Ishi, The Survivor

Joanne Freeman: Not everybody who has sought solitude has shared Thoreau’s thirst for transcendence. There have been people who had to retreat into isolation for their safety as a way to survive.

Ed Ayers: In late August of 1911, a young worker was walking through a slaughterhouse in Oroville, California when he came across a startling sight. It was a man he did not know. The man was emaciated and despondent.

Jace Weaver: He was searching for food. There was no sense that he was turning himself in or acquiescing in any way.

Ed Ayers: This is Jace Weaver. He’s the Director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia. Weaver says the starving man was the last known survivor of a tribe called the Yahi. After he was found in the slaughterhouse, the man was put under the supervision of an anthropologist named Alfred Kroeber. Kroeber decided to give the indigenous man a name.

Jace Weaver: Ishi just means man in the Yana language, because under the protocol of the Yana, a person can’t give his name until another Yahi introduces him, and there was no one left to introduce him, so Kroeber just named him man.

Ed Ayers: There was no one left to introduce Ishi because the rest of his family and his tribe had died, disappeared, or been killed. In 1865 the Yahi were attacked by whites in the Three Knolls Massacre. They killed more than half the tribe. 33 of the Yahi survived, but they continued to be attacked by ranchers and hunters. Therefore, Ishi and his family decided to go into hiding and avoid white people as much as possible. They stayed in this solitude for more than 40 years, but despite their efforts, grief still found Ishi and his family.

Jace Weaver: He had a terrifying encounter when some engineer surveyors were coming through. He and his sister panicked and ran in opposite directions, and he never saw his sister again.

Ed Ayers: By 1911, Ishi was about 50 years old and alone. When he was found searching for food, Ishi’s hair was still burned short. This was an act of mourning for the Yahi. Ishi’s mother had recently died. She was the last of his companions. Now, without speaking a word of English, Ishi is thrust into Western society and is taken to live at the Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco.

Jace Weaver: It was reported in the newspapers when Kroeber returned with him. The public flocked to the museum. Ishi hated crowds. He hated to be touched. He learned to shake hands politely. He would readily put out his hand if someone stuck theirs out, but he never initiated handshakes. He would literally, in the face of a faceless crowd, panic, have a panic attack. He would go rigid. He would lose speech. Yet Kroeber did turn down all more exploitative offers to put him on the vaudeville circuit. He saw himself as a protector of Ishi.

Ed Ayers: What kind of language did the press use to describe Ishi?

Jace Weaver: The last wild Indian. Whatever’s meant by last and whatever’s meant by wild, that wasn’t Ishi, although he was the last Yahi. This label of the last wild Indian was a large part of his appeal and fascination with the public. During this period, anthropologists, as well as all Americans, thought that Indians were vanishing, and so here was their last chance to see an Indian as he was.

Speaker 11: An opportunity to see Ishi, the uncontaminated Aborigin recently discovered near Oroville and believed to be the last wild Indian in the country, will be given to the public Sunday afternoon at the Museum of Anthropology. Curator A.L. Kroeber of the museum has arranged to have Ishi on exhibition from 1:00 until 4:00. Between those hours, Ishi will allow the people of the city to inspect him weaving a fishnet, chipping arrow points, or engaged in some other Native occupation. San Francisco Chronicle, October 14th, 1911.

Ed Ayers: Kroeber and a colleague decided they wanted to see where Ishi had lived and they go on a camping trip. Can you tell us about that?

Jace Weaver: Yes. Kroeber and Saxton Pope persuaded Ishi over Ishi’s own objections to accompany them on a camping trip back to his homelands. Theodore Kroeber, who wrote the book, Ishi, and she says he was happy on the trip, but all of her evidence belies that. He was distracted. He was fidgety. Remember, it was where his last relatives had died. It was for him a land of the dead. When Kroeber suggests that they have to get back to the city, Ishi, who hated horseback riding, immediately packed up the base camp and got on the horse and was ready to go. In fact, Kroeber and Pope hated to go back to civilization, quote unquote. They wanted to stay longer, even though Ishi was clearly agitated.

Ed Ayers: Weaver says this camping trip shows how Ishi was caught between two worlds of torment. At the museum he’s seen as a spectacle and living exhibit. Meanwhile back in his homeland he’s met with nothing but the memory of death and despair. Nevertheless, Ishi endured life at the museum, but only for five years. He died of tuberculosis in 1916.

Jace Weaver: Kroeber is away at the time, and he wires Saxton Pope, who was a physician. He did not want an autopsy. Ishi had stumbled one day in on Pope in the dissection room and saw these bodies in various stages of dissection and was horrified and appalled. Kroeber, again trying to be protective, wires Pope and says, “An autopsy would not do anything other than be macabre. If it’s said that it’s the interest of science, tell them I say science can go to hell,” but it arrived too late and Pope had already performed the autopsy.

Ed Ayers: There’s continuing controversy about this, right, about the consequences of that autopsy?

Jace Weaver: Yes. Ishi’s brain was separated from his body and was sent to an anthropologist at the Smithsonian in Washington. Although Ichi’s body was there, his brain was not with it. It wasn’t until the 1990s that it was found, the Smithsonian saying it was in a curatorial facility in Silver Spring, Maryland, and they didn’t know anybody had been looking for it.

Ed Ayers: Then there’s a reburial in 2000 is my understanding?

Jace Weaver: Correct, reuniting his brain with his ashes. I assume that the brain was cremated as well.

Ed Ayers: Not surprisingly and not without cause, white Americans feel guilty for the enormous death and destruction they unleashed among indigenous people. Do you think there’s a kind of compensation that people are searching for when they go to the museum to see Ishi?

Jace Weaver: Yes, I think that’s right. You’re probably familiar with what’s called Chief Seattle’s Speech.

Ed Ayers: Tell me about that.

Jace Weaver: Chief Seattle was a chief in the Puget Sound area. In 1855 he signed a treaty agreeing to leave where Seattle now is and go to a reservation on another part of the Sound. He made a speech that day. In the early 1970s a version of that speech became wildly popular because it talked about we’re all related, interconnected, there’s a web of existence, but that version bore no resemblance to the speech that was recorded that day, taken down that day. It was made up for an environmental documentary by a screenwriter. The end of the ’73 speech is, “No one can escape the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We shall see.” The version that was recorded that day, at the end Chief Seattle says, “When your children and your children’s children think themselves alone, we’ll be there with them. They will never be alone. The teeming masses of my dead will be there with them, so let them treat Indians justly, for the dead are not all together powerless.”

Ed Ayers: Jace Weaver is the Director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia.