programs, and sponsored a large annual pow-wow every July. 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." In addition, UIATF has acquired other land in Seattle outside Daybreak Star, including a quarter-block downtown at Second and Cherry. In the same era when Daybreak Star was being constructed, Whitebear served on the Seattle Arts Commission. In 1995, he was appointed to the board of the National Museum of the American Indian, and was involved in the planning for the new museum that opened September 21, 2004 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Whitebear died of colon cancer, July 16, 2000. Personal life Whitebear married Jessica King. He had six children. Marilyn Sieber of the Nit Nat tribe was his "constant companion" for more than a decade in the 1970s and '80s, and the two were at one point engaged. He acted like a parent to "every Indian kid in Seattle", according to his brother. He gave away most money that came his way to those he considered needier, sometimes borrowing money from his siblings to do so. Legacy and honors In 1997 Washington governor Gary Locke declared Whitebear to be the state's first "Citizen of the Decade." After Whitebear's death he said Whitebear should have been designated as citizen "of the Century". Activist and author Vine Deloria, Jr. called him the most important Indian of the last century. In 2000 Whitebear's death was front-page news in the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The Times ran front-page stories on him for two successive days. The Bernie Whitebear Memorial Ethnobotanical Garden was established in his honor next to the Daybreak Star Cultural Center. Lawney Reyes memorialized Whitebear and his sister Luana in the public sculpture Dreamcatcher, at the corner of Yesler Way and 32nd Street in Seattle. The eleventh floor of King County's Chinook Building, completed in 2008 at Fifth and Jefferson, was named in his honor. Notes References Lawney L. Reyes, White Grizzly Bear's Legacy: Learning to be Indian, University of Washington Press, 2002. . Lawney L. Reyes, Bernie Whitebear: An Urban Indian's Quest for Justice, University of Arizona, 2006. . . Patrick McRoberts, Whitebear, Bernie (1937-2000), HistoryLink.org Essay 5170, February 4, 2003. Accessed 12 March 2007. Bernie Whitebear, "Self-Determination: Taking Back Fort Lawton. Meeting the Needs of Seattle's Native American Community