. Also, she was deeply committed to training and then employing Native people to run their own health programs. In 1974, for example, she testified about her work before Congress and noted that 75% of the workers at the Seattle clinic were Native. That was super important in a world where medicine was also used as another tool of white genocide. People need to be able to trust their doctors and in this case it helps a lot if they are also indigenous.

I’m not entirely sure if this link will work for folks, but on Google Books you can read her 1974 testimony, which is pretty interesting. In fact, quite a bit of the material on her that you can find online is various testimonies available on that site.

Reyes died in 2001. She was 68 years old. It was aplastic anemia that got her.

Luana Reyes is buried in Pia Mission Cemetery, Stevens County, Washington.

There is today a Luana Reyes Leadership Award at the Indian Health Service.

If you would like this series to visit other Native activists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Richard Oakes is in Stewarts Point, California and Dennis Banks is in Federal Dam, Minnesota. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.