Identity crisis
Scholar re-examines the life and lasting controversy of Ishi
Reviewed by Elizabeth Corcoran
Sunday, February 8, 2004
Ishi's Brain: In Search of the Last "Wild" Indian
By Orin Starn
NORTON 352 PAGES; $25.95
Great legends are allegories, stories that impart a deep moral lesson even if they have to fudge the facts to do so. Over the decades, the story of Ishi, typically billed as "California's last wild Indian," grew to legendary proportions. Now, "Ishi's Brain: In Search of the Last 'Wild' Indian," by Orin Starn, an anthropologist at Duke University, aims to strip away the moralistic veneer of the Ishi legend.
Told like a detective story, "Ishi's Brain" is a compelling, and at times, agonizing story of human fallibility, of conflicting good intentions gone awry.
First the history: In 1911, a half-naked, starving man stumbled into the yard of a slaughterhouse outside of Oroville (Butte County), about 150 miles northeast of San Francisco. He did not understand any language spoken to him including a local Indian tongue, Maidu. Someone suggested that he might have belonged to a tribe that, many years earlier, was believed to be responsible for raids on white townspeople.
The day after he was found, the town paper ran a banner headline: "Aboriginal Indian, the last of the Deer Creeks, captured near Oroville." Alfred Kroeber, of the University of California at Berkeley, immediately sent a colleague to Oroville to take custody of the Indian. (At the time, American Indians were considered wards of the state, receiving citizenship only in 1924.) The anthropologist ascertained that the Indian spoke a dialect of Yana. The scientist consequently dubbed the language "Yahi," and named the Indian "Ishi," which sounded like "I'citi," his word for "man." He appeared to be the last surviving member of his tribe.
Kroeber moved Ishi into quarters in his new museum by Golden Gate Park. Ishi became friendly with the museum staff, demonstrated how to chip arrowheads for tourists and recounted songs and stories into early audio recording devices for the Berkeley anthropologists. In March 1916, he died of tuberculosis.
Against Ishi's expressed wishes, a doctor autopsied his body, removing and preserving his brain. The body was later cremated in a private ceremony and the ashes stored in a black Pueblo Indian pot at the Olivet Memorial Park in Colma. In 1961, Kroeber's wife, Theodora, published "Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America." Told with all the flourish and moral underpinnings of a legend, it became a best-seller. As Starn points out, even though Theodora vividly described the massacres of the Yahi people, Ishi's forbearers, she wanted her story to be about healing: Ishi survived thanks to the kindness of her husband, Alfred, and other white protectors. Once settled at the museum, Ishi embraced these people as his "intimate friends," Theodora wrote. But Theodora was loose with facts and omitted some key points, including the fate of Ishi's brain.
Starn spent about two years poking around into the history of Ishi. Even Starn's library research takes on an air of suspense with the rich mosaic of detail he provides: "I decided to take one more look at the Bancroft Library. The Bancroft closed at three, which only left me forty-five minutes before the doors shut for good until after the New Year. ... I checked my bag, signed the register, and showed my ID as now required to enter the library's oak-paneled reading room."
At last, Ishi's pickled brain is found. It is floating around in a vat of preserving solution (along with 32 other brains) in a Maryland warehouse maintained by the Smithsonian Institution. No one was happy. Indian tribes were angry that the Smithsonian still had the brain. Officials at the Smithsonian were vexed by the uproar over a specimen that had been forgotten for decades. Sorting out the legitimate heirs to the brain of someone billed as the "last" of his kind was fraught with tension. Leaders of one tribe, the Maidu, had set Starn on the trail of the brain. But another tribe, the Pit River Indians, claimed closer linguistic ties to Ishi. The Pit River Indians won and then snubbed the Maidu by not inviting them to the burial ceremony.
Starn does not shirk from describing these clashes. Many of his characters' decisions are flawed by ambition. Ishi, too, comes under scrutiny. Starn locates a couple of Indians who can understand some of the songs that Ishi recorded decades ago. They are dismayed. "He shouldn't have sung those songs," explains an elderly woman. "They were given by the spirit to the medicine man." Why would Ishi choose those songs? Starn wonders. He recalls hearing a story told by Indians that cast Ishi as a malevolent shaman expelled by his tribe.
But even as he seeks to correct the historical record, Starn, like Theodora, wants to be a peacemaker. He wants us to understand everybody's motives -- the doctor who chose to dissect Ishi; Kroeber, who packed off the brain to a distant museum; Theodora, who sugar-coated the story; the Smithsonian officials, who tarried over the decision to repatriate Ishi's remains; the Indian tribes who clashed over the right to bury the brain. By leaving the nuances and complexities in the story, Starn has completed the transformation of Ishi -- from man, to legend, and now, at last, back into mortal man again.
Elizabeth Corcoran is a contributing editor to Forbes.
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/02/08/RVGQ94K8721.DTL
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