Abstract
The play begins with Ishi’s capture in Oroville and ends with his appearance 35 days later on October 3 as a celebrity audience member in a Vaudeville Show at the San Francisco Orpheum headlining Lilly Lena of the London music halls (San Francisco Call, October 6 1911; Adams, 2003).
The stage is bare, no scenery, few props, just a folding table and two chairs. On the table are various items, including a barley sack, a bow, and arrows, a spear, beaded moccasins, arrow heads, a deer skull. In the corner of the stage are three posters: one poster advertises Buffalo Bills Wild West Show; a second poster announces Lily Lena’s performance at the Orpheum, and a third is a life-size poster of Ishi in front of his wickiup house in the Hearst Museum. He is wearing only a loin cloth (Vizenor, 1995, p. 306). The poster gives the times of Ishi’s Sunday afternoon museum performances with Dr. Kroeber.
Mr. Apperson, Yahi enemy, rancher in Yahi country
Boots: Old Yani woman, Ishi’s best friend
Richard Gernon, member surveyor party
Wile E. Coyote: Ishi’s old friend from Deer Creek and before
Ishi One (T. Kroeber’s Ishi): “Ishi is an artist but he cannot prove his tribal identity under the provisions of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act” (Vizenor, 1995, p. 299, paraphrase)
Ishi Two (real Ishi, Ishi as Vizenor’ trickster, Ishi-as-story-teller)
Ishi Three: Ishi-as-Ishmael, a radicalized Ishi Two
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous historian, activist (2014)
Ira Jacknis, anthropologist in Hearst Museum
Alfred Kroeber (Professor and Director of Hearst Museum, Big Chiep is Ishi’s name for him)
Theodora Kroeber, wife of Albert, author of the best-selling Ishi in Two Worlds, a biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America
E. B. Merritt Assistant Commissioner of Indian Affairs
Mary Ashe Miller of the San Francisco Call
Nancy Rockafeller, medical historian
Saxton Pope, medical doctor
T. T. Waterman, anthropologist
Sheriff Webber
Yahi Chorus: Sam Batwi, Yani, urges Ishi to reveal his real name
Jean Delores, Papago, friend of Ishi
Boots: old Yahi woman
Our play begins with the events immediately following Ishi’s capture on August 29, 1911 and his transfer, seven days later to the Hearst Museum at eleven o’clock on the evening of September 4, 1911. 4
Our story starts with two newspaper stories:
An aboriginal Indian, not yet named, cornered by dogs, clad only in a rough canvas shirt that reached to his knees, was taken into custody late evening by Sheriff Webber and Constable Toland at the Ward slaughterhouse on the Quincy road in Oroville. He was handcuffed, helped into a wagon, and taken to jail. He did not speak a word of English. Where he comes from is a mystery, the most plausible explanation seems to be that he is probably the surviving member of a little group of uncivilized Deer Creek Yahi Indians who were driven from their hiding place two years ago. The Register was no more than off the press than the Sheriff’s office was besieged with people desiring to see the savage. The Bureau of Indian Affairs and Professor Kroeber of the University of California were informed that the Indian is in custody, and the county wishes to turn him over to the Federal Government, of which he is a proper ward (Heizer & Kroeber, 1979, pp. 92-93, paraphrase; also T. Kroeber, 1961/1989, p. 217). 5
He understands no word spoken to him. His is a silent language. In gestures more eloquent then the spoken word, he lays bare the tragedy of his people and their death. His silence is broken only by his mournful chanting to the Great Spirit (In Heizer & Kroeber, 1979, p. 96, paraphrase).
The capture of this man is of vital importance. His language represents a supposedly extinct dialect. He is more of an aborigine than any of the Indians we have been working with over the last ten years. He is exactly the kind of man who was in California 100 years ago. We will call him Ishi, after the Yahi word for man (Kroeber, paraphrase).
A little history will help. After I was given the name of Ishi by Alfred Kroeber, I was affectionately known as the Last Wild Indian in North America. I deeply resented this, but what could I do? The newspapers picked it up and ran with it. I was born in 1860. I died of Advanced Pulmonary Tuberculosis on Christmas day (March 25, 1916).
In 1915, sculptor James Earle Fraser unveiled his monumental sculpture The End of the Trail for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. The image of the near naked, exhausted, dying Indian mounted on his exhausted horse proclaimed the final solution, the elimination of the Indigenous peoples on the content.
I died a year after Fraser’s sculpture was released. At least I did not ride into Oroville on the back of a starving horse.
Dozens of other popular images of the “vanishing Indian were displayed during this period, think of Edward Curtis’s famous 20-volume ‘vanishing race’ series” (Curtis, 1972).
Vanishing Indians everywhere.
Let me clarify. Ishi was the last of a lost tribe, not the last wild Indian in North America.
That is not how your subtitle reads!
It has been said that no other Indian in the history of the United States has generated more commentary (Shackley, 2003, p. 159; also Clifford, 2013, p. 91).
Don’t let it go to your head.
I spent my entire life from 1861 to 1911 along the streams in the Mount Lassen foothills with a small tribe of Yahi/Yana Indians. 6 On August 29, 1911, I left the wilderness, delirious and starving. I was cornered by barking dogs in the Old Ward Slaughter House and taken into custody by the Sheriff of Oroville, California. At that moment, I became a ward of the state, and placed under the supervision of Professor Alfred Kroeber. For the next four years and seven months, I lived in a room in the University of California Hearst Museum of Anthropology. I was given a job as an assistant janitor, US$25 a month. And so I entered the wilds of civilization with the status of a wage-earner (T. Kroeber, 1961/1989, p. 146).
When last seen in a play, I was the central character in Gerald Vizenor’s (1995) “Ishi and the Wood Ducks: Post Indian Trickster Comedies.” I was walking into the sunset, out of Judge Kroeber’s courtroom, having been declared an artist, a member of my own tribe, innocent of violating the Indian Arts and Craft Act (Vizenor, 1995, pp. 335-336).
Thank you Ishi. While you were performing in Gerald’s play, you did not know your brain had been sitting in a vat of formaldehyde in the Smithsonian for nearly 50 years (Starn, 2004). Of course this discovery would lead to a huge controversy over how your brain had been treated by the Berkeley Department of Anthropology before and after your death (Scheper-Hughes, 2003; Starn, 2004). But before these matters can be addressed, it is necessary to step back and discuss the events surrounding your capture. These events set in motion the process that would turn you into a white, assimilated urban Indian.
It was commonly understood that by 1900, the Yahi were a vanishing tribe, numbering perhaps no more than five members, including Ishi (K. Kroeber, 2008, p. 32; also T. Kroeber, 1961/1989, pp. 94-95). On November 9, 1908, two engineers came upon a naked Indian fishing with a harpoon on Deer Creek. The next day, surveyors discovered a small Indian village along the same river. Reports of these discoveries immediately appeared in the local papers and national newspapers, including those owned by William Randolph Hearst (San Francisco Examiner). Kroeber and Waterman read the stories and corresponded with the surveyors. Waterman traveled to the area and sent photographs of the village to the San Francisco museum. On April 13, 1911, H. H. Hume, a surveyor, discovered several barley sacks containing moccasins, arrow heads, arrows, deer hides, nails, and screws hanging in an Oak tree. It was assumed the sacks belonged to Ishi, who appeared four months later in Oroville (T. Kroeber, 1961/1989, p. 113).
Yes, those were my sacks. I thought they were in a safe place. I went back to get them and they were gone. I had nothing to hunt with.
Have you heard my wood duck story? Winotay, winotay, winotay. It is a love story, and quite complicated. I fall in love, then I am killed. And then I am put back together (see T. Kroeber, 1961/1989, p. 199).
Ishi and his story made the front page of the San Francisco Examiner, September 7, 1911:
Ishi the aboriginal Indian who was captured last Monday, started telling a story yesterday of the loves of U-Tut-N, the Wood Duck. The story took over six hours to tell and consisted of three words. Ishi uses three tones in singing it.
He loves his Wood Duck stories. It keeps him calm.
I’m in deep trouble. The courts are charging me with two crimes— breaking and entering at the old Ward Slaughter House and stealing a ratty old canvas shirt.
Hey, we’ll fight this! How can they charge you with theft? The old canvas shirt was in a dumpster. And breaking and entering, the slaughter house was wide open. You just walked in. You took nothing. Besides, it is on original Yahi/Yani land.
I’m with you guys. I say justice for the little guys!
Thanks Boots. We can bring all of this into the courtroom, but we may have to go up against Judge Kroeber. There is also the slight issue of my name. I’m not going to be called the Last Wild Indian in North America. It is not right. Dr. Kroeber thinks he can use a Yahi word for my name. If I have to go before Judge Kroeber to get this changed I will.
The Judge said he’ll send me back to the wilderness if I don’t get a real name. I like being called Boots. See my shiny new cowboy boots (Vizenor, 1995, p. 304)?
Kroeber has no right to use a Yahi name. Never trust a Judge. Trust me.
We all need real names, but they have to be secret. I will no longer be known as Ishi. From now on call me Ishmael. I am in exile, like my namesake in Moby Dick, a social outcast, a victim of robbery. They stole my identity (Melville, 1851; T. Kroeber, 1961/1989, p. 4).
Confession time. I am an unreliable storyteller. I am an invention. I was named by an academic, my name is cultural evidence that I am “the property of the state and its anthropologists” (Vizenor, 2008, p. 3, paraphrase). There is no good reason to believe what you read here. These are the words the anthropologists used to create me in their image. To understand who I am you must read between the lines. I cannot read. I cannot write.
7
I refused to share my name. I gave no details about my family. Most of what they said about me was based on rumor, gossip and hearsay. They said I was a well-bred Yahi, a good Indian. In my first dinner in a whiteman’s house, the day after my arrival in San Francisco, they said I had good table-manners, that I followed good Indian etiquette (T. Kroeber, 1961/1989, p. 138).
Good manners, imagine that, an Indian with good manners. Yippee and then they turned you into a janitor, asking you to clean up after the tourists.Boy oh Boy!!
Hey, I have good manners too.
So do I.
Whenever they asked Ishi/Ishmael about his family, or past life he would tell a story, like the wood ducks story or the story of how the coyote stole the fire (Jacknis, 2003, p. 253).
Forgive me. I get ahead of myself. We must go back to the day I was captured. Remember, what is said about me comes from the mouths of White people.
We are wards of the state. Indians have no rights. They can do anything to us.
The Yani and Yahi were here before any Whites. This is our land. It was stolen from us.
I was not captured. I put up no resistance. I was lost and alone. They pointed their guns at me. I had no way to defend myself. They got me in a wagon. We went down a road. The wagon came to a big tree. I was afraid they were going to hang me. The sheriff was nice to me. We did not stop under the big tree. He gave me a big fat cigar (T. Kroeber, 1964, pp. 147-148).
They took me into a big house and then into a small room with bars and without windows. People filled the outer room. They stared at me and said words I did not understand. They laughed when I spoke in Yahi. I rested my head against the wall and closed my eyes. The sheriff came back and spoke to the crowd. They left. The sheriff came back with a clean shirt and pants, and a bucket of water and towel so I could wash myself. I put on the clothes. The sheriff offered me food to eat. He left. I laid down on a strange bed on the floor. I was tired. I fell asleep.
I dreamed I was going on a journey that would take me to the lost trail and my lost family.
I sent T. T. Waterman to Oroville to interview and then transport the Indian we have decided to call Ishi to the University of California Museum of Anthropology
8
at the Affiliated College in San Francisco. He can live in our museum.
Two days later, the anthropologists turn me into a research subject. I complied, but I tricked them. They got me to tell one of my stories to Waterman. On Wednesday September 6 I agree and start telling the story of Wood Duck (U-tut-ne). The first time I told the story it took me seven hours (Jacknis, 2003, p. 242).
On Thursday September 7 I repeated the story for the phonograph (Jacknis, 2003, p. 239). The story contains three words that are repeated in different combinations.
Winotay winotay, winotay, tay-o-win, o-win-tay, u-tut-me
I am very upset. I had another dream, more like a nightmare, not the happy wood duck story—Winotay, winotay, winotay dream. I dreamed there were skeletons and bones from dead people in the museum room next to where they were asking me to sleep. The dead are sacred and must be separated from the living. I cannot sleep next to the dead.
Calm down, sing your Winotay song.
Winotay winotay, winotay
How can I keep on living?
What choices do you have?
So ends Ishi’s first day in the White world— What are his choices?
The next morning, a stranger (aka Waterman) came into my room. He sat beside me and asked me questions and made little bird footprints on pieces of white bark. I spoke for the first time in Yahi: siwini, Auna, Moocha, Banya, hisi, saldu. The old words poured out faster than the stranger could mark them down. The stranger left, and then he came back.
He asked me if I would like to go to a movie. I did not know what he meant. But there in a dark room I saw a huge train pass by on the big screen. I was scared (Jacknis, 2003, p. 265, note 29). We left the dark room and went back to the jail. I was exhausted. I half-slept, half-dreamed—swini, swini, swini (pine wood). I woke up from a dreamless sleep: I want to speak the Tongue, to hear this Stanger speak it. I am no longer afraid of guns and poison, and hanging trees (T. Kroeber, 1964, p. 154). The sheriff came into the little room:
Ishi do you want to go back to the Yahi World? I’ll help you, if you want.
No, I don’t know that world any more.
Would you like to go to a reservation?
No, that is the world of the Fat Ones with short memories who forgot what happened in the past— murders, rapes, hangings.
Come with me to my house. It is a museum-watgurwa. You will like it there. Can I enter your dreams? Can I be your friend?
Don’t let him into your dreams. Don’t do it! Don’t go.
You speak the Tongue of the People. You are my friend. I will go with you to your museum.
Careful pal, that museum is filled with native bones and artifacts stolen from our sacred burial sites by White thieves who masquerade as archaeologists (Vizenor, 2000, p. 14).
Don’t trust a White man who asks you to come live in his museum. He’ll put you on stage and ask you to perform. You’ll never get out. Mark my words, go there, you die there.
Maybe I die if I go to the reservation. I was starving back at Deer Creek. Do I really have a choice?
We always have choices. You might have found a sanctuary with Maidu Indians on their reservation (Scheper-Hughes, 2003, p. 119).
They were our enemies (Starn, 2004, p. 21).
How can I keep on living?
Ishi, you have no choice but to be a trickster. Be like Wile E. Coyte. Trick them, tell them silly stories. You know how. Remember you took seven hours to tell them the wood duck story and nobody understood a word of what you were saying. Mr. Trickster won that round.
Be what I call a post-Indian trickster, an invention, a transformation of the Whiteman’s invention of the Indian. They have never seen the likes of you before (1995, p. 299). Play your game but pretend to go along with them, be shy, coy, smile, be a strong Yahi, share very little (T. Kroeber, 1961/1989, p. 125).
So ends Ishi’s second day in the White world. He has fallen into the anthropologists’ web. Or has he? Who is being tricked?
Oh dear reader. What you have just read is very critical to this story. It hinges on your willingness to believe that Ishi, after having been in custody for only two days (a) finds a friend who not only speaks his language (the Tongue of the People) but he is also able to converse and identify with this White man; (b) leading him to immediately forsake his previous life, agree to live in a museum; and to enter into a new life with White friends (Scheper-Hughes, 2003, p. 119).
It’s all pretty complicated. Ishi-as-the-trickster could have pulled of a charade. In fact you can say this is exactly what he did. But I could go with the doubters.
Ishi was at the end of his rope. He gave in, seeing no real alternative (Scheper-Hughes, 2003, p. 120).
Did he give in, or was he pretending. I believe he was pretending, just waiting to see what was going to happen, maybe even thinking of revenge. After all, White people killed his family.
I don’t believe the official story for a minute. I don’t even think the Sheriff asked Ishi these questions. They make for a good story. They set the stage for their larger story, turning Ishi into a White Indian, a friend of the “anthros” (see Scheper-Hughes, 2003, p. 123).
They had to tell the story this way, it’s an old story, it is called the salvage anthropology narrative. Simple. The anthropologist’s job is to document the cultures of rapidly disappearing indigenous people (Scheper-Hughes, 2003, p. 106; K. Kroeber & Kroeber, 2003, p. xv).
When Alfred Kroeber asks his wife Theodora to write Ishi’s story, he is asking her to do some of the work of salvage anthropology, to record the story of the last member of a dying culture.
A fantasy. Kroeber and Kroeber wanted to tell a story that justified taking Ishi into custody. This story fit the narrative about an uncivilized aboriginal who could easily walk out of the Neolithic world and into the modern world. They wanted to tell a story about how Ishi and the anthropologists would become family, close friends, how they immediately shared a universal language of love.
His soul was that of a child (T. Kroeber, 1961/1989, pp. 124-238).
Nonsense! We are asked to believe that all of this happened in forty-eight hours. The die was cast when Ishi got on board the train at the Oroville station, maybe the instant the Sheriff put him in the wagon and took him to the Oroville jail.
Ishi is the last “incontaminated” aboriginal American Indian in the United States, the last person in the United States to come into contact with civilization, the flint arrow point and the fire drill are the two features the Stone Age man has in common with the prehistoric cave dwellers who lived even before America was “discovered” by its aboriginal inhabitants. These are Ishi’s tools, his link to prehistoric cave dwellers (Heizer & Kroeber, 1979, paraphrase).
They claim they were on a salvage mission, rescuing a member of a disappearing culture, turning Ishi into a living exhibit (Foster, 2003, p. 94).
This is why they had to bring Ishi in. They were at risk of losing him. They had no choice but to tell the story and take the actions they did.
So ends Ishi’s second day in the White world. He has fallen into the anthropologists’ web.
I was up before daylight the next morning. The sheriff helped me dress for the journey. The stranger helped too. The three of us, along with Boots, walked to the train at the Oroville station. It took us to Oakland.
In Oakland, you will have to take the ferry across big water to San Francisco. Then you ride a cable car to the Museum on the hill.
I’ll be waiting to meet you at the Museum.
I don’t trust that man.
Boots, not to worry. Ishi is our ward. He is our responsibility now. We will take good care of him (Vizenor, 1995, p. 309).
Ha Ha. Is anyone foolish enough to actually believe this White man?
Not so cynical Wilie. The morning after Ishi’s arrival at the museum, a friendship between the two of us was born that lasted all our days together. Granted the ordeal by fear and strangeness was acute, but he conveyed a gentleness and a timidity that seemed to keep the fear under control. Still he started at the slightest sound (T. Kroeber, 1961/1989, p. 124, paraphrase).
Kroeber is turning Ishi into the Indian he wants him to be. Ishi, the trickster, is playing along.
To repeat: his soul was that of a child (T. Kroeber, 1961/1989, pp. 124-238).
Keep this timeline in mind: August 29, 1911: Ishi is captured; August 30, 1911: First newspaper stories appear; August 31, 1911: Kroeber is designated Ishi’s guardian; Ishi visits with Waterman in jail; September 3: Waterman takes Ishi to a movie in Oroville; September 4: Ishi arrives in San Francisco, taken to Museum; September 5: Taken to dinner at Waterman’s in Berkeley; September 6, 7: Ishi is tape recorded telling his wood duck story and other stories. The American Phonograph Company proposes making audio recordings by and about Ishi (T. Kroeber, 1961/1989, p. 130); September 6, 7: Small film companies propose bringing Ishi’s ethnic view to the screen; September 20: Taken to Buffalo Bill’s wild west show; October 1: Hearst Museum opens to the public, over thousand guests attend, celebrating the opening of the museum, while expecting to meet and see Ishi. Attendees included the president of the university, members of the Board of Regents, and the governor (T. Kroeber, 1961/1989, p. 134; C. Kroeber, 2003, p. 6). Announcements of the event were carried in the Hearst newspapers (T. Kroeber, 1961/1989, p. 135); October 3: Ishi is taken to a vaudeville show. Newspapers report the visit (Adams, 2003; Wallace, 1951/1979).
Spotlight shines on poster of Ishi shaking hands with Lily Lena, from the San Francisco Call (October 8, 1911, p. 11 in C. Kroeber and Kroeber, 2003, p. 18).
In one short month, Ishi moves from being an unnamed Native American from a vanishing tribe to being the best known Indian in North America. The story was there, just waiting for him to step into it.
Not everybody was happy about Ishi’s treatment by Kroeber. An editorial in the The Call commented, “apparently the cave man is placed in the same category as the chimpanzee and held in captivity to make a scientific holiday, but before they put him in the museum they put him in jail” (Adams, 2003, p. 24, paraphrase).
For the record, Phoebe Hearst’s money supported Kroeber’s research. Her money funded the museum named after her. Her son’s newspapers carried Ishi’s stories. Her money also funded research done by members of the Berkeley Department of Anthropology.
I think Little Chiep wanted to be like me. He wanted to be wild and free and have stories that come out of the mountains (Vizenor, 1995, p. 303).
He was afraid of you.
Ishi was Kroeber’s pet buffalo. He should never have been sent to San Francisco. Kroeber used Ishi to advance his own career (see Day, 2016).
How could they even think about putting me in a museum?
A home in a museum with a fake name? Get real!
And so, on a sunny August morning in 1911 Ishi’s life as a free man ended. He was now formally a ward of the state of California. In turn, the state transferred their power to Professor Kroeber and the University of California at Berkeley.
The day I was caught I was on the run, lost my bearings, didn’t trust anyone, was at a breaking point, betrayed by barking dogs, hunted like a fox, driven into a corner, nowhere else to go (Scheper-Hughes, 2003, p. 110). I know there was no one else living from my tribe. I was terrified. I thought I was going to be killed because white people killed members of my family.
This was genocide, California style, pure and simple (Madley, 2016; T. Kroeber, 1961/1989, p. 77).
Before I tell you my new wood duck stories, which I know you are anxious to hear, there is another set of events you need to know about.
Before wood ducks?
Yes, I had a beautiful dream the night before I wandered into Oroville.
Maybe I was hallucinating because I was so weak from lack of food.
Give me details.
I dreamed that I am the last of the people.
In my dream I went down into the canyon to the alder tree crossing. I made a fire and had a sweat bath. I then jumped into the cold water of Banya Creek, today this area is called Ishi Wilderness. A voice said I was the last one and when I am gone there will be no one to remember. It will be as we never had been. I prayed. “O Great One, only the land remains, the Lost Ones have found the trail to the Land of the Dead where they are at peace. I am free to go now, and I will meet them when it is time and I will find my mother and father and the Little One and the Lost” (OneT. Kroeber, 1964, p. 144).
This is beautiful. So peaceful.
There is more. In my dream, all was well.
At first we could not hear the dead, then we could.
The sun came up, a beautiful sunrise (Perry, 2003, pp. 278-282),
The dead came down through the hole in the sky.
They went out to hunt deer, To hunt birds, To catch fish,
They made sunflower seeds out of sand
and they put it over deer meat.
They made grasshoppers out of snow.
And acorns out of rain.
Lizard made arrows and they were taught
To go forward (Perry, 2003, pp. 219-292, paraphrase).
Love it. Love it
This dream gave my confidence in myself. I could leave the wilderness, if that is what I needed to do to survive. I could take my dreams and stories with me. In my dream, the new salmon were swimming in the clear water, the marigolds made me think of Round Meadow where a huge butterfly settled on my hand. I smiled at the sky. I was at peace with myself. I dreamed of other peaceful dreams, and I fell asleep.
We are here for you Ishi.
I experience my dreams as stories.
All my dreams are stories. They come in fragments, some are short: Winotay, winotay, winotay (Vizenor, 1995, p. 302). Others are long. My dreams are from my life before I came to the city; they are from a long time ago, when I was a young man, happy, surrounded by my family.
Why do you keep singing Winotay, winotay, winotay? (Vizenor, 1995, p. 303).
It is the title of my love story. There are many traditional stories I can tell. The White scholars have given them names. They are all the same story: Journey of the Dead, Long Long Ago, Lizard Story, Coyote and His Sister, The Yahu are story tellers. These are stories we tell one another (see Jacknis, 2003; C. Kroeber & Kroeber, 2003, pp. 230-233; Luthin & Hinton, 2003; Perry, 2003).
Now can we hear the Wood Duck Story?
Not today. You can read it in the appendix. 10
Close your eyes and listen carefully, this is a love song about the loves of U-Tut-Ne, the Wood Duck who grew up and wanted a bride.
My stories and my dreams keep the memories of the members of my family alive. I can recall many traditional myths, stories, songs, and tales that I learned through years of listening and am able still to recite, and perform (Perry, 2003, p. 277; also Jacknis, 2003, p. 243).
Ishi’s stories place a firewall between his past life and the world he had been thrust into. In these stories, he is a sophisticated and subtle storyteller. This allows the stories to build, as in the opening lines to “Ishi and the Wood Duck” with the repeated words: Winotay, winotay, winotay (see Perry, 2003, p. 276; Vizenor, 1995, p. 302).
When we get to the later plays in this cycle, we will see that Ishi-the-trickster never criticizes Kroeber, like the members of the press did. Nor does he raise ethical issues surrounding his treatment by Kroeber as will be the case after his death (see Scheper-Hughes, 2003; Starn, 2004; Vizenor, 2003).
Where are we going with this story?
It’s a story about a journey, about a trickster getting his due. It’s a story about a powerful California family, an ambitious young anthropologist, a Yahi Indian at the end of his robe, and the taken-for-granted genocidal practices embedded in twentieth century American race relations.
We need a counter narrative.
I want to be in your story.
The more the merrier.
The Yana and Yahi have many Coyote stories:
“Coyote and His Sister,” “Coyote Rapes His Sister”
are just two of many (Luthin & Hinton, 2003, p. 320).
I’m not familiar with those coyote stories.
Sit tight guys, we are on a journey.
We’ll play along with
their game for a while until
we figure out how to get
back to Deer Creek.
Before we skip this joint, how about going to a
Vaudeville show at the Orpheum and catch that
Lily Lena from London. I hear Ishi even got his picture
taken with her.
Stage Right: Spot light shines on news story:
With broad shoulders squared, he pussy
footed down the aisle of rich plush and into
his private box above the glittering splendor
of the Orpheum stage—Ishi, the primordial
man and the only wild Indian in existence and
the exotic dancer from London (Wallace, 1951/1979, p. 107).
The performers come back on stage and take bows.
This play has attempted to answer a simple question: How was Ishi transformed from a wild Indian into an urban Indian, into a trophy Indian in one short month? The answer is simple. Ishi, the Post-Indian Trickster, had no choice but to go along with his White capturers, to smile, wear the clothes they gave him, sing them his songs. He played along with them when they had him act like a wild Indian, a trophy Indian, the next assimilated Indian. He performed his repertoire of skills, which they called prehistoric and aboriginal, including fire-making, harpoon, and bow-and-arrow making. He did not resist when he was asked to dress as a White man, in suit and dress shirt. He was also willing to be photographed in the wilderness wearing only a loin cloth. As a trickster, he had mastered two identities, wild Indian and urban Indian living and performing in a museum.
His life as a holocaust/genocide survivor was denied. It was never part of his public identity (Scheper-Hughes, 2003). 11 This denial allowed Alfred Kroeber and the public to never acknowledge that his tribe was destroyed during the California Genocide. This allowed Kroeber to call him the last Yahi.
Turning Ishi into the polite well-performing civilized Yahi denied him this painful history. His new story involved the anthropologists recording and translating his nearly lost language. This story had nothing to do with genocide. He had been turned into an anthropological subject, simultaneously a celebrity, an oddity, the Last Wild Indian in North America. Maybe he had the last word. He never learned English.
Even his name—
Ishi
Don’t call me last man—
an insult,
Call me trickster, post-Indian,
walking dead,
they killed my family
I was hunted, handcuffed, shot at,
tracked down, cornered, jailed.
photographed, caged in a museum
met a governor, danced with my
friend boots, dreamed I was free
DON’T
EVER CALL ME ISHI
AGAIN WHITE MAN
Never ever
Ishi created a special sense of natural presence in his stories,
a native presence that included others. He was a visionary, his oral stories were assertions of liberty. He was amused by the trace of time on a wristwatch and by the silence of scripture. He was a tricky storier in exile. He is in our vision, in our dreams. He persists in our memory, we hear his exile as our own, and by his tease and natural reason, we create new stories of native irony, survivance and liberty, and in these ways, he has secured a decisive presence in our national literature and history (Visenor, 2008, pp. 5-17, paraphrase). 12
To be continued.
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.