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Ishi - The Last Yahi Indian
Winter Steel ^ | FR Post 7-24-02 | Editorial Staff

Posted on 07/26/2002 5:10:10 PM PDT by vannrox

Ishi

 The Last Yahi

 

In August 1911, Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi Indian tribe, walked out of the foothills near Mount Lassen... leaving behind his Stone Age world... and entered twentieth-century California society. From 1911 - 1916, Ishi resided at the Anthropology Museum of the University of California Affiliated Colleges on Parnassus Heights in San Francisco (now the site of the University of California, San Francisco), sharing knowledge about his culture and beliefs with Anthropologists Alfred L. Kroeber and Theodore T. Waterman, as well as Surgeon Saxton T. Pope. Graciously collaborating with the anthropologists, Ishi provided insight about his language, a dialect presumed lost until his emergence from the Mill Creek region of California. Free to return to his homelands, Ishi chose to remain at the museum as a living interpreter of his culture. Exposed to a society hosting diseases foreign to the Yahi, Ishi contracted tuberculosis and died on March 25, 1916 at the medical college on Parnassus. Ishi left behind a legacy of invaluable information about his people, and provided a shining example of a courageous human spirit bridging the divide between two worlds.

However, this was not all that Ishi left behind... A California Indian's preserved brain accentuates his tragic and mysterious life... and death...

Inside a sealed tank in a Suitland, Md., warehouse rests a brain that, for the past 86 years, has refused to die. The lump of preserved tissue doesn't pulsate or glow like the gory centerpiece of some late-night monster movie. Rather, it reaches out and grabs people because it's infused with the symbolic power of a real-life horror story... the near-destruction of several Native American tribes by white California settlers in the late 1800s.

This is Ishi's brain. Officials at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where the brain was sent in 1917 by one of anthropology's most eminent practitioners, hope to return it soon to the two surviving Indian tribes most closely related to Ishi. Once legal and logistical hurdles are cleared, the tribes will conduct a traditional burial uniting Ishi's brain with his cremated body, now held in a California cemetery.

The reappearance of this long-forgotten brain, which surprised even some Smithsonian scientists, has ignited fierce debate over the ethics of the researchers who befriended and studied Ishi. It has also focused scientific and public attention on the ongoing repatriation process, by which anthropologists return skeletal and cultural remains to Native American groups.

Moreover, the saga raises questions about how much can ever really be known about Ishi, a man who has attained near-mythic status among anthropologists, Native Americans, and others, especially in California.

"Ishi has become an icon of our guilt and regret about past mistreatment of Native Americans," says Nancy Rockafellar, a medical historian at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). "He's been admired for his resilience and heroism, and now he's a symbol of the repatriation struggle. There are many Ishis."

In August 1911, only one Ishi existed, and that just barely. Starving and almost naked, he straggled into the northern California town of Oroville. In a wicked irony, he took shelter in the local slaughterhouse. Most of the approximately 400 members of the Yahi tribe to which he belonged had been massacred by white vigilantes and bounty hunters.

The 1849 California gold rush had set off bloody attacks on Indian tribes in mining areas, many occurring in the years just after Ishi's birth around 1860. From 1870 to 1911, Ishi and 5 to 20 Yahi hid in wooded areas not far from Oroville. As apparently the last surviving member of that hardy band, a desperate Ishi crossed into the white world. The sheriff turned him over to University of California anthropologist Thomas T. Waterman, who on Sept. 4, 1911, took Ishi to live at his institution's anthropology museum, then located in San Francisco.

Waterman and his colleagues, including anthropology department head Alfred Kroeber, took an immediate liking to their outgoing, intelligent boarder. So did the general public. In his first 6 months at the museum, 24,000 visitors watched Ishi demonstrate arrow making and fire building. Kroeber referred to him as the last Stone Age Indian in North America.

Ishi also spent much time demonstrating archery techniques to Saxton Pope, the UCSF surgeon who became his personal physician. Famed linguist Edward Sapir worked with Ishi to document the Yahi language.

Ishi, whose life story was first described in the popular book Ishi in Two Worlds by Theodora Kroeber (1961, University of California Press), died of tuberculosis on March 25, 1916. Theodora Kroeber, the wife of Alfred Kroeber, notes in her book that Ishi's brain was removed during an autopsy, although she makes no mention of what happened to it.

The issue drew little notice until 1997, when four Maidu Indian tribes in northern California's Butte County formed a committee to campaign for the return of Ishi's remains for reburial in the Yahi homelands. They knew that his ashes were stored in a cemetery just south of San Francisco. Upon learning that his brain had ended up elsewhere, they launched an effort to find it.

Rockafellar and other UCSF officials joined the search after seeing a June 6, 1997 Los Angeles Times article suggesting that UCSF still held the brain.

The UCSF investigators eventually ran across clues that their quarry had ended up at the Smithsonian. After getting a tip from an emeritus anthropologist familiar with Ishi's story, Rockafellar telephoned JoAllyn Archambault, director of the Smithsonian's American Indian Program. Rockafellar quotes Archambault as saying that Ishi's missing brain "is old folklore, and it doesn't exist."

Later in 1998, anthropologist Orin Starn of Duke University in Durham, N.C., combed through Alfred Kroeber's letters held at UC Berkeley. In a letter dated Oct. 27, 1916, Kroeber offered to ship Ishi's brain to Ales Hrdlicka, then the Smithsonian's physical anthropology curator, to include in his studies of links between brain size, body weight, and race. Hrdlicka had quickly sent back a letter of acceptance.

Armed with these documents, Starn met with anthropologist Thomas Killion, director of the Smithsonian's Repatriation Office, on Jan. 27, 1999. At that meeting, Killion confirmed that Ishi's brain was stored in a Smithsonian facility.

With the search over, the repatriation process began. Killion and his colleagues worked with the Butte County committee to identify, as required by law, the closest living relatives to whom the Smithsonian could return Ishi's brain. On May 7, 1999, Smithsonian officials announced that they would return the preserved tissue to the Redding Rancheria and Pit River tribes in Butte County. These groups contain descendants of a larger Yana culture to which Ishi's Yahi belonged, as well as the Maidu.

The two tribes still await final legal approval from the state of California to retrieve Ishi's cremated remains from the cemetery. Tribal deliberations continue on where to hold the burial and how to conduct it. After resolving those matters, representatives of the tribes will retrieve the brain from the Smithsonian.

"Things are going slowly, but that's how we want to handle it," says Mickey Gemmill, spokesman for the two tribes. "The way we see it, [Ishi's burial] will happen when it's supposed to happen."

Although Native American groups were heartened by the Smithsonian's quick action on their repatriation request, they're upset that it took so long to locate Ishi's brain, Gemmill notes. For her part, Rockafellar wonders why Archambault at first denied the brain's existence and why Smithsonian officials who knew the location of the brain did not seek out the Butte County committee once its well-publicized search began.

Killion and anthropologist Stuart Speaker, who works in the Smithsonian's Repatriation Office, say that repatriation workers knew the whereabouts of Ishi's brain all along, even if anthropologists in other Smithsonian departments didn't. After decades during which Ishi's brain attracted virtually no attention and underwent a couple of location changes, its official documentation had become muddled.

In fact, when the Smithsonian distributed an inventory of remains for possible repatriation to California Indian tribes in 1998, Ishi's brain wasn't on the list. "That was an unfortunate oversight that we corrected after meeting with Starn," Speaker says.

He adds that he doesn't know why Archambault denied the brain's existence to Rockafellar. Archambault doesn't recall talking to the UCSF historian. However, she says that because she had no knowledge of its presence at the Smithsonian, she told several callers who inquired on separate occasions around that time that Ishi's brain had never been sent there.

"This is a big place and people [from different departments] don't talk to each other much," Archambault says. "I found out that Ishi's brain was here when the story came out in the press [in early 1999]."

That's when the Berkeley anthropology faculty found out, too. The news led some to feel that their discipline and their founding department head had done a disservice to Ishi.

In the April 1999 Anthropology Newsletter, published by the American Anthropological Association, Berkeley anthropologist Jonathan Marks expressed puzzlement at what motivated Kroeber to "objectify a friend" and allow Hrdlicka "to add a pickled Indian brain to his macabre collections."

Marks notes, however, that Ishi died while Kroeber was in Europe. Upon learning of the loss, Kroeber immediately sent a letter to an associate declaring that no autopsy should occur. The letter arrived too late.

Marks also scolds the Smithsonian for hesitating "longer than the blink of an eye" to repatriate Ishi's brain.

His views echo those of a statement issued by the Berkeley anthropology department on March 29, 1999, and published in the May 1999 Anthropology Newsletter. The statement described relations between Ishi and the researchers as "complex and contradictory." It concludes that Kroeber "inexplicably arranged" to send Ishi's brain to the Smithsonian.

Some Berkeley anthropologists, such as George M. Foster, staunchly objected to the department's statement. Foster, who has conducted field research since 1937 and was a student and colleague of Kroeber's, defends the actions of the late anthropologist in the October 1999 Anthropology Newsletter.

Ishi had comfortable, permanent living quarters at the San Francisco museum, where he enjoyed a longer and healthier life than he would have if he had been sent to an Indian reservation, Foster contends. The Yahi survivor was a source of information for researchers, but he probably didn't feel exploited by them, Foster adds. He suspects that Ishi, like Native Americans Foster has worked with, was pleased to record his language and culture.

Foster also describes Kroeber as having had "genuine affection" for Ishi. Kroeber's reasons for sending Ishi's brain across the country are unclear, Foster holds. Kroeber apparently spent months pondering what to do with the unexpected "bottled brain of a close friend in his office," Foster says.

Hrdlicka, who had a large collection of primate brains, may have presented an acceptable solution to Kroeber's predicament with a bonus of what appeared to be a scientific payoff. Nonetheless, Hrdlicka never published any measurements of Ishi's brain or included it in any studies.

In a letter accompanying Foster's written comments, Kroeber's son Karl, a humanities professor at Columbia University, says that the Berkeley departmental statement ignores the mutual respect and friendship that developed between Ishi and those with whom he worked at the museum.

Rockafellar and Starn coauthored a comment on this matter in the August-October 1999 Current Anthropology. Kroeber and his fellow researchers truly cared for Ishi, "but he was an object to them as well as a friend," they state. They argue that Ishi's dual status encouraged Kroeber to send the preserved brain off for scientific analysis rather than add it to the rest of the deceased Yahi's ashes.

Whatever Kroeber's motivation for forwarding Ishi's brain to Hrdlicka, Smithsonian officials say that the final outcome of the case demonstrates that the repatriation process is working. It took only about 2 months to respond to the formal request to repatriate Ishi's brain and offer the remains to the appropriate tribes, Killion says.

Since 1991, he adds, the Smithsonian's Repatriation Office has returned more than 4,000 sets of remains to more than 40 Native American groups. An additional 30 repatriation requests are pending.

The Repatriation Office's intensive investigation of Ishi's roots put to rest the notion that he was "the last Yahi," Speaker says. It also found evidence that Ishi and his Yahi comrades did not lead an isolated, Stone Age existence. For instance, Ishi liked to make arrowheads from glass obtained from bottles gathered at white towns and camps.

Yet for all that has been written and said about him, Ishi remains a puzzling figure. Even the arrowheads he fashioned to such acclaim while in San Francisco leave questions unanswered.

Ishi's arrowheads most closely resemble those of the Wintu tribe, a neighbor of the Yahi, according to Berkeley archaeologist M. Steven Shackley. In his youth, Ishi may have learned to make arrowheads from a Wintu relative or might even have lived among the Wintu, Shackley suggests.

Killion doubts those scenarios. Ishi and other Yahi, however, probably interacted with other Native American groups to a greater extent than has been appreciated, he says.

"A lot of what we think is known about Ishi's life is rather fragmentary," Speaker asserts. Ishi made it clear to Waterman, Kroeber, and others from the beginning that he didn't want to talk about his family or his feelings about what had happened to them. In fact, he didn't even divulge his real name, probably due to a Native American belief that it's disrespectful and potentially dangerous to reveal one's name to strangers, Speaker says.

Consequently, he was dubbed Ishi, the Yana word for man.

"Ishi's story is one of the most slippery that I've ever encountered," Rockafellar remarks. "We have his complete medical records at UCSF, but he's still a mystery. Science couldn't penetrate Ishi."

A REAL LIFE "LAST OF THE MOHICIANS...

There he stood ... tearfully straddling two worlds, bridging two cultures. For him there were three realities ... yesterday, today, tomorrow. Looking back he saw life; his youth, family, home, ... his world. Pondering the present he could only feel confusion, emptiness, and grief. The future, as far as he could imagine one, offered loneliness and fear; an unknown world into which he must walk if he was to live. But he was to walk it alone. There was no one by his side, no one to guide him, no one to give comfort. They were all gone. He was the last of the ...

Here we can see two men. One is he who walked the moccasin trails of James Fenimore Cooper's imagination ... Chingachgook, the noble man of "The Leatherstocking Tales", the Last of the Mohicans. In Cooper's fictional account of the fate of the Mohican people, Chingachgook was the lonely figure left behind by his people. Slowly they all died; vanished ... until Chingachgook was left as the sole inheritor of his people's legacy.

The second man was he who walked in the shadows of northern California's rugged high country. Unlike Chingachgook, he was real. His was not a tale of fiction, but the reality of the darker side of humanity. He was a son of his people ... the Yahi. Like Chingachgook, he was the lonely figure left behind in a world strange and frighteningly different. His people had all died; vanished ... he too was the sole inheritor of his tribe's legacy. He, Ishi, was the last of the Yahi. And he was to bequeath his legacy to the world so all would know that the proud Yahi once flourished in this world

Who were Ishi's lost people? Who were the Yahi? They were the southernmost people of the Yana tribe whose homeland had been the Mount Lassen Foothills of northern California. The Yana ancestors had once inhabited the fertile upper Sacramento Valley, at a time when there was but one single Hokan language (one of six North American linguistic families). It is believed that 3 to 4 thousand years ago, Hokan, like all languages, evolved into a dozen new tongues spoken by the various Hokan people who continued to occupy these valleys, living the life of hunter-gatherers, for millennia. They harvested wild roots, berries, bark, and foliage. They fished the numerous streams. The surrounding hills and mountains were bountiful hunting grounds. Deer and other game were tracked as they made their seasonal migrations to the high grounds and harvested by bow and arrow. Food sources were abundant in the game laden hills, valley forests, streams, and meadows. Such was the undisturbed Yana way of life for 2 to 3 thousand years.

Having flourished in the rich valley for ages, the Yana were dispossessed as others have been since time immemorial. They were victims of the powerful, numerous Winton. Desiring the fertile valleys of the Sacramento, the invading Winton drove the Yana from their homes. The exiled people were driven into the hill country and forced to adapt to this new environment. Adapt they did and here they would stay for a thousand years. The exodus forced an instant cultural evolution, from valley to hill people. The new country, formerly Yana hunting grounds, was situated east of the Sacramento River, south of the Pit River. Present day Red Bluff, California, along I-5, stands just 6-10 miles west of the Yank's territory. It was not the fertile lowlands they were accustomed to. It was not as bountiful as the valley. Life was much harder to sustain in the high country, but the Yana were a strong people ... Isolated, independent, resilient, and self-interested, they would fight to survive. They were proud and they were deeply rooted. Tribal history was infused into their hearts and burned into their minds. They knew where they came from, what they were, and who they were. They were Yana.

The bordering environs were of no great consequence to the Yana. They gave no indication they wished to leave the foothills of Mount Lassen, nor did the neighboring peoples covet the harsh, nearly desolate lands they possessed. Though isolated, the Yana were not immobilized in their country. They moved freely about, maintaining friendly relations and trade with some tribes; engaged in hostile clashes and raids with others. Rugged, strong, and fierce fighters, the Yana terrified their enemies, most especially the Winton who had the dubious honor of being the primary target for Yana raiding. In a somewhat bitter irony, the Winton, who first drove the Hokan-Yana people from their Sacramento homeland long ago, were now the recipients of Yana terror. And it was primarily the Wintu who influenced white settlers' perception of the Yana with tales of being victimized by "wild Indians" who swooped down upon them, carrying off captives and raiding their villages. Though the conflict was a mutual affair, the picture painted by the Wintu was one of a fierce, war-like people who must be eradicated from the region. The image was to remain in the minds of many settlers who took up the task with less than honorable enthusiasm.

Whatever the relationship to other tribes, the Yana's one constant concern was the Yana. Having survived as a people for thousands of years, their culture, history, families, and future were paramount to all else. Whatever occurred in "other" worlds mattered little to them, as long as Yana country was preserved. They had no interest in discovering or exploring the mysteries beyond their borders. In Theodora Kroeber's words, they were "provincials" ... and the provincial proud Yana continued on, with little change to their way of life, into Ishi's life. This traditional Yana culture was the world he was born into during the latter half of the 19th century. At once the same, and yet different. Life within Yana country remained as it was for generations and generations, but the world around them was rapidly altering, pushing, restructuring. It was in a state of immense transition. Changes were in the wind for the Yana Yahi and the boy Ishi was destined to bear the full weight of those winds.

In the late 1840's, the end of the Yahi was set in motion by events which took place far from Yahi lands. The 1848 land grants by Mexico ended the Spanish-Mexican era (which had little effect upon the Yana) and ushered in the Anglo-Saxon era. The exchange of land claims, augmented by the discovery of gold in the riverbeds along the foothills of California's high country, set the stage for the tragic demise of the Yana. The wheels of time were spinning wildly into their world.

There were, at this critical time in northern Californian history, approximately 2 to 3 thousand Yana in a 2,400 square mile homeland, comprised of four sub-tribes. Differing in language, these four each had their own separate territory ... the Northern Yana, the Central Yana, the Southern Yana, and the Yahi. At the time of Ishi's birth (c. 1862), daily life remained much as it had been for thousands of years. However, an external element had begun to pierce Yana life. Immigrant people were encircling, then entering the hill country; hunting, land staking, pasturing livestock. The world was growing smaller; the Yahi were no longer their own concern. Game and vegetation were becoming scarce while hunger was a frequent visitor. The mounting pressure from without was exacting a heavy toll within. Yana population numbers plummeted. Within a decade, as little as 30 Northern and Central Yana were believed to be alive. No Southern Yana were left at all, and the southernmost band of the Yana, Ishi's Yahi, were thought to be entirely gone. What happened to these Hokan people who had occupied and survived the rugged terrain of northern California's hill country for a millennium? ... Tragedy struck with lightning swiftness.

The discovery of gold brought to the California hills a frenzied, unbridled, ruthless group who flooded the "new" territory by the thousands. Unrestrained by authorities (as were the Spanish-Mexicans), these new arrivals to California came bearing an entirely different perspective on the native people. Simply put, they were a breed apart. They weren't interested in co-existing or establishing friendly relations with the inhabitants of the hills. These were, for the most part, callous, hardened men ... miners, trappers, hunters, adventurers, and criminals. Many of the immigrant families that followed, though not necessarily psychotic, were equally hardened ... transformed from who they once were prior to their western trek. (Not all who migrated westward were ruthless killers. Unfortunately, those who were left a greater mark.) Just as LOTM's Magua was embittered and traumatized by life's cruelties, so too were these semi-nomads. Hardship, heartache, tragedy, and despair disallowed their humanity to flourish or respond to pleas for help. (There were numerous accounts of travelers who, upon reaching the rough mountain passes, abandoned sick family members, including children, to their own fate.) By journey's end, many who came seeking a new life had changed; they were perverse, ruthless, twisted ... willing to stand by while others died, or all to eager to abandon even their loved ones if the inconvenience proved too great. They came, whether or not it was consciously understood, to dispossess those already there. To this new breed of immigrants, the Yana were to be either exploited or exterminated. In the course of a boy's lifetime, they achieved both.

As more ranchers sought pasture land, and more families cleared claims and hunted game, Yahi survival became that more tenuous. Hunger often drove Yahi to take cattle or sheep. Anger often drove ranchers to take Yahi. They were hunted down, killed, kidnapped, and enslaved. Scalping suddenly became a home business. Villages were attacked without provocation, leaving 30 or 40 dead at a time. Despite the enormity of the enemy's numbers, the Yana resisted. In a spirited last stand that rivaled the defenders of the Alamo, of all the Yana it was the Yahi who offered the greatest resistance. They raided the ranches and farms; they killed whites and ransacked cabins. Stories of murdered children (a few were true) spread wildly across the new settlements, inciting vigilante groups to seek their own justice. Murder for murder. Raid for raid. Brutal retaliation was the name of the game. Diseases ran rampant. The Yahi declined with horrid rapidity. It was among the bloodiest wars of the western frontiers and the outcome was never really in doubt. Nonetheless, despite the tragedy of this clash, there is something heroic and admirable in its events. It was at one time hauntingly sorrowful and yet inspiring. The will ... the spirit of resistance... the determination to protect, defend, and survive is a tribute to the Yahi people. This spirit was personified in Ishi ... the real-life counterpart to the Mohican Chingachgook.

Just as the Mohicans in the eastern frontiers were hopelessly caught in territorial conflicts, so too were the Yana. The greatest differences were duration and fate. The Mohicans had engaged in a defense of their lands for two centuries; the Yana for twenty two years. The Mohicans survived as a people; the Yana vanished. Like the fictional Chingachgook, Cooper's grieving last Mohican; Ishi was destined to be an historic grieving last Yahi.

Recalling once again Cooper's tale of tragedy and destruction, we find the story of Chingachgook and his son Uncas riveting, touching. They are running out of time, struggling to hang on, but the Mohicans begin to vanish. One by one they are gone, until only a father and his son remain. We feel the weight on Chingachgook's shoulders as he vainly attempts to steer life's canoe to placid waters. In the end, he can not fight against the current and finds himself coasting along the turbulent water alone. It is an American tragedy that Cooper speaks of ... one he knew full well to be much more than a fictional work. Yet even Cooper's great imagination could not have foreseen the likes of an Ishi stumbling out from a stone age world into the 20th century.

While still a child, Ishi's own father was killed in a village massacre. The boy and his mother escaped by jumping into a nearby river. On and on it went. The Yahi were being slaughtered, until only a remnant band of 40 remained. Unbelievably, the survivors of this tiny band hid successfully for nearly a half century, undetected by the outside world. It was firmly believed, even by locals who went up into the foothills of the Lassen, that the Yahi, or "Mill Creek Indians", were a people of the past. Gone. No record of their history, origins, culture, or language having survived. In time, however, the world would be forced to confront and rediscover the Yahi.

Living in the Shadows of Life

In November of 1908, a surveyor team hired by the Oro Light and Power Company, accompanied by guide Merle Apperson traveled to Deer Creek, the heart of Yahi country. Assuming the country to be uninhabited, the crew went about its business with not a thought to the former occupants. Two of the group were returning to camp one day when they had an unexpected run in. What they unwittingly and carelessly stumbled upon was an Indian man fishing in the creek. They hurried back to relate their tale of a "wild Indian", but most brushed it off as nonsense. Not Merle Apperson. The following morning he led the way along Deer Creek to where he suspected there may have been a camp. He was right. The surveyors walked into the tiny village. As far as they could tell, it was inhabited by three "wild" Indians ... an old man, an old sick woman, and a younger woman. The man they had seen the day before was not visible. These were Yahi ... Ishi's mother, "sister", and the elderly man. This small remnant of the 40 Yahi had been hiding for years, eluding capture or detection by living in their cunningly hidden settlement like trapped animals. Their existence was drab ... depressing. Starvation, fear, illness, grief ... such was their daily burden. The younger woman and the old man fled to hide as the intruders approached the village, but the old woman could not run. She had been covered with blankets in the hope that she would not be noticed.

The men entered the hideaway and surveyed it well. They poked around, eyeing whatever goods were present. They then shook the blankets and discovered the Indian. Her mourning was obvious by her shorn hair. Her deer thong wrapped legs were swollen and she could not walk. She was weak, sick, and in pain and she shook with fear as the strangers looked her over. An attempt was made to communicate but with no success. What a moment of terror this must have been for Ishi's mother. Incredibly, after seeing with their own eyes the pitiful state this woman was in, the intruders ransacked the village, taking with them every last thing that could be carried out. Everything, even food. With that, they coldly walked out of there, leaving the woman to die. According to Apperson, he alone was appalled at his companions' actions and protested the thievery. He claims he pleaded with the others that they should at least transport the woman to their camp for care. His protestations fell upon deaf ears. What these men had done with such chillingly casual ease was strip four terrified, starving people of their meager possessions, including items they needed to find food. They had handed down a death sentence, with no mercy or cause, to the last four surviving members of a people who had inhabited, thrived, and survived the northern California region for thousands of years. In a fateful moment, brought on by the actions of callous men, the Yahi people apparently had come to an end.

After the departure of the thieves, Ishi returned. No food, tools, utensils, or comforts were left. It was he and his mother ... alone. The other two never returned, nor was Ishi able to find any sign of them. They were gone. Dead. Ishi reasoned they had either drowned during their desperate escape, or had been eaten by one of the numerous predators in the back country. What a tragic, sad end to people who managed to survive so long against desperately fatal odds. Before long, even Ishi's last living Yahi relative, his mother, was dead. He was now truly, truly alone. It is chillingly haunting to even attempt to hear in one's mind the death song Ishi must have sang for his companions, for his mother. What a mournful sound must have risen from the cliffs along Deer Creek in 1908.

Imagine if you can, bearing the burden of grief that Ishi bore. From the time he was a child, he witnessed the systematic slaughter of his people. He lived his entire life in fear. Always hiding, always running. He watched helplessly as his friends and relatives were killed, lost, or died of hunger. He struggled to survive while his world grew smaller and smaller. His tiny circle of companions, his last connection to the Yahi and their long tradition, disappeared. They dwindled away before him and there was nothing he could do to stop it. Everything was gone. His world had vanished and he had not one soul to turn to, to talk to, to walk with. He was the only Yahi speaking person alive in the world. No one else, they were all gone, but he ... Ishi. He was the finale.

Crossing the Rubicon Trail

Miraculously, Ishi survived the death sentence of 1908. With no home, shelter, tools, food, or friend he somehow found a way to live. Grief was his constant companion, loneliness his curse, ... but despair never overtook this last Yahi. He went on despite life's tragic burdens. His survival is a beautiful tribute to the resiliency of the human spirit. Ishi, though broken hearted, starving, lonely, and scared ... wanted to live. Yahi history; its beginnings, events, culture, language, and its people was alive and infused into one last soul. As long as Ishi lived, the Yahi lived. Thousands of years had rolled by in its momentous course until they had climaxed into one last, single moment ... one person. Ishi WAS Yahi.

Three years had passed since the raid on his village and the death of his family. It had been that long since he had heard a single utterance from the lips of another Yahi. Nearly dead from starvation, and perhaps desperate for human companionship, Ishi made a decision. Knowing he would die if he stayed at Deer Creek, and fearing he would be killed if he left, Ishi took a chance. A chance on life. He would depart the Yahi world and enter the world of the whites. Maybe he would die, maybe he would live. He had to try.

On the morning of August 29, 1911, in a slaughter house corral, two miles from the town of Oroville, a nearly dead "wild man" is discovered. He is emaciated, exhausted, frightened, and starved. The sheriff takes the Indian into custody, but is baffled as to what to do next. Locked in a cell, unable to communicate with any number of Indians brought before him, the traumatized man awaited his yet unknown fate.

In a carnival atmosphere, Ishi, the "wild man" caught the imagination and attention of thousands of onlookers and curiosity seekers. News of his discovery reached two professors of anthropology at the University of California, Alfred L. Kroeber and T. T. Waterman. Both men had an interest in the human saga being played out in Oroville for several reasons. Beyond the obvious general anthropological interest, they had been searching for the lost "wild man" that had been sited three years earlier by the surveyor crew a few miles north of Oroville ... in the Deer Creek region. They wondered if this could be him.

Two days after Ishi's discovery, Waterman was on a train to Oroville to assume responsibility for the "wild man." Kroeber and Waterman became guardians of Ishi, the last Yahi. For nearly five years Ishi lived at the university's museum while teaching the professors whatever he was able to communicate about the Yahi people. There was no other speakers of his tongue so communication was difficult and tedious. Kroeber persevered and managed to learn and communicate in 'conversational' Yahi, while Ishi learned about life in 20th century America.

The bond that developed between Kroeber and Ishi was, by all accounts, a close one. They both came to depend upon one another, not only for the pursuits of study they were engaged in, but on a personal level. For Ishi, this relationship must have been especially precious, for he had been alone for so long. (It was Kroeber who named him "Ishi", which is Yahi for 'man'. Yahi tradition prevented Ishi from speaking his own name or the names of the dead.)

As Ishi told the Yahi story, Kroeber became anxious to see the country of which he spoke. The village sites, the spots they frequented for food, ... the place where Ishi and his mother parted for the last time. At first, Ishi resisted, afraid to revisit the places at which he had experienced both joy and sorrow. Eventually, he did agree. Ishi was going home. The results of the 1914 excursion to Yahi country are invaluable. Kroeber drew maps, marking crucial sites of Ishi's life, and recorded the place names as the Yahi knew them. There were also photographs taken of both locations and of Ishi demonstrating the Yahi methods of crafting arrow heads, arrows, bows, spears, etc. In a strange way, Kroeber was actually recording the past through living history in the present for the future. It was as if he had reached back in time, pulled forth a man of another age, and asked him; "Please show me what life was like long ago." Ishi was physically contemporary, though culturally and socially antiquated. That alone bears reflection.

The record of Yahi history ... its people, language, beliefs, etc. , that we now have is the result and gift of Ishi's survival and entrance into the modern world. Though he had been cruelly left behind as the sole survivor of his people, Ishi was able to offer his people's legacy and mark to be remembered forever. How close we came to losing knowledge of the Yahi altogether! Through him we have language, Yahi beliefs and myths, cultural information, and most poignantly, a first hand account of what happened to the Yahi in their final chapter. A detailed personal story of tragedy, resilience, determination, and pain. Had the world not known Ishi, the Yahi would have passed away, remembered as nothing more than the fierce, troublesome "Mill Creek Indians" who had a brief and violent appearance on the stage of American expansion.

Ishi's contributions to the search for the Yahi were incomplete. Though he had offered a massive, exhaustive quantity of knowledge, time which had been generous thus far, was running out. Four and a half years of research, demonstrations, instruction ... and still there were so many questions. But the only source of Yahi life could not stay forever. After battling several illnesses during the course of his years at the museum, Ishi eventually contracted tuberculosis. He was exhausted, unable to fight this one last battle. While his friend Professor Kroeber was away in New York, Ishi died on March 25, 1916 in his bed. The last Yahi had departed this world. There was no one left to sing his death song.

Was Ishi the last? Is is possible that somewhere, in some remote area, as yet untouched by man... maybe not in the United States, but elsewhere... there are other remnants of the Pre-Colombian Western World? Who knows? Certainly the Jungles of South and Central America hold primative peoples... Certainly the islands of the South pacific have their share of "Stone Age" Cultures... When will one of these... last remnants of an earlier era... walk out to face the uncertainty of the modern world, and unlock for us the mysteries of our own past?

 



TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; Extended News; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: affairs; anthropology; archaeology; economic; ggg; godsgravesglyphs; history; indian; ishi; lithics; past; studies; washington; yahi
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This is an intersting Read.
1 posted on 07/26/2002 5:10:11 PM PDT by vannrox
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To: vannrox
I researched Ishi back in the sixties, in high school. Glad to see it's not been forgotten. It's an amazing story.
2 posted on 07/26/2002 5:13:12 PM PDT by EggsAckley
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To: vannrox
Too bad ol' Ishi didn't hold out longer. Think of the Indian Casino he could've had.
3 posted on 07/26/2002 5:13:36 PM PDT by martin_fierro
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To: vannrox
Ishi provided many anthropological contributions to be sure. However, modern bowhunting also benefited. Thanks to Saxton Pope.
4 posted on 07/26/2002 5:22:18 PM PDT by Jagdgewehr
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To: vannrox
This is an intersting Read.

It might have been. 100% italics are too hard on the eyes.

Please consider plain text.

5 posted on 07/26/2002 5:41:00 PM PDT by LibKill
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To: martin_fierro
You are funny. No really,I think you are very funny.I admit I dont think you are as funny as much as you seem to think you are, but still, you are really funny.

BTW, did you have a point?

6 posted on 07/26/2002 5:46:00 PM PDT by sarasmom
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To: vannrox


Any relation to Ishi Tib?

7 posted on 07/26/2002 5:55:07 PM PDT by Momaw Nadon
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To: vannrox
Wow. I just realized I'm a vannrox posts groupie.
8 posted on 07/26/2002 6:02:40 PM PDT by lizma
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To: vannrox
Ishi is a part of the CA East Bay culture. I did a high school report on him and the SF Bay tribes in the 50s. I wonder how many students in CA have even been made aware of him/them within the present courses. The Parks Dept. Does a pretty good job of posting information on the history of the Bay Area on trails and rec. lands. Much more is needed to preserve the lands heratige. Ignorance, abuse and bigotry - we and our parents are all guilty of. Chief Seattle - whos not much visited grave in Washington - summed it up best.
9 posted on 07/26/2002 6:04:34 PM PDT by Bobibutu
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To: Bobibutu
http://www.webcom.com/duane/seattle.html
10 posted on 07/26/2002 6:06:19 PM PDT by Bobibutu
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To: sarasmom
Put down your firewater and squint -- you might be able to see it.

No, really, I'm sure you're quite sober. Just not as sober as you think you are.

11 posted on 07/26/2002 6:15:36 PM PDT by martin_fierro
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To: vannrox
For years after the surrender of Geronimo in 1886 there were isolated raids by renegade Apaches in the United States and Mexico. Finally, tired of the depredations ranchers on the border gathered a volunteer cavalry of 600 men based in Douglas, Arizona to go after the Indians. The year was 1934.

After years of rumors and reported sightings and the discovery of campgrounds an Apache headman confirmed that there were still bands of Apache in the Sierra Madre. Occasionally they would venure north across the border. They did everything to avoid discovery and, aside from an occasional petty theft, avoided whites entirely. The year was 1960.

Even now it is possible, without too much trouble, to go back into the canyonlands of the Navajo Reservation and find elderly Navajo who have seen few, if any, white men in their lifetimes. They speak no English and live the old ways.

There are other groups who have gone back to the old ways. They are not anthropologically significant because they have chosen to leave the modern world and try to live like their ancestors. There is no chain of continuity and a white man could do the same.

Many live in a grey area between old customs and the modern world. It will take centuries for the old cultures to disappear.
12 posted on 07/26/2002 6:21:28 PM PDT by MARTIAL MONK
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To: Bobibutu
My tribe didn't get off the boat until the 1890's. As far as I know, we never bothered any injuns. Get over it.
13 posted on 07/26/2002 6:41:15 PM PDT by chadwimc
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To: martin_fierro
Jealous?

I am not tribal.Nor am I drunk.You are still at the same level of humor I originally commented upon.History is history.Rewrite it at your own risk.

I am still curious as to your point in your first post to this thread.

14 posted on 07/26/2002 7:02:40 PM PDT by sarasmom
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To: EggsAckley; blam
You might like this guy's site, then. Here are some casts and photographs of Ishi's work (be sure to check out some of the non-Ishi stuff too... like some of the woodland cache blades from Illinois and the incredible posters this guy puts out ) :

Lithic Casting Lab

15 posted on 07/26/2002 7:18:55 PM PDT by piasa
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To: piasa
Thanks, I'm familiar with Ishi.
16 posted on 07/26/2002 7:31:24 PM PDT by blam
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To: vannrox
Bravo, Vannrox. Excellent posting. Ishi's story is one of the finest. I used to live in Paradise, down by Chico, and hiked those Lassen trails.
--Raoul
17 posted on 07/26/2002 9:34:04 PM PDT by RDangerfield
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To: vannrox
Ishi apparently wasn't the last Yahi, according to new evidence from UC Berkeley research archaeologist

by Gretchen Kell

Berkeley -- Ishi is a household name in Northern California, where school children have been taught for 85 years that he was the last Yahi, a subgroup of the Yana Indians. "Ishi, the Last Yana Indian, 1916," is etched into the small black jar containing his cremated remains.

But by studying the arrowpoints Ishi made, Steven Shackley, a research archaeologist at the University of California at Berkeley's Hearst Museum of Anthropology, has discovered that Ishi apparently wasn't the last full-blooded Yahi, or Yana, after all.

Instead, Shackley said that Ishi, who was found, starving and afraid, near Oroville in 1911, was of mixed Indian blood -- a finding that revises Ishi's famous history, which many Californians learned by reading "Ishi in Two Worlds" by Theodora Kroeber.

Shackley said that, in light of this new evidence on Ishi, teachers educating children about California history "should be more aware of the complexity of Ishi's situation. It's more complex than Kroeber imagined."

Her book was "simplistic," he said, "not based completely on hard research."

An analysis by Shackley of a large UC Berkeley collection of Ishi's arrowpoints indicates that although he spoke Yahi and had lived in the ancestral Yahi homeland in the Mount Lassen foothills, he also had either Wintu or Nomlaki blood.

"Arrowpoints made in the historic Yahi sites excavated by the Department of Anthropology in the 1950s and housed at the museum are quite different from Ishi's products," said Shackley. "But tools and arrowpoints made at historic Nomlaki or Wintu sites also housed at the museum bear striking resemblance to those made by Ishi."

An expert in stone tool technology, Shackley found that the hundreds of projectile points Ishi made after he left the wilderness had long blades with concave bases and side notches. In contrast, arrowheads in the museum from historic Yahi sites are short and squat, with contracting stems and basal notches.

Although Ishi was culturally Yahi, said Shackley, "it appears he was not the last purely Yahi Indian. He learned to produce arrowpoints not from Yahi relatives, but very possibly from a Nomlaki or Wintu male relative.

"This makes Ishi's story even more romantic and sad," he said. "Being of mixed blood, he is an example of the cultural pressure the Anglos placed on the dwindling number of Indians in the mid- to late-1800s to marry their enemies."

Shackley first investigated Ishi's arrowpoints in 1990. After a hiatus, he resumed work upon hearing evidence at an Ishi conference that physical anthropology suggests Ishi was not completely Yana.

The Wintu, Nomlaki and Maidu belonged to a large group of Indians in the Sacramento Valley who spoke a language called Penutian. They lived adjacent to their enemies, the Yana, who were in the Lassen foothills. The Yana had four subgroups -- the northern, central and southern Yana, and the Yahi -- and each had its own dialect, territory and culture.

Ishi was born into an extended family that, in order to perpetuate life, was forced to intermarry with outsiders, with enemies, said Shackley, and one of Ishi's parents may have been Wintu or Nomlaki. The number of Indians was dwindling, and an incest taboo kept them from choosing a relative as a mate.

"We always thought that Ishi was a survivor who was extremely adaptive," said Shackley. "Now we know he was even more adaptive because he was the product of a society that had to adapt to a situation that was not part of its cultural ideology."

"Ishi didn't talk about his ancestors because his religious beliefs prevented him from doing that. But that's my job as an archaeologist," he said. "And Ishi would have wanted the truth known."

Ishi first made headlines on Aug. 29, 1911, when butchers found him outside a slaughterhouse near Oroville. Initially, he was jailed by the Butte County sheriff. But two UC Berkeley anthropologists, Alfred Kroeber and Thomas Talbot Waterman, befriended Ishi and gave him shelter at the campus' anthropology museum, then in San Francisco.

Kroeber's wife, the author of "Ishi In Two Worlds," wrote that Ishi was "the last wild Indian in North America, a man of Stone Age culture."

The anthropologists pronounced Ishi a Yahi because he spoke Yahi and was found near Yahi territory. They also considered him the last Yahi, said Shackley, since "the only Yahi left in the hinterlands were believed to have been exterminated by Indian killers brought in by whites,"

Furthermore, they believed Ishi was the last Indian to have lived in the wild. Massacres, starvation and disease had taken the lives of countless Indians in Northern California during the mid- to late-1800s. Many others had been forced into reservations.

In 1908, surveyors did spot four Indians in Yahi territory. But in 1909, Waterman and two guides failed to find the group. Two years later, Ishi, who verified that he had been one of the four, appeared alone near Oroville.

"That Ishi was wearing his hair burned short in sign of mourning in August, 1911, was evidence of a death or deaths in his family," wrote Theodora Kroeber, "but his mourning may well have been a prolonged one."

Under pressure from reporters who wanted to know the stranger's name, Alfred Kroeber called him "Ishi," which means "man" in Yana. Ishi never uttered his real name.

"A California Indian almost never speaks his own name," wrote Kroeber's wife, "using it but rarely with those who already know it, and he would never tell it in reply to a direct question."

Ishi was given a home at the University of California's anthropology museum -- then on the UCSF campus in an old law school building. He lived there for most of the rest of his life, except for the summer of 1915, when he lived in Berkeley with Waterman and his family.

While at the museum, Ishi often worked on native crafts, such as the arrowpoints Shackley analyzed. By his own choice, he often did these crafts for museum audiences and would give some of his work away.

"The quality of the arrowpoints Ishi made shows he felt good about himself -- he was a good craftsman," said Shackley. "This positive self-image helped make Ishi a hell of an adaptive person."

Ishi formed close friendships with Waterman and Kroeber and with Saxton Pope, a teacher at the university's medical school, which was next door to the museum. He also agreed to record linguistic material on the Yahi language for UC Berkeley.

In December 1914, Ishi developed what doctors felt was tuberculosis. After several hospitalizations, his friends moved him back to the museum to spend his last days. He died there on March 25, 1916.

###

Note: Contact Steven Shackley at (510) 643-1193, extension 3. A limited number of photos is available upon request from Gretchen Kell at the UC Berkeley Public Information Office (510) 642-3136.


18 posted on 07/27/2002 3:23:59 AM PDT by ppaul
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To: vannrox
I love this book by Theodora Kroeber. Here's the final portion of it, which mentions Ishi's people's own poignant way of saying goodbye:

Waterman and Kroeber, bound to the reticences of Yana etiquette, made no significant public statement upon Ishi's death. He had walked quietly out of the Neolithic world into their world, and once he was settled in the museum, Ishi and the anthropologists took each other pretty much for granted, as one's family is taken for granted, and one's close friend. Four and more moon cycles waxed and waned and returned, while Ishi stayed on, a part of the changing twentieth century--his two friends had ceased to envision a world without him.

Then he was gone, the long journey from the ancient Yana homeland along Mill and Deer creeks to the Land of the Yana Dead completed, his leavetaking from his friends and their world as quiet as his own preferred and understated phrase of farewell:

"YOU STAY, I GO."

19 posted on 07/27/2002 8:53:12 AM PDT by texasbluebell
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To: ppaul
Someone is saying Ishi was of mixed blood because of the way he made arrow points? Seems far fetched. He may have copied arrowpoints he had found, as flintknappers have been known to do, or learned from a person of another cultural group, but that by no means implies he was of mixed blood, although when tribes had been decimated it wasn't unusual for the survivors to join another and blend customs, or to lose their customs entirely to the larger group. Interesting read though, so I'll bump it for a more detailed read later.
20 posted on 07/27/2002 5:28:31 PM PDT by piasa
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