ISHI, THE LAST OF THE NATIVE AMERICAN YAHI PEOPLE

Ishi

Today, The Grandma has received the amazing visit of one of her closest friends, Joseph de Ca'th Lon. Joseph loves Anthropology, Archaeology and Astronomy and he spends a lot of time talking with her.

They have been talking about Ishi who is considered the last Native American to make contact with European Americans, and emerged from the wilderness of northeastern California on a day like today in 1911.

Native American is a minority nowadays. They fought against the colonizers, the white man, to preserve their lands and their culture but they were killed, massacred and ignored.

Joseph and The Grandma want to talk about Ishi to pay homage to all of those Native American Tribes that were victims of one the worst genocides of the history.

Ishi (c. 1861-March 25, 1916) was the last known member of the Native American Yahi people from the present-day state of California in the United States.

The rest of the Yahi, as well as many members of their parent tribe, the Yana, were killed in the California genocide in the 19th century.

Ishi, who was widely acclaimed as the last wild Indian in America, lived most of his life isolated from modern American culture.

In 1911, aged 50, he emerged near the foothills of Lassen Peak in Northern California.

Ishi, which means man in the Yana language, is an adopted name. The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber gave him this name because in the Yahi culture, tradition demanded that he not speak his own name until formally introduced by another Yahi. When asked his name, he said: I have none, because there were no people to name me, meaning that there was no other Yahi to speak his name on his behalf.

More information: Universitiy of California, San Francisco

Ishi was taken in by anthropologists at the University of California, Berkeley, who both studied him and hired him as a janitor.

He lived most of his remaining five years in a university building in San Francisco. His life was depicted and discussed in multiple films and books, notably the biographical account Ishi in Two Worlds published by Theodora Kroeber in 1961.

In 1865, Ishi and his family were attacked in the Three Knolls Massacre, in which 40 of their tribesmen were killed. Although 33 Yahi survived to escape, cattlemen killed about half of the survivors.

The last survivors, including Ishi and his family, went into hiding for the next 44 years. Their tribe was popularly believed to be extinct. Prior to the California Gold Rush of 1848–1855, the Yahi population numbered 404 in California, but the total Yana in the larger region numbered 2,997.

Ishi

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 infectious diseases such as smallpox and measles.

The northern Yana group became extinct while the central and southern groups, who later became part of Redding Rancheria, and Yahi populations dropped dramatically. Searching for food, they came into conflict with settlers, who set bounties of 50 cents per scalp and 5 dollars per head on the natives. In 1865, the settlers attacked the Yahi while they were still asleep.

In late 1908, a group of surveyors came across the camp inhabited by two men, a middle-aged woman, and an elderly woman. These were Ishi, his uncle, his younger sister, and his mother, respectively. The former three fled while the latter hid herself in blankets to avoid detection, as she was sick and unable to flee. The surveyors ransacked the camp, and Ishi's mother died soon after his return. His sister and uncle never returned.

After the 1908 attack, Ishi spent three more years in the wilderness, alone. Finally, starving and with nowhere to go, at around the age of 50, on August 29, 1911, Ishi was captured attempting to forage for meat near Oroville, California, after forest fires in the area.

More information: All That's Interesting

The local sheriff took the man into custody for his 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, then housed on the University of California, San Francisco campus in an old law school building.

Studied by the university, Ishi also worked as a janitor and lived in an apartment at the museum for most of the remaining five years of his life.

Ishi

In June 1915, he temporarily lived in Berkeley with the anthropologist Thomas Talbot Waterman and his family. Waterman and Alfred L. Kroeber, director of the museum, studied Ishi closely over the years and interviewed him at length in an effort to reconstruct Yahi culture.

He described family units, naming patterns, and the ceremonies that he knew.

Much tradition had already been lost when he was growing up, as there were few older survivors in his group. 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.

Lacking acquired immunity to the diseases common among European Americans, Ishi was often ill. He was treated by Saxton T. Pope, a professor of medicine at UCSF. 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.

More information: The Vintage News

Ishi died of tuberculosis on March 25, 1916. It is said his last words were You stay. I go.  His friends at the university tried to prevent an autopsy on Ishi's body, since Yahi tradition called for the body to remain intact. However, the doctors at the University of California medical school performed an autopsy before Waterman could prevent it.

Ishi's brain was preserved and the body cremated. His friends placed grave goods with his remains before cremation: 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.

Kroeber put Ishi's preserved brain in a deerskin-wrapped Pueblo Indian pottery jar and sent it to the Smithsonian Institution in 1917.

Ishi

It was held there until August 10, 2000, when the Smithsonian repatriated it to the descendants of the Redding Rancheria and Pit River tribes. This was in accordance with the National Museum of the American Indian Act of 1989 (NMAI).

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. His remains were also returned from Colma, and the tribal members intended to bury them in a secret place.

In 1994, Steven Shackley of UC Berkeley learned of 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. Johnson also referred to oral histories of the Wintu and Maidu that told of the tribes' intermarrying with the Yahi. The debate on this remains unsettled.

In 1996, Shackley 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.

More information: Smithsonian-Repatriation Office

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 of mixed ancestry, and related to and raised among members of another of the tribes. He based his conclusion on a study of the points made by Ishi compared to others held by the museum from the Yahi, Nomlaki and Wintu cultures.

Among Ishi's techniques was the use of what is known as an Ishi stick, used to run long pressure flakes. This is known to be a traditional technique of the Nomlaki and Wintu tribes. This suggests that Ishi may have learned the skill directly from a male relative of one of those tribes. These people lived in small bands, close to the Yahi. They were traditional competitors and enemies of the Yahi.

Ishi's story has been compared to that of Ota Benga, an Mbuti pygmy from Congo. His family had died and were not given a mourning ritual. He was taken from his home and culture. During one period, he was displayed as a zoo exhibit. Ota shot himself in the heart on March 20, 1916, five days before Ishi's death.

More information: Boom California

If you won’t believe in yourself, who will?

Ishi