“You Can Call Me Ishi”

My name is Ishi but you could call me Ishmael, for I too am an exile, a social outcast, a victim of robbery, the last surviving member of a small society (Melville, 1851; T. Kroeber, 1961/2002). ¹ The anthropologists named me Ishi, Kroeber said I was the last man in the stone age. I was born in 1860 and died in 1916. I came out of the Northern California mountains in an undershirt and rags. First you put me in jail, then you put me on a train and took me to San Francisco and put me in a museum next to a room that contained human bones. You dressed me up in Western clothes, and then asked me to pose bare-chested for photographers and journalists.

You said I was shy at first, but gentle and had a good sense of humor. You said I sometimes used pantomime to make myself understood. You said I blushed easily, was easily embarrassed, and I learned very little English (T. Kroeber, 1961/2002). The newspapers said I was civilization’s last wild man, a well-born Yahi. You put me behind glass. You recorded my voice and transcribed my stories. Hucksters wanted the museum to promote a two-man act of me and Kroeber. It would be for educational and edifying purposes (T. Kroeber, 1961/2002). On Sunday afternoons between two and four-thirty, Krober and I received visitors to the museum. Later the museum made a movie of me entering, leaving, and working in my little museum house (T. Kroeber, 1961/2002).

When I died, you sent me brain to the Smithsonian. I was cremated, and my ashes remained in a small black Pueblo jar for 80 years in Mount Olivet cemetery.

Call me Ishi, it was never my name. I never told them my real name. Kroeber, the Big Chiep, named me Ishi, which means man in Yana, my language, one of the people. I am last man. I am absence. I am Gerald Vizenor’s postindian. You gave me a watch but I cannot tell time.

Call me Ishi. I lived in exile, a fugitive pursued by pioneers and miners bent on genocide, 25 cents a scalp. $5 for an Indian’s head.

I am part of your creation story. I was there before there

was a beginning, before there were Indians. There are no real in Indians. The word is an invention. I am a simulation, I am trickster, coyote, a make-believe aboriginal.

You put me on stage as if in a Wild West Show, like one of the Indians in George Catlin’s Traveling Indian Gallery (Catlin, 1848a, 1848b; Denzin, 2013).

I told tricky Wood Duck stories, smiled,

made bows and arrows, chipped arrowheads out of

pieces of broken glass, built campfires.

I said I want to grow old here.

I was like Gloria Anzaldua’s Indian,

safely locked up in a reservation

or urban ghetto, or

behind glass in the museum (Anzaldua, 1987, p. 183

paraphrase). I never learned how to shake hands,

I never went bare-chested, wore leather clothes,

or feathers.

I smiled at tourists, I was more than

a starved-out Indian from the wilds of Dear Creek.

Big Chief said I had perceptive powers far keener than those of highly educated White men, a higher mentality than most Indians.

You said I proved that an Indian from the wilds can be civilized.

I gained 40 pounds in two months of captivity

I was a native hunter in a museum, I bought a certificate

that said I was an Indian but there is nobody left from my tribe.

I am a tribe of one, I am my own sovereign tribal nation, I am an artist, I am a man. I am as real as every fictional Indian: Noble Savage, proud warrior Tonto, Little Beaver, Squanto, Pocahontas, Chief Joseph, Geronimo, Sacajawea, Crazy Horse, Hiawatha Big Foot. Yippee ki-yay. I even went to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. And a Sioux Indian asked what Tribe is Indian is this?

Everywhere I turned they were taking my picture. I became an expert on matters of lighting, posing and exposure. They sold

photographs of me to tourists. They dressed me up as a civilized man, a suit, tie, leather shoes. I died of TB in a museum. They divided my estate between the state and the hospital. The medical school got $265.

You found my brain in a vat at the Smithsonian. Friends returned my brain and my ashes to a sacred site in my homeland.

“My name is Ishmael” or “I am Ishmael,” but rather “Call me Ishmael” (Melville, 1851). Never call me Ishi. “My name is Ishmael” or “I am Ishmael,” but rather “Call me Ishmael,” your orphan, your outcast (Melville, 1851).