Abstract
A two-act play/performance text inspired by James Luna’s performance of “Ishi: The Archive Performance”: Boston, July 2014, text courtesy of Elena Creef; see also Johns (2014).3 Contrary to Theodora Kroeber, Ishi’s story did not end with the publication of her book Ishi in Two Worlds (1961; also Kroeber and Kroeber, 2003). In fact, Ishi has had multiple lives since he died. Here are some of them. In fact, he became an indigenist rights activist participating in the Dakota Access Pipeline Protest (2022).
Moment of Silence
May we begin with a moment of silence. We wish to acknowledge the land upon which we gather today. These lands were the traditional territory of a number of California First Nations bands prior to European contact: The Yahi, Yani, Mill Creeks, Maidu, Kombo, Shasta, and the Nozis, were some of the last bands to be forcibly removed. Ishi nearly survived the destructive forces of this colonial system. Let us pray for our Standing Rock Sioux Brothers and their Sisters and all indigenous persons who fight for social justice.
Characters
Old Yani woman, Ishi’s best friend
Ishi’s old friend from Deer Creek and before
San Francisco Solar Dancers (SFSD), ethnic activists, and tricksters
Kroeber’s name for him. The last known member of the Yahi people, an indigenous Northern California community.
Ishi’s secret name, which cannot be printed or spoken.
Phoebe Apperson Hearst, philanthropist, and founder, Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology
Elena Creef, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Little Big Horn
Project, horsewoman, memorial rider, “Rashomon at Little Bighorn,” and “Geisha Cowgirl.”
Dino Gilio-Whitake, American Studies Professor, Indigenous activist.
John Johnson, author of Laban’s Legacy: Lessons on Race, Gender, Violence, Peace, and Community from my Johnson ancestors.
Alfred Kroeber–Chiep is Ishi’s name for him, Anthropologist, Director, Hearst Museum.
Theodora Kroeber. Author of Ishi in Two Worlds (1961/1989), wife and former student of Alfred.
James Luna, 1950–2018. Payómkawichum, Ipi, American performance artist, photographer, and a multimedia installation artist. Luna’s “Ishi: The Archive Performance” critiques Kroeber’s (1961/1989) version of Ishi’s life.
Saxton Pope, medical doctor who supervised Ishi’s cremation and removal of his brain.
T. T. Waterman, anthropologist who studied Ishi
Yahi Chorus
Stage
A diorama, a revolving set of scenes displaying commodified representations of 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century Native Californians continuously plays on a 40 × 60-foot drop-down screen above a long table. Included are pictures of contemporary and historical native Americans performing in museums, rodeos, reservations, political protest, and everyday life, including those posed in native dress, playing drums, in war paint, trick or treating on Halloween, riding horses, native mothers holding their children, as well as specimens from Northern California Indian cultures, including a human skull, a funeral urn, a bear skin, and a bow and arrows.
With Gómez-Peña’s we want to challenge traditional museums like the Hearst to become temporary sites of radical democratic engagement. We ask our audience to consider how museums of the future can advance the public good and go beyond reproducing old stereotypes.
**A spotlight shines on two posters: “INDIANS ARE THE INVENTION OF COLONISTS, MISSIONARIES AND HOLLYWOOD”.
**
Center Stage: Drumroll, Lights Dim
**An evangelist preaches to an invisible congregation, while selling miniature Alfred Kroeber, Ishi, and James Luna dolls outside a peep show.
The Dakota Pipeline Resistance Collective (DPRC), wearing American flag masks, are joined by James and Ishi 2 who are also wearing American flag masks. The protesters carry a sign reading as follows:
Respect Our Sacred Water
Get Off Sacred Lands
**An actor named Ishi riding a wooden pony demonstrates his skills with a children’s bow and arrow, shooting at balloons over the stage.
**James Luna, dressed as Theodora Kroeber, slow dances with Ishi to ragtime piano music.
**Ishi 2, dressed as Phoebe Apperson Hearst, slow dances with James to ragtime piano music.
On the Diorama
**Three Solar dancers in clown costumes dance a jig while holding a bag of bones labeled, “
**A Phoebe Hearst poster hangs in front of a photo of the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology
**Fancy dancers and Ishi in white face turn cartwheels while Elena Creff and Dustin Hoffman-as-little Big Man hold
***Boots stands outside a teepee, smoking a peace pipe.
The audience, in faux native costumes and American flag masks, sits on three sides of the stage; some hold signs:
***
Act One: Scene One: James and Ishi: In the Beginning
Welcome to our little play. James Luna is going to perform parts of Ishi’s story as told by my wife in her book. Actually, I told my wife Ishi’s story first, then she wrote it.
Actually, we will go into a little more than Theodora’s story. Ishi’s story has gone global.
We don’t trust Professor Kroeber. Ishi will play himself and make corrections in the story, as needed.
Ishi’s happiest days were with my husband in his museum.
I hated my life in the museum.
They threw you in jail.
They threw you in jail! Then made you live and perform in a museum! They threw you in jail!
(Aside): There is a long history of putting Indians on stage, in museums. Buffalo Bill made a lot of money doing this with his Wild West Shows.
Amen! But they threw you in jail!
We agree with Joni Mitchell, “sometimes we just wish we had a river we could skate way on.” We just came in from the storm and we needed some shelter (Columbia records, 1975) and look at us now, trapped inside the walls of a small room in a museum performing for Kroeber and his buddies.
Alfred and I never saw it this way. We were helping Ishi learn about and adjust to this new way of life.
Ishi was a great source of solace and comfort for Alfred after his first wife died. We’ve always felt indebted to Ishi.
Indians are good at doing this for whites.
Act One: Scene Two: Will the Real Indian Stand up
**Ishi and Luna dressed as Ishi outside Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology
**Ishi with Kroeber and Sam Batwi, the Yani interpreter who works with Kroeber in the Phoebe Hearst museum.
**Haggard looking Ishi just out of the wilderness—dressed in tattered night shirt.
**Luna as Ishi with FUCK YOU on tattered night shirt.
**Ishi after capture with Kroeber and another White man in nature setting: Ishi in suit, with coat and tie.
I am not Ishi, No one knows my name. Kroeber gave me this name. He said it means man in Yani. How would he know?
Ishi you were a man before Kroeber gave you this name
I have a painful story I will only share with James, my brother. Today, we both live in museums. We are museum Indians. People pay us to play natural Indians making bows and arrows, and wearing loin clothes. Then Hollywood tells its stories about us. I am not Tonto.
Buffalo Bill loves you.
I don’t care about Buffalo Bill. Just another media invention. I am James Luna I am real. In my daydreams I am Ishi 2 disguised as James Luna. I call this the Ishi Archive Project. Elena Creef helped me stage an early version of this project.
James was my dear friend and it will forever be my privilege that I got to assist him when he debuted the earliest version of the Ishi Archive in Boston in 2014. We have to get history outside museums into new performance spaces.
Free Ishi now!
In my nightmares I am James Luna disguised as Ishi All California Indians are Ishi 2 Only in our dreams are we free.
Act One: Scene Three: A Story Too Painful to Tell
We are not Hollywood inventions! If Alfred Kroeber invented us. why did it take the Kroebers so long to tell our story? I died in 1916? The book appears in 1963, 47 years later.
No good answer. Alfred said the story was too painful. He could not write it.
Painful story! They Put your brain in a bottle of Formaldehyde and shipped you off to the Smithsonian. They kept this secret for over 40 years.
They hung photographs of you on the walls In their living room, like in a gallery—exhibits, trophy photos.
Too painful, Alfred’s wild Indian!! Indeed, the last wild Indian turned into Kroeber’s image of a civilized Indian, white shirt, suit, and tie.
I hated being an exhibit in the Kroeber house. But not as bad as being in his museum.
Of course it was painful. It was a story of genocide murder, rape, stolen lands, broken treaties, erasure of native languages.
Short story. California’s indigenous people endured great suffering during the colonial period. Then they faced the horror of government-sanctioned genocide under the nascent State of California.
I’ve devoted my entire life to contesting the logic behind these gross exhibition practices. Genocide is a wicked practice. Ishi was a victim of this practice.
Alfred was part of this genocide. to write the story required this admission. But Theodora did include a version of this history of California Indian genocide in her book on you.
So, does that make Ishi’s story any different?
Act One: Scene Four: Live Exhibits
I am not a freak You come and stare at me The White Man looked me in the eye and quite honestly said, “Gee, I’ve always wanted to be an American Indian.” Are you a real Indian? I told him. I am not your Tonto. I am not your noble savage, No Geronimo, or Crazy Horse, no mass media invention.
We wish we had a way to get out of here. Ishi 2 and I are post-Indians, inventions, commodities. We have needs, sexual desires, We drink beer, mow our lawns, hold our grandchildren, laugh, sing, cry. We are not part of Andy Warhol’s version of Cowboys and Indians (1986), cut out popular culture stereotypes, from Custer to John Wayne, Roy Rogers, Bonnet Indians to Plains Indians Indian mothers with child, no Kachina Dolls, or Sitting Bull. (see Warhol’s West Family Day, Eiteljorg Museum March 12–August 7, 2022).
***
Act One: Scene Five: Ghosts and Secrets
I never told Kroeber my name. As you know, I lasted four years in captivity, and then I died. I’ve come back to work with my dear friend James, who wants to set the record straight about my life in the museum. I’m the ghost of Ishi, call me Ishi the trickster. I am Ishi disguised as James Luna, James the trickster. There is much more to our story, things people didn’t want told. Kroeber would not let me be alone with white women. He kept me poor, He made me perform for little children In schools.
We gotta get out of this place. ***
I am James Luna a living, breathing Museum Indian. “Half Indian/Half Mexican,” a college professor, a performance artist. I am inspired by Ishi’s story. I was created by Ishi’s story. *** Come into my teepee. Another night performance in Kroeber’s Museum. “Take a picture with a Real Indian” (1991). I’ll pose for you. Here are three cutouts of me. A photographer with a Polaroid Instant Camera and a tripod-mounted camera waits to photograph whomever chooses to join me. I’ll wear a headband with an eagle feather, I’ll pose in a loin cloth, and wear a beaded vest, I’ll stand tall, long hair, dark shirt, wearing tan slacks Half-breed, biracial, a white man’s nightmare. I’m here to tell the real story about Ishi, who is only a made-up person, a fiction, a ghost, Kroeber’s pet Indian. Want more? Come see me in my new performance. I call it Artifact Piece (1987): I play a real Indian. I am on display in the San Diego Museum of Man. I am wrapped in a towel, lying on a bed of sand, inside a wooden frame, a live exhibit, Ishi on display. Artifacts from my life are placed around me, my divorce papers, my degrees, CDs of my favorite music, my traditional medicine objects; these are things from my life. I am a simulation of the natural Indian, like Ishi the precontact Indian fishing for salmon in Kroeber’ book. Calm down, take a picture with a real prairie Indian. A souvenir to take home for the grandchildren, Put it on the mantel.
It was an honor helping James stage this performance. He tears apart the idea of a real authentic Indian.
Is being authentic real? Is memory real? What is real? What does real mean?
Authenticity is not our goal, it is the whiteman’s goal. Memory is a prison. Our goal is to turn memory—remembering—into an active performance, into an active standpoint, to turn the past upside down. I am James Luna as Ishi, wrapped in a towel, lying on a bed of sand, inside a wooden frame, a live exhibit, I am naked Ishi on display. I broke out of realism’s jail. (In Smith, 2005, p. 28).
Indians have never been ignored. We are the targets of genocide, assimilation, romanticism, we are only real if we play Indian. ***
For whites we are survivors, ceremonial clowns, performers Poster children, perfect survivors of Genocide, ideal assimilated INDIANS! McIndians who can be mass produced. But we are not Disney-land Wild West Indians. Sitting Bull to your Çuster, No image for Andy Warhol’s Wild West exhibit.
I am not a McIndian. I am coyote. I am a clown, a trickster I wasn’t born in a tepee. I was born in TV, I’m your contemporary American Indian artist, the real thing. Like my friend James, I reject the history you make up for us, You called me a relic from the Stone age who transitioned to the white man’s way
How could we transition? Transition to Where? We are homeless global citizens. You destroyed our homes, our families, our way of life.
***
Act One: Scene Six: Lies and Fictions
Back to Theodora. She said I made friends with Kroeber, Waterman, and Pope. Granted, I regularly had dinner with them. We never talked. They were not my friends. Kroeber wanted to study my dreams. I Would never share a dream with him. He thought he could be my psychoanalyst. I saw Kroeber every day. On Sundays He dressed me up in various costumes and introduced me to tourists at the museum. I made arrowheads and I sang Yana and Yahi songs for them. Afterwards, Kroeber took me to his house for dinner. He said I became dependent on him for his friendship. That is not true. When Kroeber’s wife died, he said I helped him deal with the grief of her passing. I had no family to turn to, Just this strange man and his doctor buddies, His wife never knew me. Against my wishes he insisted I take the trip to my homeland where he had me pose as a wild Indian. Then, returning to the museum. I caught TB and died. Too painful! Too painful! It was story of abuse and Genocide; benign neglect. Remember, Kroeber went on sabbatical leave in 1916, leaving me in the hands of his friend Saxton Pope, I’ve been dead since 1916, They thought my story was, over, but it exploded into front page news when they found my brain in a bottle of formaldehyde in a back room in the Smithsonian in 1999. (Starn, 2004)
Act One: Scene Seven: New Inventions
Never forget, my story is largely all fiction. All made up. The Kroebers invented me, made me into the Indian they wanted me to be. Then I invented myself.
Then I came into Ishi’s life I was made to be Ishi. I Started performing him and he started performing me He taught me how to be him I’m Ishi being James luna I’m James Luna playing Ishi.
Sometimes we live together In a museum, and travel from town to town performing one another, joining protest movements. We are wild, angry traveling Yahis turned into activists. He said, you are not a freak, You are not a curiosity You are not Kroeber’s invention You are a man I am a man too I am your brother, many things you shared with me. Many things we would not tell Kroeber About nature, about our God Kroeber had no interest in understanding us Museums are not our natural homes We have no natural home We can never go home I am a warrior, standing in a meadow, shooting my bow and arrow Come, take a picture with a real museum Indian With his tomahawk and scantily dressed; He lives in a teepee in a museum. I am a live exhibit, see my scars, I am a bar fighter, a drunk, I drink too much We learned from our fathers. We long for our mothers, our brothers and sisters, our children.
Act One: Scene Six: New Inventions, Part Two
Recently, sollowing since the controversy over the discovery of my brain (Starn, 2004) we’ve gotten more political. The legacies of genocide and racial hatred run deep, moving from one generation to the next, stolen land, broken treaties, racist monuments, and statues. We are part of several national movements: contesting native sports mascots, the celebration of public parks on Native lands, supporting the Trail of Broken Treaties Collective, the Battle of Little Big Horn Resistance (Creef, 2022), demanding the removal of statues celebrating catholic priests—Father Serra—(and earlier) soldiers and public figures who enacted slavery and racial oppression, and genocide of First Nation Peoples, and Native Americans.
Protestors are turning history back on itself, using the cracks and contradiction of the past to imagine new futures. A large group gathers outside the Carmel Mission, mocking the Churches and the state of California’s response to past injustices. They do not want apologies. They want formal apologies, reparation for slavery, segregation, and genocide; they want stolen lands returned; and educational and housing programs.
We want straight stories about the past; stop the endless running of Hollywood western movies about the Indian wars and battles with white settlers (see Screenpix Westerns).
4
No more pretend apologies and fake history.
My students are reenacting the Battle of Little Big Horn narrative, telling the story of the battle through Indigenous eyes. We are also working with the Dakota Pipeline Resisters.
Call it the Reparation Blues. The state built its missions, schools, and laws on land stolen from Native California Indians (Denzin, 2021, pp. 1–6).
We must have a new model of resistance and protest (Gilio-Whitaker, p. 44). It starts with the earth, and the air we breathe and the water we drink. Restoring lands to Indigenous control is where we start. Then, we need new ways of rethinking and repairing the damage of too many centuries of colonial racism.
History lesson: 1607, 104 English men and boys arrived in North America to start a settlement. On May 13, they picked
We can trace the beginning of Ishi’s story back to Jamestown and King James. So can I!
Here here! And here lies the origins of the “original sin” of colonialism and its twin pillars of slavery and indigenous genocide and land theft. Three cheers for old King James.
American Indian people must regain control and jurisdiction over the lands they stewarded for millennia. This means the return of public lands and restoring Indigenous control over to them. This is environmental justice.
Act Two: Scene One: Ode to Our Dakota Brothers and Sisters
James ends his performance of Ishi with a request, invoking memories of the past when Native Americans rallied against war and social injustice.
We must pray for our Dakota Brothers and Sisters and thank them for reminding us that the battle for justice is never done, it is only beginning. We must celebrate the spiritual rights of indigenous peoples. Indeed all of their rights—environmental, treaty, religious, and sacred—must be honored. Their view of nature as a force to be lived with, not destroyed or consumed, packaged, and sold must be implemented as a national value.
***
ODE TO ISHI AND JAMES
Don’t call us Ishi, ever again
Not Ishi 2, not James as Ishi 2, or
Ishi 2 as James
No more museums. No more photographs on the wall
No kachina dolls, Tonto, no more Andy Warhol’s Wild West exhibits
No more unreturned Native bones in the Hearst Museum
We are a reminder of what Anthropology might have been, but never was
And still they will not change the name of Kroeber Hall to Ishi Hall.
It took two federal acts for us to get free:
The National Museum of the
American Indian Act of 1989
and the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (see Denzin, 2021, pp. 104–106).
And they still put us in museums.
Freedom came slowly:
Read your history:
The American Indian movement,
Red Power,
Red Pedagogy,
Indianismo,
the New Indian
Wounded Knee II,
World War Two, the Nazi Holocaust,
Hiroshima,
the civil rights movement, tribal capitalism,
indigenous mobilizations,
Indigenous history, sovereign rights,
broken treaties
Theodora, Alfred, Karl, Clifton, Theodora (Ursula)
Three Decades of the World’s Indigenous People,
the 2017 Standing Rock Sioux Tribe
and the Dakota Pipeline Resistance.
Gerald Vizenor, Sandy Grande, and Vine Deloria
Cuter died for his sins
Sitting Bull, CrazyHorse,
Little Beaver
Graham Green, Jane Fon∂a
Tonto, Minnie HaHA
Ishi-the-pretender
The Ghost of Ishi
The performances of James Luna
The will and desire to resist must prevail.
There is another Dakota
Pipeline Disaster waiting to happen.
***
President Trump took executive action on January 24, 2017, encouraging the Army Corps of Engineers to override environmental review and speed up construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation,
Saying it as in our national interest to do this.
Nonsense. We must never stop resisting
We must dream
***
Headline: February 22, 2022
Today the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Dakota pipeline to shut down.
A major victory
for environmentalists and
the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe
who had rallied support
from across the world and
sued the U.S. government to stop the environmentally affecting pipeline from being built on tribal lands.
***
Act Two: Scene Two: Ode to Museum Indians
A new space for Ishi 2, James the trickster,
Red Power, and
The New Indian
In remembrance of
All the wild “Indians” who have moved to Hollywood
Or find themselves
represented in archives, comic books, and ethnology exhibits
Museum Indians are relics of the past;
residential schools aren’t
Peace!
No peace without Repatriation Acts and Truth and Reconciliation Commissions
New performances of Indigeneity
Refusals to enact stereotypes
Celebrations of
Red skin, Red People, Red Magic, and
Aboriginal theater
Performance as empowerment.
We dance our way home, the living earth our drum
We play on Turtle Land.
Our new home
Drum Roll:
***
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.