Ishi

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Ishi in 1914
Ishi in 1914

Ishi (c. 1860 – March 25, 1916) was the pseudonym of the last member of the Yahi, in turn the last surviving group of the Yana people of California. Ishi is believed to be the last Native American in Northern California to have lived the bulk of his life completely outside the European American culture. He emerged from the wild near Oroville, California, leaving his ancestral homeland in the foothills near Lassen Peak.

Ishi means man in the Yahi dialect of Yana; his real name was never known because it was taboo in Yahi society to say one's own name. Since he was the last member of his tribe, his real name died with him.

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[edit] Biography

Prior to the California Gold Rush, the Yahi population numbered approximately 400.[1] In 1865, Ishi and his family were victims of the Three Knolls Massacre (40 killed),[2] which approximately 30 Yahi survived. The remaining Yahi escaped but went into hiding for the next 40 years after cattlemen killed about half of the survivors. Eventually Ishi's mother and other companions died, and he was discovered by a group of butchers in their corral at Oroville on August 29, 1911.

After being noticed by townspeople, Ishi was taken into custody by a local sheriff for his own protection. He was then moved to the Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, San Francisco where he lived the remainder of his life in evident contentment, until his death from tuberculosis in 1916. While at the Museum Ishi was studied closely by the anthropologists Alfred L. Kroeber and Thomas Talbot Waterman, helping them reconstruct Yahi culture by identifying material items and showing how they were made. He also provided information on his native Yana language which was recorded and studied by Edward Sapir, who had previously done work on the northern dialects.

His story was popularized in a book by Theodora Kroeber, wife of Alfred Kroeber, who worked with her husband's notes and comments to create the story of a man she had never met. The book, Ishi in Two Worlds (ISBN 0-520-22940-1), was published in 1961 after Alfred Kroeber's death. A shorter, more fictionalised version appeared in 1964 under the title Ishi: Last of His Tribe. Additional scholarly materials, edited by R.F. Heizer and T. Kroeber, appeared in a 1981 volume, Ishi the Last Yahi: A Documentary History (ISBN 0520043669). In 2000, Lawrence Holcomb published a novel titled The Last Yahi: A Novel About Ishi (ISBN 0595127665).

In 2003, anthropologists Clifton and Karl Kroeber, sons of Alfred L. Kroeber, edited Ishi in Three Centuries (ISBN 0-8032-2757-4), the first scholarly book on Ishi to contain essays by Indians, although native writers such as Gerald Vizenor had been commenting on the case since the late 1970s.

Ishi's story was updated by Duke University anthropologist Orin Starn in his book, Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian, published in 2004 (ISBN 0-393-05133-1). Ishi's Brain follows Starn's quest for the remains of the last of the Yahi and seeks to understand what he meant to Americans then and modern Indians today. (In 2000 Ishi's brain was reunited with his cremated remains.)

Ishi's story has been filmed twice for TV. First as Ishi: the Last of His Tribe with Eloy Casados in the title role, telecast on NBC December 20, 1978. Then as The Last of His Tribe (1992), with Graham Greene as Ishi. Ishi is also depicted in Jed Riffe's award-winning documentary film Ishi: The Last Yahi (1992).

Thanks to a campaign by Gerald Vizenor, the courtyard in Dwinelle Hall at the University of California, Berkeley was renamed "Ishi Court."

[edit] Ishi's arrowheads

A recent study by Steven Shackley, of the University of California, Berkeley [1], indicates that Ishi may have actually been only half Yahi. This conclusion was based on a comparative study of Ishi's arrowheads, and indicates that he may have learned this skill from a male relative from the Wintu or Nomlaki tribes that lived in close proximity to the Yahi lands, though they were traditionally enemies. If Ishi descended from both of these tribes it would help to explain his extraordinary adaptive abilities, as it would indicate that his circumstances were, essentially from birth, different from the cultural norm of his people. The debate on this has not been definitively settled, however, and the circumstances of his birth probably died with him. Among Ishi's techniques was the use of what is now known in flintknapping circles as an Ishi stick, used to run long pressure flakes.

[edit] Ishi and archery

Ishi, like other California Indians of his time, was an excellent archer. Among his closest friends at the university was Saxton Pope, a physician called in to care for him. Pope was particularly fascinated by the bows and arrows Ishi made, and by the practice of archery. Ishi taught Pope how to make the equipment and the two hunted together in the mountains of California. After Ishi's death, Pope continued with the archery that Ishi had taught him and went on to write the book Hunting with the Bow and Arrow, which became influential in the development of modern-day archery and archery hunting. Ishi's arrow heads were made from obsidian, although when making arrowheads for the public he often used the bottoms of beer bottles.

Today, an annual archery tournament called the "Ishi Tournament" is held in the Yuba-Sutter community, about 40 minutes from Oroville. The tournament is open to both youth and adults, testing their skills in comparison to Ishi's archery skills. Two awards can be earned during the tournament:

  • The Ishi Certificate is awarded to any archer who can hit all 30 arrows to a 20 yrd. target, get a score of at least 99 to a 40 yrd. target, and have one arrow reach 100 yrds.
  • The American Ishi Degree is awarded to any archer who can match Ishi's 1914 archery scores or better. This award only goes to an average of 1-3 people a year, due to its complexity.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ THE STORY OF ISHI: A CHRONOLOGY by Nancy Rockafellar
  2. ^ Ishi Report

[edit] External links