Enduring legacy of a man apart
The identification tag bore the number 60884, which was meaningless until you opened the catalog and scanned down the row of entries.
60882: Ivory charms (elephant tusks) from Abyssinia.
60883: Set of current postage stamps from the Philippine Islands.
60884: Brain of Ishi (California Indian).
The year was 1917. The catalog belonged to the Smithsonian Institution, and California’s most famous Native American had been dead for nearly a year -- dead, cremated and memorialized -- all except for the business of Item No. 60884.
Floating in a jar of formalin, it must have looked no different than the other brains in the collection -- including explorer John Wesley Powell’s -- each wrapped in cheesecloth, suspended in this solution for eternity. In time -- decades later, in fact -- it was placed in ethyl alcohol and transferred to Tank 6, Pod 3 of the Smithsonian’s Wet Collection in Suitland, Md. As good as missing.
Missing, that is, until Orin Starn, a cultural anthropologist at Duke University, came along and rediscovered it. “Ishi’s Brain” is Starn’s intimate, provocative, even cathartic account of Ishi’s long journey home. It is -- along with the more scholarly collection of essays, “Ishi in Three Centuries” -- a valuable addition to the 1961 seminal biography, “Ishi in Two Worlds,” by Theodora Kroeber, wife of the anthropologist most singularly associated with Ishi’s fate.
Like Banquo’s ghost, Ishi will not go away. It was inopportune for him to step into the world that late summer day in 1911, wandering down from the foothills half-starved and alone, like the sole survivor of some terrible massacre, setting the dogs in the Oroville slaughterhouse to barking and reminding us of the warfare and genocide that had in a little more than 50 years reduced the California Indian population from 300,000 to 20,000.
No wonder we pretended he was something he wasn’t. The truth was too shameful, too frightening. The San Francisco Examiner called him a “savage of the most primitive type.” As “aboriginal in his mode of life as though he inhabited the heart of an African jungle,” said the San Francisco Call. The “most uncontaminated and uncivilized man in the world today,” said Alfred Kroeber, head of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Kroeber had Ishi brought from Oroville to San Francisco and set him up at the university’s Museum of Anthropology as janitor, caretaker and specimen-in-residence. He earned $25 a week making fire, producing animal sounds and creating his art for visitors.
Anthropology at the time was a new science, concerned mostly with the study of “primitive people.” At one extreme, it attempted to rationalize the brutal sweep of colonialism -- from slavery to the Indian wars -- by finding evidence of the racial superiority of Caucasians (mostly in the measurements of conveniently selected skulls). Kroeber, on the other hand, a student of the liberal-minded Franz Boas, practiced “salvage anthropology,” which held that all cultures, no matter their fate, are to be valued for their customs, cultures and mores. Thus began Kroeber’s five-year cultural study of Ishi, and by extension the Yahi tribe, of which he was deemed the last living member.
Though Ishi preferred not to speak about his recent past, he shared generously his skills and his songs. Today we can still see him in black-and-white photos, posed in loincloth on a riverbank, and we can hear his voice on an early recording. So thoroughly was his presence documented that it is difficult to believe that he was among us for only five years before dying of tuberculosis on March 25, 1916.
Starn picks up the story in the winter of 1997. While researching a book about Ishi, he learned that a Northern California tribe, the Maidu, was attempting to repatriate Ishi’s ashes from a cemetery south of San Francisco to the foothills of Mt. Lassen. Rumors, however, persisted that Ishi’s brain had been secreted away after the autopsy.
Starn plays it like a mystery, crosscutting past and present, interviewing or profiling anyone, living or dead, whose identity had somehow become entangled with Ishi’s. Eventually he breaks the case when he finds a series of letters between Kroeber and the head of the physical anthropology department of the Smithsonian, Ales Hrdlicka.
“Dear Dr. Hrdlicka,” Kroeber wrote on Oct. 27, 1916, “I find that at Ishi’s death last spring his brain was removed and preserved. There is no one here who can put it to scientific use. If you wish it, I shall be glad to deposit it in the National Museum collection.”
Hrdlicka wrote back 10 days later: “I hardly need say that we shall be very glad to receive and take care of Ishi’s brain, and if a suitable opportunity occurs to have it properly worked up.” And soon thereafter, Ishi’s brain, wrapped in cotton and excelsior, was shipped in a brown paper package to the Smithsonian by Wells Fargo.
How do we explain Kroeber’s actions? He was a man who by all accounts viewed Ishi as a friend. We know that he was in New York at the time of Ishi’s death and vigorously objected to the autopsy. “Ishi in Three Centuries,” edited by Kroeber’s sons -- Karl Kroeber, professor of humanities at Columbia University, and Clifton Kroeber, professor emeritus of history at Occidental College -- attempts in part to answer this question. Its contributing essayists, perhaps not surprisingly, are conciliatory, arguing that to criticize Kroeber is to lose sight of his humanity, as surely as some lost sight of Ishi’s. According to Gerald Vizenor, professor of Native American studies at Berkeley, Kroeber was “not sentimental enough, and anthropology was not ethical enough,” and in her essay, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes speculates that Kroeber’s final disregard for Ishi was “an act of disordered mourning, of ravaged grief.”
If grief and guilt kept us from seeing Ishi for who he was, then certainly the work of the Maidu and Yana peoples of the Redding Rancheria and Pit River tribes, who stepped beyond the tragedy of the past and fought for Ishi’s repatriation, is courageous. Starn’s conclusion, covering the ceremonies that marked the return of Ishi’s brain and its burial along with his ashes in Deer Creek Canyon on Aug. 10, 2000, is all the more poignant for their determination and rectitude.
But who was Ishi? If we think of him as a Stone Age Indian, we commit an act of racism on a historical level. Indians, Vizenor writes, have long been defined by their absence, not their presence, in American society, and this absence, willful and intentional, allows us to define them as we need them to be, not as who they are. Ishi, Vizenor reminds, was not his real name but a construct devised by Kroeber.
Perhaps the greatest service of these books is to draw Ishi closer to us. Hardly the “wild Indian,” Ishi grew up in hiding from white settlers, never knowing what it was like to roam the hills without fear of being gunned down. His life and his family’s were filled, by necessity, with scavenging and improvising: picking up Spanish words, using iron nails for harpoon tips, window glass for arrowheads, stealing canned food, sacks of flour and livestock.
In San Francisco, he liked pillows and beds and was enamored of screened porches and matches. He was quick to joke and smile, but he most likely suffered, as a man who was aware that his days were over. As Scheper-Hughes suggests, Ishi knew he was “at the end of his existential rope. Though not of his choosing, Ishi accepted his final destiny with patience, good humor, and grace. He was exceptionally learned in the art of waiting.”
Understanding Ishi’s humanity will always be the real challenge. Poet Yusef Komunyakaa imagines Ishi in the San Francisco museum in his “Quatrains for Ishi”:
Here, in this ancient dust
on artifacts pillaged from Egypt
& Peru, I know why a man like you
laughs with one hand over his mouth.
Also, I know if I think of you
As me, you’ll disappear....
Ishi certainly was a strange gift to us. At a time when native culture in the state had been nearly eradicated, he stepped from the wilderness and greeted us in friendship, and by his manner extended a forgiveness that is unaccountable and unwarranted. Nearly 100 years later, we seem close to reciprocating the gesture. *
