People and Names
HMS Discovery
The name Discovery Park was inaugurated in 1973 honoring the British sloop HMS Discovery, a vessel commanded by Captain George Vancouver. Vancouver is credited with the first European exploration of Puget Sound in 1792. Vancouver himself was a British explorer tasked with navigating the waters around the Puget Sound for British commerce endeavors. He is reported to have civil working relationships with the Indigenous peoples of the region and is credited with creating finely detailed nautical maps for the British Crown. What is often ignored is the ways in which this apparently ‘peaceful’ relationship with Indigenous communities along the West Coast was an invaluable tool for his cartography and all future extraction endeavors. There are many colonial cities (Vancouver, BC; Vancouver, WA) throughout the world named after Vancouver.
The original stewards of the region include the (federally unrecognized) Duwamish Tribe and other Coast Salish Peoples. The Burke Museum holds archaeological record of Indigenous use of the land base known as Discovery Park, primarily the area known as “West Point” but PKa'dz Eltue, for thousands of years pre-European contact. While these artifacts, or tools are one way to understand the geologic and anthropological history of the region, knowing the Indigenous history through contemporary Indigenous struggle is more accurate.
Bernie Whitebear
Inside this struggle for land bases and recognition a prominent local figure was Bernie Whitebear. Whitebear was born on and spent much of his formative years in the Coleville Reservation in Northeastern, WA. After attending the UW for one year and 2 years as a Green Beret paratrooper, Whitebear returned to the Seattle area and continued a life of activism. He would eventually help lead the charge in the takeover of Fort Lawton styled after the Alcatraz occupation of 1969. The action, claimed under the banner of the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation, led to a monumental reckoning of Indigenous power in the region and the creation of the Daybreak Star Cultural Center. Whitebear was an instrumental part of several points of Indigenous resistance to the loss of land, culture and access to life eventually landing him among the famed Seattle “Gang of Four”.