2013 U.S. Go Congress

Discovery Park is a 534 acre natural area park.It is the largest city park in Seattle, and occupies most of the former Fort Lawton site. Situated on Magnolia Bluff overlooking Puget Sound, Discovery Park offers spectacular view of both the Cascade and the Olympic Mountain ranges. The secluded site includes two miles of protected tidal beaches as well as open meadow lands, dramatic sea cliffs, forest groves, active sand dunes, thickets and streams.

The Daybreak Star Cultural Center is a Native American cultural center. Located on 20 acres (81,000 m²) in Seattle’s Discovery Park in the Magnolia neighborhood, the center owes its existence to Bernie Whitebear and other Native Americans, who staged a generally successful self-styled “invasion” and occupation of the land in 1970 after most of the Fort Lawton military base was declared surplus by the U.S. Department of Defense.

The existing building, an impressive piece of modern architecture incorporating many elements of traditional Northwest Native architecture, dates from 1977.

Daybreak Star, a major nucleus of Native American cultural activity in its region, functions as a conference center, a location for pow wows, the location for a Head Start school program, and an art gallery. The center’s permanent art collection includes a variety of large art works by and about Native Americans, notably “Blue Jay”, a 30 foot (9 m) wide, 12 foot (3.7 m) high sculpture by Bernie Whitebear’s brother Lawney Reyes, which came to the Center in 2004 after hanging prominently for over 30 years at the Bank of California building in downtown Seattle. Also included in that donation was a major oil painting by Guy Anderson based on a traditional Northwest Native representation of a whale.