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Clifford-Ishi's Story ISHI’S STORY From: James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the 21st Century. (Harvard University Press 2013, pp. 91-191) Pre-publication version. [Frontispiece: Drawing by L. Frank, used courtesy of the artist. A self-described “decolonizationist” L. Frank traces her ancestry to the Ajachmem/Tongva tribes of Southern California. She is active in organizations dedicated to the preservation and renewal of California’s indigenous cultures. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited world wide and her coyote drawings from News from Native California are collected in Acorn Soup, published in 1998 by Heyday Press. Like coyote, L. Frank sometimes writes backwards.] 2 Chapter 4 Ishi’s Story "Ishi's Story" could mean “the story of Ishi,” recounted by a historian or some other authority who gathers together what is known with the goal of forming a coherent, definitive picture. No such perspective is available to us, however. The story is unfinished and proliferating. My title could also mean “Ishi's own story,” told by Ishi, or on his behalf, a narration giving access to his feelings, his experience, his judgments. But we have only suggestive fragments and enormous gaps: a silence that calls forth more versions, images, endings. “Ishi’s story,” tragic and redemptive, has been told and re-told, by different people with different stakes in the telling. These interpretations in changing times are the materials for my discussion. I. Terror and Healing On August 29th, 1911, a "wild man,” so the story goes, stumbled into civilization. He was cornered by dogs at a slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Oroville, a small town in Northern California. The man had been hiding for forty years with a dwindling remnant of his kin in the steep ravines of Mill Creek and Deer Creek, feeder streams of the Sacramento River in the Mt. Lassen foothills. His people, the "Yahi," were virtually exterminated by white settler militias in the late 1800s. Some fled north, taking refuge and intermarying with other Indian groups around 3 Redding and the Pit River. Those who stayed were pursued, killed, kidnapped, and starved, until only a single individual remained in Deer Creek. The man's remarkable story has come down to us-- an unfinished legacy of the Gold Rush, that epochal disaster for Native Californians. The survivor, a Yana-speaking Indian, whose personal or family names were never revealed, is known to us simply as "Ishi," a label affixed in 1911 by the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, and made famous fifty years later by Theodora Kroeber's great book. 4 Figure 1 (Ishi in Two Worlds original cover) Theodora Kroeber, Alfred Kroeber's second wife and widow, published Ishi in Two Worlds in 1961. This " biography of the last wild Indian in America" was an instant classic, widely translated and a perennial best-seller for the University of California Press. The original cover 5 photo, reproduced in many later editions shows Ishi in his Mlll Creek habitat--an image of pre- contact Indian life, close to the ground. It is a staged performance. For the photo was taken near the end of Ishi's life, after four years in San Francisco, during a return trip instigated by his anthropologist friends. Ishi’s face, in partial shadow that has been intensified in the printing, suggests a primitive mask. Figure 2 This 2007 edition of Ishi in Two Worlds includes a much-expanded selection of photos showing Ishi in many garbs and poses, plus images drawn from the late-nineteenth century historical 6 record. The cover has been redesigned to suit the changing times. All elements suggesting primitiveness are gone. Ishi is visible in a suit and tie; and the somewhat distanced “object” of an ethnographic gaze from the earlier covers is now a divided, complex “subject.” Seen up close, with part of his face outside the frame, Ishi’s expression is proud, troubled, ambiguous… The photograph, taken at the time of Ishi’s capture, transmits a more defiant mood than more familiar images. 7 Figure 3 (Ishi at the Oroville jail) 8 The most reproduced image of the “wild man” was taken in 1911 by a local photographer at the Oroville jail. Ishi was held there temporarily, prior to the arrival of Kroeber's assistant, Thomas Waterman, who would take the refugee to a new home in San Francisco. In the photograph, his fear and emaciation (very different from the well-fed man in the 1961 cover photo) are evident. Normally the Yahi’s hair would have been long, but following custom he has burned his short, in mourning for his deceased family. The image is a powerful construct. A weird lack of background-- the result of a backdrop, and perhaps of some work in the darkroom—makes the man seem completely cut off. Hovering nowhere, almost extraterrestrial, a lost soul... Stripped of any context, he is pure artifact, available for collection; pure victim, ready to be rescued. Theodora Kroeber's book about "Ishi" made this name-of-convenience familiar, personal, even intimate through its absorbing account of the refugee's life in San Francisco where he became something of a celebrity. For five years, he lived and worked at the University of California's Museum of Anthropology. There he was employed as a custodian, and on Sundays, he would cheerfully demonstrate Yahi techniques of arrowhead manufacture and archery for eager crowds. The Indian was also a willing ethnographic informant, particularly in the areas of oral tradition, technology, and language. Many remarked on his "gentlemanly" restraint, his decency and humor. Confronted with the civilization of San Francisco the Yahi sustained a mix of curiosity and reserve. He was less impressed by airplanes than by doorknobs, spring loaded window- shades, and matches. What terrors he certainly felt (of crowds, of human bones stored at the anthropology museum), he largely kept to himself. In 1916, Ishi succumbed to the tuberculosis that was widespread at the time, and particularly dangerous to Native Californians. Ishi's name, during his five years at the museum, would become closely intertwined with that of his friend and protector, Alfred Kroeber, a towering figure in North American anthropology, and founder of the discipline at the new University of California. A relationship of respect and loyalty 9 developed between them—a friendship conditioned by both men’s sense of restraint, by Ishi’s dependence on someone he called “Big Chiep,” and by the demands of science. Over time, their relationship has come to be burdened with significance, and so Ishi’s story is also, inescapably, Kroeber’s. Theodora Kroeber evokes Ishi's time in San Francisco with skill and compassion. While she never knew the subject of her biography, she had access to many who remembered him vividly, most notably, of course, her husband, who died just before the book’s publication. She also drew on a substantial collection of photographic, acoustic, and documentary records preserved by the Berkeley Anthropology Museum (Jacknis 2008). While recent scholars such as Orin Starn, writing from different places of hindsight, have identified factual errors and have questioned some of her emphases (as I do here), Ishi in Two Worlds remains crucial. It is still the source for most of what we know about Ishi’s life. With a generous appreciation of human complexity and an eye for the telling detail, Theodora Kroeber, a novice author, created a masterpiece. Reading her, generations have come to know the man called "Ishi." This knowledge is a mixture of insight and blindness. The book’s compelling human portrait often makes it hard to recall the severe limits on what was actually known of this man by her principal sources. We forget how little Yahi Alfred Kroeber and his colleagues spoke, and how rudimentary was the Yahi's English. His stories and songs, more than fifty hours preserved on wax recording cylinders, remain very partially understood--for there was no other source for Ishi's language, a dialect of the Yana group. The man's excited voice comes across the decades. He loved, apparently, to tell stories. We hear his words distantly, with only a fragmentary sense of what he was trying to say, or to whom. 10 Ishi’s story does not end in 1917, or with its most influential re-telling four decades later. His death and its aftermath are still charged with meaning for diverse California audiences. And it is increasingly significant today that the human portrait created by Ishi in Two Worlds was not based on the views of Native Californians. Though Theodora Kroeber apparently did not feel the need to seek out and include, native perspectives on this resonant life, she knew and was friendly with California Indians. The Cherokee Scholar Karen Biestman (2003: 148) notes the omission. “Had Mrs. Kroeber consulted Natives in the region…she might have heard narratives of intermarriage, shared experiences, and mutual histories. Ishi’s life and Yana existence are alive in the oral traditions of these people…” Biestman goes on to recognize the value of Ishi in Two Worlds, given the 1950s “termination” period, a time when stereotypic Cowboys and Indians populated the general culture, and complex, sympathetic images of tribal people were rare. As we will see, the historical moment has shifted. Theodora Kroeber’s perspective seems more partial and her book has become meaningful in new ways, viewed from different distances. Ishi wouldn't talk about his family--the dead; and we have no idea why, exactly, he walked out of hiding toward Oroville where the dogs cornered him. Why did he travel south? Where was he going? It has long been assumed that, lonely and exhausted, he was simply giving himself up… to white civilization.
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