Ishi

Ishi
Born	c. 1860
Died	March 25, 1916 (approx. aged 54) University of California
Nationality	American
Ethnicity	Yahi people of California

Ishi (c. 1860 – March 25, 1916) was the last member of the Yahi, the last surviving group of the Yana people of the U.S. state of California. Widely acclaimed in his time as the "last wild Indian" in America, Ishi lived most of his life completely outside modern culture. At about 49 years of age, in 1911, he emerged from "the wild" near Oroville, California, leaving his ancestral homeland, present-day Tehama County, near the foothills of Lassen Peak, known to Ishi as Wa ganu p'a.

Ishi means "man" in the Yana language. The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber gave this name to the man because it was rude to ask someone's name in the Yahi culture. When asked his name, he said: "I have none, because there were no people to name me," meaning that no Yahi had ever spoken his name. He was taken in by anthropologists at the University of California, Berkeley, who both studied him and hired him as a research assistant. He lived most of his remaining five years in a university building in San Francisco.

Biography

Yahi population

Prior to the California Gold Rush of 1848–1855, the Yahi population numbered approximately 400 in California, but the total Yana people numbered about 3,000.^[1] The gold rush brought tens of thousands of miners and settlers to northern California, putting pressure on native populations. Gold mining damaged water supplies and killed fish; the deer left the area. The settlers brought new diseases such as smallpox and measles.^[2] The northern Yana group became extinct and the central and southern groups and Yahi populations dropped dramatically. Searching for food, they came into conflict with settlers, leading to bounties on the natives by the settlers. Prices included 50 cents per scalp and 5 dollars per head. In 1865, 17 men surrounded and massacred 50 Yahi Indians while the Yahi slept in bed.^{[citation needed]}

Birth and early life

Ishi is estimated to have been born between 1860 and 1862. In 1865, when he was a young boy, Ishi and his family were attacked in the Three Knolls Massacre, in which 40 of their tribesmen were killed.^[3] Approximately 30 Yahi survived to escape, but shortly afterwards, cattlemen killed about half of the survivors. The last survivors, including Ishi and his family, went into hiding for the next 40 years, and their tribe was popularly believed to be extinct.^[4]

Richard Burrill wrote, in Ishi Rediscovered: "In 1865, near the Yahi’s special place, Black Rock, the waters of Mill Creek turned red at the Three Knolls Massacre. 'Sixteen' (Moak 1923:20) or 'seventeen' (T. Kroeber 1961: 80) [so-called] Indian fighters killed about forty Yahi, as part of a retaliatory attack for two white women and a man killed at the Workman’s household on Lower Concow Creek near Oroville (Moak 1923:18). Eleven of the Indian fighters that day were Robert A. Anderson, Hiram Good, Sim Moak, Hardy Thomasson, Jack Houser (also spelled Howser by Anderson), Henry Curtis (leader of the Concow men), his brother Frank Curtis, as well as Tom Gore, Bill Matthews, and William Merithew. W. J. Seagraves visited the site, too, but some time after the battle had been fought (Waterman 1918: 53)."

Burrill continued, "Robert Anderson (1909:79) wrote, 'Into the stream they leaped, but few got out alive. Instead many dead bodies floated down the rapid current.' One captive Indian woman named Mariah from Big Meadows (Lake Almanor today), was one of those who did escape (Burrill, 2003:39). The Three Knolls battle is also described in Theodora Kroeber’s Ishi in Two Worlds (1961: 81-82), but more information has come to light. It is estimated that with this massacre, Ishi's entire cultural group, the Yana/Yahi, may have been reduced to about sixty individuals. From 1859 to 1911, Ishi's remote band became more and more infiltrated by non-Yahi Indian representatives, such as Wintun, Nomlaki and Pit River individuals. In 1879, the infamous Indian boarding schools started in California. The ranks of embittered reservation renegades who became the new 'boys in the hills', to quote Robert Anderson, became a direct function of what new attacks or removal campaigns that the volunteers and military troops elected to carry out against the northern California Indian tribes during that time."

In late 1908, a group of surveyors came across the camp inhabited by a man, a young girl, and an elderly native woman — Ishi, his younger sister, and his elderly mother, respectively. The former two fled while the latter hid herself in blankets to avoid detection, as she was sick and unable to flee.

Ishi's quiver of arrows

The surveyors ransacked the camp and took everything. Ishi's mother and other relatives died soon after Ishi's return.

Walking into the modern world

Ishi lived three years beyond the raid alone, the last of his tribe. Finally, starving and with nowhere to go, at the age of about 48 or 49 on August 29, 1911, Ishi walked out into the occidental world.^[4] He was captured attempting to steal meat near Oroville, California after forest fires in the area.^[5]

After the native was noticed by townspeople, the local sheriff took the man into custody for his own protection. The "wild man" caught the imagination and attention of thousands of onlookers and curiosity seekers. Professors at the University of California, Berkeley, Museum of Anthropology — now the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology (PAHMA) — read about him and brought him to their facility,^[5] then housed on the University of California, San Francisco campus in an old law school building. Studied by the university, Ishi also worked with them as a research assistant and lived in an apartment at the museum for most of the remaining five years of his life. In the summer of 1915, he lived temporarily in Berkeley with the anthropologist Thomas Talbot Waterman and his family.^[6]

Ishi revealing Yahi culture

Waterman and Alfred L. Kroeber, director of the museum, studied Ishi closely over the years and interviewed him at length to help them reconstruct Yahi culture. He described family units, naming patterns, and the ceremonies that he knew, but much tradition had been lost because there were few older survivors in the group in which he was raised. He identified material items and showed the techniques by which they were made. Ishi provided valuable information on his native Yana language, which was recorded and studied by the linguist Edward Sapir, who had previously done work on the northern dialects.

Illness and death

Ishi, having come to live in San Francisco, and having no immunity to the 'diseases of civilization,' was often ill. He was treated by a Professor of Medicine at UCSF, Saxton T. Pope. Pope became close friends with Ishi, and learned from him how to make bows and arrows in the Yahi way. He and Ishi often hunted together.

Ishi died of tuberculosis on March 25, 1916. His friends at the university initially had tried to prevent an autopsy on Ishi's body since the body was to be kept intact according to Yahi tradition, but the doctors at the University of California medical school performed one before Waterman was able to stop it. Ishi's brain was preserved and the body cremated. Included alongside his remains were "one of his bows, five arrows, a basket of acorn meal, a boxful of shell bead money, a purse full of tobacco, three rings, and some obsidian flakes." Ishi's remains were interred at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Colma, near San Francisco,^[7] but his brain was put in a deerskin-wrapped Pueblo Indian pottery jar and sent to the Smithsonian Institution by Kroeber in 1917, where it remained until August 10, 2000, when descendants of the Redding Rancheria and Pit River tribes received the brain, according to both the letter and the spirit of the National Museum of the American Indian Act of 1989 (NMAI).^[8] According to Robert Fri, director of the National Museum of Natural History, "Contrary to commonly-held belief, Ishi was not the last of his kind. In carrying out the repatriation process we learned that as a Yahi-Yana Indian his closest living descendants are the Yana people of northern California."^[9] Once the brain and remains were returned, further information about them has remained private.^[8]

Possibly multi-ethnic

Ishi in 1914

In 1996, M. Steven Shackley of UC Berkeley announced work based on a study of Ishi's projectile points and those of the northern tribes. He had found that points made by Ishi were not typical of those recovered from historical Yahi sites. Because Ishi's production was more typical of points of the Nomlaki or Wintu tribes and markedly dissimilar to those of Yahi, Shackley suggested that Ishi may have been only half Yahi and of mixed ancestry, related to another of the tribes.^[10] He based his conclusion on a comparative study of the points that had Ishi made and others held by the museum from the Yahi, Nomlaki and Wintu cultures. 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.^[11] As it was a traditional technique of the Nomlaki and Wintu tribes, the finding suggests Ishi may have learned the skill directly from a male relative from one of those tribes. Also small groups, they lived close to the Yahi lands and were traditional competitors and enemies of the Yahi.^[11]

In 1994, Shackley had heard a paper by Jerald Johnson, who noted morphological evidence that Ishi's facial features and height were more typical of the Wintu and Maidu. He theorized that under pressure of diminishing populations, members of groups that were once enemies may have intermarried to survive. To further support this, Johnson presented oral histories from the Wintu and Maidu that told of the tribes' intermarrying with the Yahi.^[10] The debate on this has not been definitively settled, however, and the possibility of establishing the circumstances of his birth probably died with him.

Legacy

• The anthropologist Theodora Kroeber, also the wife of Alfred Kroeber, popularized Ishi's story in her book Ishi in Two Worlds (1961). She worked with her husband's notes and comments to create the story of a man she had never met, publishing it after Alfred's death.
• Robert F. Heizer and Theodora Kroeber edited Ishi the Last Yahi: A Documentary History (1981), which contained additional scholarly materials.^[12]
• In 2003, anthropologists Clifton and Karl Kroeber, sons of Theodora and Alfred Kroeber, edited Ishi in Three Centuries,^[13] the first scholarly book on Ishi to contain essays by Native Americans. Native writers, such as Gerald Vizenor, had been commenting on the case since the late 1970s.
• The Duke University anthropologist Orin Starn updated Ishi's story in his book, Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian (2004).^[14] He recounted his quest for the remains of the last of the Yahi, while interpreting what Ishi meant to Americans then and modern Indians today. (In 2000 Ishi's brain was reunited with his cremated remains.)
• The Ishi Wilderness Area in northeastern California, believed to be the ancestral grounds of his tribe, is named in his honor.
• Due to a campaign by Gerald Vizenor, the courtyard in Dwinelle Hall at the University of California, Berkeley was renamed "Ishi Court".
• Ishi is revered by flintknappers as probably one of the last two native stone tool makers in North America. His techniques are widely imitated by knappers, and ethnographic accounts of his toolmaking are considered to be the Rosetta Stone of lithic tool manufacture.^[15]
• Krober and Waterman's 148 wax cylinder recordings (totaling 5 hours and 41 minutes) of Ishi speaking, singing, and telling stories in the Yahi language were selected by the Library of Congress as a 2010 addition to the National Recording Registry, which selects recordings annually that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".^[16]

In popular culture

• 1964, Theodora Kroeber published a shorter, partially fictionalized version of the story as Ishi: Last of His Tribe.
• Lawrence Holcomb published a novel titled The Last Yahi: A Novel About Ishi (2000).^[17]
• Ishi: The Last of His Tribe, with Eloy Casados in the title role, telecast on NBC December 20, 1978. The film was written by Christopher Trumbo.^[18]
• The Last of His Tribe (1992), with Graham Greene as Ishi, was also produced as a TV movie.^[19]
• Jed Riffe created an award-winning documentary film Ishi: The Last Yahi (1992).^[20][21]
• "In Search of History: Ishi, the Last of His Kind" was a 1998 television documentary.
• Ishi (2008), a play written by John Fisher, was performed from July 3–27, 2008, at Theatre Rhinoceros in San Francisco. He also directed it. A review in the San Francisco Chronicle said the work "is a fierce dramatic indictment of the ugliest side of California history."^[22]
• Author George R. Stewart gave the name "Ish" (short for Isherwood) to the protagonist in his novel Earth Abides, a post-apocalyptic novel in which Ish emerges from his cabin in the mountains to find a plague of mass proportions had swept through the United States, leaving him to be the last of his "tribe," the Americans. Although, in fact, Stewart's hero Ish was NOT the last of the Americans.

See also

• Uncontacted peoples

References

Further reading

• Kroeber, Theodora; Kroeber, Karl (2002). Ishi in two worlds : a biography of the last wild Indian in North America. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-22940-2. OCLC 50805975 
• Merton, Thomas (1976). Ishi means man. Unicorn keepsake series 8. foreword by Dorothy Day, woodblock by Rita Corbin. Greensboro, N. C.: Unicorn Press. 
• Waterman, T. T. (1917). "Ishi, the Last Yahi Indian". The Southern Workman 46. Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. pp. 528–537.  See also audio narration at LibriVox's Short Nonfiction Collection Vol. 026 (2012).
• Waterman, T. T. (January 1915). "The Last Wild Tribe of California". Popular Science Monthly 86. pp. 233–244. 

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ishi.

• Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last 'Wild' Indian Starn, Orin, New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. (ISBN 0-393-05133-1)
• "A Compromise between Science and Sentiment: A Report on Ishi's Treatment at the University of California, 1911–1916", University of California, San Francisco
• Ishi being from two tribes, Press Release, UC Berkeley
• Ishi: The Last Yahi (1992) documentary synopsis
• Ishi: The Last Yahi (1992) at the Internet Movie Database
• Richard Burrill, "Synopsis of Ishi's Life", Ishi Facts Website
• Books on Ishi by Richard Burrill
• Saxton Pope, Hunting with the Bow and Arrow, includes discussion about Ishi
• Saxton Pope, "Yahi Archery", University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, The Archery Library