Ishi's Brain: in Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian

Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian by Orin Starn W. W. Norton & Company, 2004; $25.95

When Orin Starn visited the Olivet Memorial Park cemetery, just south of San Francisco, several years ago, he could not help noting how strange it was that America's last "wild" Indian now rested in a stark white columbarium flanked by a row of faux Greek columns. Ishi had spent most of his fifty-odd years hunting and gathering along the creeks of northern California. Now his ashes lay behind the glass window of Niche 601, in a black pot of Pueblo Indian origin. Ishi's history, it seems, had ended as incongruously as it had begun.

In August 1911 newspapers nationwide reported the discovery of a starving man crouching in the backyard of a slaughterhouse near the northern California town of Oroville. He wore only a tattered denim shirt, carried a rough sack with some manzanita berries and dried meat inside, and spoke a language no one understood. The anthropologist Alfred Lewis Kroeber, suspecting that Ishi was a cultural fossil, had him brought to San Francisco. Kroeber settled Ishi at the newly opened Museum of Anthropology and saw to it that he was hired as a part-time janitor.

Ishi ultimately adapted well, even to his duties as a "living exhibit," putting on Sunday demonstrations of arrowhead making and other native arts for eager crowds of visitors. He learned to converse in broken English and developed a taste for doughnuts and ice-cream sodas. Professors came west to interview him, take down his utterances, and make wax cylinders of his chants. When he died of tuberculosis in March 1916, the San Francisco Examiner reported that he had been cremated "according to the customs of the California tribes," along with his bow and arrows, some acorn meal, and a pouch of tobacco.

But Ishi's story had only begun. Over the years, Californians transformed him into an icon of an unspoiled past they'd never known, the one that existed before the missions, the forty-niners, the farmers, and the freeways turned the state's promised land into a nightmare. In 1961 Kroeber's widow Theodora wrote a best seller portraying Ishi as a noble savage; the book became a favorite of the 1960s flower children.

In the 1980s and 1990s, newly empowered Native Americans began to retell Ishi's story as a case study in cultural imperialism. In 1997 Art Angle, a political activist and a descendent of the Maidu, neighbors of Ishi's Yahi kinfolk, organized an effort to rebury Ishi in the old Yahi territory near Mount Lassen. Rumors circulated among some of the Maidu that Ishi's brain had been removed for scientific study just after his death, though it was not clear what had happened to it after that.

Starn, a cultural anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, played a role in finding the brain, which had been preserved in a jar and sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and he writes with undisguised empathy for the California tribespeople who brought Ishi home. But he's too much of a scholar not to note the cultural ironies of the case. Little is known of Ishi's Yahi ancestors, and practically nothing of Ishi himself. But even before he set foot in San Francisco, Ishi was no unspoiled innocent. He wore garments of factory-made cloth, foraged for food near homesteads and general stores, and even spoke a few words in the language of his neighbors (Maidu and perhaps Spanish).

The various tribes of native Americans who contributed to bringing about his reinterment have more culture in common with each other--and with the residents of Brooklyn--than they do with Ishi's ancestors. They drive gasoline-powered vehicles, watch the NFL on the tube, and pay more heed to Arnold Schwarzenegger than to the spirits of the hills and woodlands. In the end, the lessons of Ishi's story have more to do with managing cultural identity in the modern era than with returning to Ishi's way of life.

Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Supernova Story, is the W. K. T. Sahm professor of physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.

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