He Was the Last of His People. Then They Put Him in a Museum

[00:00:00]On the morning of August 29, 1911, a middle-aged man walked out of the wilderness of northern California and into the town of Oroville.

[00:00:09]He was wearing a canvas covering over his shoulders. He was thin from starvation.

[00:00:14]The forest fires that had swept through the region in recent weeks had destroyed the game and vegetation he had depended on for survival.

[00:00:22]His hair was singed short in the Yahi tradition of mourning. He had been alone, completely alone, for an unknown number of years.

[00:00:31]The townspeople who found him huddled against the fence of a slaughterhouse called the sheriff. The sheriff put him in handcuffs and took him to the county jail.

[00:00:40]Not for any crime, but because there was no other framework available.

[00:00:45]No one in Oroville knew what to do with a man who spoke no English, recognized none of the objects of 20th century American life, and appeared to have walked directly out of a world that everyone believed had ceased to exist.

[00:00:58]He was a living anachronism. The newspapers immediately understood what he represented, and they reached for the only language they had.

[00:01:06]They called him the last wild Indian in America.

[00:01:09]That phrase, which he never heard in a language he never learned, would define him for the rest of his life.

[00:01:16]It would determine where he lived, how he spent his days, who had authority over his body, and what happened to him after he died. It would determine that his brain would be removed from his skull against his express wishes and sent to a museum in Washington, where it would sit in a storage vat for 84 years before anyone decided what to do with it.

[00:01:37]His name, by his own people's tradition, was not something to be shared with strangers.

[00:01:43]The anthropologist who took charge of him gave him a name instead, Ishi, which means simply man in the Yahi language.

[00:01:50]Ishi is the story of what happens at the end of a genocide, when the last survivor walks out of the wilderness and a civilization that destroyed his people decides to study what remains.

[00:02:01]To understand what Ishi's emergence meant, you have to understand what had happened to the Yahi people in the decades before 1911.

[00:02:10]The Yahi were a band of the Yana people of northeastern California occupying the foothills and canyons of the Deer Creek and Mill Creek regions at the base of Mount Lassen.

[00:02:20]Before the California Gold Rush of 1848, the Yahi population has been estimated at between 400 and 3,000 people, depending on the source. They were hunter-gatherers who lived in close relationship with the landscape of the California foothills, hunting deer, gathering acorns and plant foods, fishing the streams of the Sacramento Valley drainage. In 1848, the gold rush began. Within 3 years, more than 300,000 people had poured into California from across the United States and the world.

[00:02:53]The territory of the Yahi became impossible to defend. The settlers who flooded through were not simply passing by.

[00:03:01]They were establishing permanent claims on land that the Yahi had occupied for thousands of years, and they were doing so with weapons and numbers that the Yahi could not match.

[00:03:11]What followed was not a war in any formal sense.

[00:03:14]It was a series of massacres. In 1865, at a place called Kingsley Cave, a group of settlers killed between 30 and 40 Yahi, men, women, and children in a single incident. The survivors, including a young boy who would eventually become the man known as Ishi, fled into the remote canyons and lived in hiding.

[00:03:34]The settlers called these events Indian hunts.

[00:03:37]They were organized, they were reported in local newspapers, and they were not prosecuted. By the early 1870s, the Yahi who survived the massacres numbered in the dozens, perhaps fewer.

[00:03:49]They retreated into the the of the Deer Creek Canyon system and simply disappeared.

[00:03:54]Not because they had died, but because they had made the deliberate decision to become invisible.

[00:03:59]They stopped making fires large enough to be seen.

[00:04:03]They stopped leaving traces on trails.

[00:04:05]They developed the discipline of absolute concealment that would allow a small group of people to live in a landscape that was being increasingly settled around them without being found for 40 years.

[00:04:17]40 years of hiding. 40 years of watching the world that had destroyed their civilization expanding around them while they survived in the canyons on deer and acorns and fish, maintaining their language, their ceremonies, their knowledge in a bubble of the old world that shrank as the people in it died one by one until there was only one left. That one was Ishi.

[00:04:40]The anthropologists who came to claim him from the Oroville jail were Alfred Kroeber and Thomas Waterman of the University of California at Berkeley. They arrived with a Yana speaking interpreter and confirmed that the man in the jail was speaking a dialect of Yana.

[00:04:56]Specifically, the Yahi dialect that had not been heard by any academic researcher in four decades. They arranged for him to be transferred to their custody and taken to San Francisco where he would live at the university's anthropological museum on the Parnassus campus. This arrangement was made under a federal order.

[00:05:15]The Bureau of Indian Affairs authorized Kroeber's custody of Ishi.

[00:05:19]And Ishi was employed at the museum as a research assistant and live-in custodian.

[00:05:24]He was paid a small wage. He had his own room.

[00:05:28]He was, in formal terms, housed and employed. He was also, in less formal terms, on display, publicized as the last wild Indian in California. Ishi was employed at the museum to demonstrate Yahi culture. He spent much of his time on display for white museum audiences fashioning obsidian and colored glass projectile points and recording Yahi songs and stories.

[00:05:49]Thousands of people came to watch him work.

[00:05:52]On designated public days, Ishi would sit at his workbench in the museum and make stone tools, arrowheads, projectile points, scrapers, using the techniques his people had developed over thousands of years. The audience would gather around and observe. He was, in the precise technical sense, a living exhibit.

[00:06:11]Ishi appears to have borne this arrangement with extraordinary grace.

[00:06:15]His relationship with Kroeber was, by the accounts of both men and those who observed them, genuinely warm. Kroeber learned enough Yahi to communicate with Ishi without an interpreter on many subjects.

[00:06:27]Ishi learned enough English to navigate daily life in San Francisco.

[00:06:32]He became known in the city, walking in Golden Gate Park, riding the streetcar, visiting the hospital where he would eventually die.

[00:06:40]He was a figure of genuine celebrity, and the celebrity appears to have been something he accepted, if not entirely welcomed, but the celebrity did not alter the fundamental structure of his situation.

[00:06:51]He was a man with no legal standing, no tribal nation, no community, and no family. He was the last surviving member of a people that California had systematically destroyed, and the civilization that had destroyed them had now installed him in a museum as evidence of what had been lost. The arrangement was not without its defenders and its critics, even at the time. Kroeber's motivations were genuinely mixed. He was a scientist who understood that Ishi represented an irreplaceable source of information about Yahi language and culture, information that would disappear entirely when Ishi died. The recordings he made with Ishi of Yahi songs, stories, vocabulary, and oral literature are the only surviving record of a language and a culture that no longer has any other living witnesses.

[00:07:40]Without those recordings, the Yahi would have left no trace in any linguistic or anthropological archive.

[00:07:47]The recordings exist because Kroeber gave Ishi a home and a platform.

[00:07:51]This matters. At the same time, Kroeber accepted an arrangement in which a human being was employed as a museum exhibit, denied the legal standing that would have allowed him to make decisions about his own life, and ultimately had his stated wishes for his own body ignored after his death.

[00:08:09]Kroeber knew what Ishi wanted for his burial.

[00:08:12]He was out of the country when Ishi died in March 1916, and the university's medical school performed an autopsy, including the removal of Ishi's brain, before Kroeber could intervene. Ishi had requested that his Yahi funerary tradition be respected, and that his body remain intact for the afterlife.

[00:08:31]Some of his friends tried to protect his wishes, but the medical school performed an autopsy before friends could prevent it.

[00:08:38]Kroeber wrote a letter of protest.

[00:08:41]He described the autopsy as a violation of Ishi's wishes and a betrayal of the trust that Ishi had placed in the people around him.

[00:08:49]The letter had no effect on what had already been done. His brain was sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where it would remain for over 80 years.

[00:08:58]80 years. Ishi died in 1916. His brain sat in a storage container at the Smithsonian until 2000.

[00:09:06]84 years.

[00:09:08]While the institution that held it debated what to do with a piece of a human being whose people no longer had a recognized tribal nation to receive his remains. Before we continue, if investigations like this one, following histories that were allowed to become invisible while a civilization watched, open something in you, consider subscribing.

[00:09:28]This channel exists to take these stories seriously. The story of Ishi's brain is the story of the gap between what institutions say they value, and what their records show they actually did.

[00:09:39]The Smithsonian received the brain from the University of California in 1917.

[00:09:44]It was cataloged. It was stored.

[00:09:47]And then, for most of the following eight decades, it was simply there in a drawer, in a container, in the vast storage system of the National Museum of Natural History, while the world moved around it. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, NAGPRA, created a legal framework for returning Native American human remains and sacred objects to affiliated tribes.

[00:10:11]It required federal institutions to inventory their collections and notify descendant communities.

[00:10:17]When the Smithsonian conducted its NAGPRA inventory, Ishi's brain was identified as a repatriable item. The complication was that Ishi was the last Yahi.

[00:10:27]He had no direct descendants. The Yahi as a distinct people no longer existed.

[00:10:32]The question of who had the legitimate claim to receive his remains was not straightforward. The Pit River Tribe and the Redding Rancheria, Native California communities with documented cultural and linguistic connections to the Yana people, worked with the Smithsonian to establish their relationship to Ishi's remains. In August of 2000, 84 years after Ishi's death, his brain was repatriated. In 2000, the brain was given to the Redding Rancheria, where they buried his brain and cremated ashes. He was buried in a secret location near the rivers and mountains that had been his home.

[00:11:09]The location is not publicly disclosed in accordance with the wishes of the tribes who received his remains. The silence that the title of this investigation references is not the simple silence of a forgotten story.

[00:11:21]Ishi was not forgotten.

[00:11:23]Books were written about him, at least eight books in the century after his death.

[00:11:28]Films were made. A courtyard at Berkeley bears his name.

[00:11:31]The Ishi Wilderness area in California is named for him.

[00:11:35]His recordings are preserved and studied. The silence is more specific than that. It is the silence around the structure of what was done to him.

[00:11:44]The silence around the question of what it means to be the last surviving member of a people that a civilization destroyed.

[00:11:51]And then to be studied by that civilization, housed in its museum, displayed for its entertainment, and finally dissected against your wishes.

[00:12:00]Your brain sent to a federal institution where it would remain for most of a century while bureaucracies debated your legal status. That silence has several layers.

[00:12:09]The first layer is the silence around the massacres that created the circumstances of Ishi's life.

[00:12:16]The Kingsley Cave massacre of 1865 was documented in local newspapers. The participants were not prosecuted. The series of killings that reduced the Yahi from hundreds to a handful of survivors was not treated in the legal or political framework of the time as something that required accountability.

[00:12:34]It happened. It was reported, and it was absorbed into the ordinary record of California's settlement without ever being named as what it was.

[00:12:43]The second layer is the silence around Ishi's own perspective. He spent 5 years in San Francisco surrounded by people who were trying in good faith to understand and document his world.

[00:12:55]He learned English.

[00:12:56]He communicated with Kroeber and the other anthropologists in his life. He was present as they recorded his language and cataloged his knowledge.

[00:13:05]And yet the record of his own feelings about his situation, what he thought about the audiences who came to watch him work, what he made of the city he lived in, how he experienced the daily reality of being the last survivor of a destroyed people on display in a museum is extraordinarily thin.

[00:13:23]This is partly a product of the time.

[00:13:25]The anthropologists of 1911 were interested in Yahi culture, not in Ishi's subjective experience of his own circumstances.

[00:13:33]The recordings they made are of songs and stories and vocabulary.

[00:13:37]They are not recordings of a man's interior life. But it is also something more than a product of the time. The framework within which Ishi existed, the federal authorization, the museum employment, the public display, was a framework that did not have a category for Ishi as a person with interiority, with preferences, with a relationship to his own life that might be more complex than what was visible from the outside.

[00:14:02]He was the last wild Indian.

[00:14:04]He was a research subject. He was a living exhibit. He was, in the terms available to the civilization that housed him, an object of study rather than a subject with a perspective.

[00:14:15]The third layer of silence is the silence around the question of what should have been done differently, and by whom. Kroeber has been criticized for his role in Ishi's life, and the criticism is not entirely unfair.

[00:14:29]He accepted an arrangement that placed a man in a museum.

[00:14:32]He profited professionally from Ishi's knowledge and presence, and when Ishi's explicit wishes for his own body were violated after his death, Kroeber's protest, while genuine, was written from another country and arrived too late.

[00:14:46]But the critique of Kroeber obscures the larger structure. Kroeber operated within an institutional framework, federal Indian policy, university administration, museum protocols, that was the product of the civilization that had destroyed the Yahi in the first place.

[00:15:02]He did not invent the framework. He worked within it imperfectly, sometimes against it, and sometimes with it in ways that served his own interests. The framework was the problem. The framework was designed for a world in which the Yahi did not exist as a legal entity with rights, because the California of 1865 had made sure that they would not. Ishi died on March 25th, 1916.

[00:15:27]He was approximately 54 years old. He had lived in San Francisco for 4 years and 7 months.

[00:15:34]He died of tuberculosis, the disease that had devastated Native American populations across the continent, a disease his immune system had never been exposed to before he walked out of the Deer Creek wilderness in 1911.

[00:15:47]He had told the people around him that he was not afraid of death.

[00:15:51]He had, by the accounts of those who knew him, faced the loss of everything, his family, his people, his world, with a steadiness that those who observed him consistently described as remarkable. He had watched his mother die. He had watched from a distance the disappearance of the last members of his small band.

[00:16:10]He had survived alone in the wilderness for years before starvation drove him out.

[00:16:15]He had seen more endings than any single person should have to see. The ending of the Yahi as a people was the product of specific decisions made by specific people.

[00:16:25]The settlers who organized the massacres, the legal system that declined to prosecute them, the political framework that classified native peoples as obstacles to settlement rather than as the inhabitants of a landscape with prior claims on it.

[00:16:40]Those decisions produced Ishi. The decisions made after Ishi walked out of the wilderness, the federal authorization, the museum employment, the public display, the autopsy, the 84 years in a Smithsonian storage container, were made by different people operating in a different time.

[00:16:58]They were not the same decisions as the massacres. They were made by people who believed themselves to be acting with good intentions.

[00:17:06]And yet the outcome for the man known as Ishi was that he spent the last years of his life as a living exhibit, died against the wishes of the anthropologists who cared for him, and had his brain removed and sent to an institution that would keep it for 84 years.

[00:17:22]History has not gone silent about Ishi.

[00:17:25]It has gone silent about the structure that produced him.

[00:17:28]About the question of how a civilization ends.

[00:17:32]What it looks like when the last person walks out of the wilderness and what the civilization that caused the ending owes to what remains.

[00:17:39]His name was Ishi because that was the name they gave him.

[00:17:43]If he had another name, he never shared it. He took it with him.

[00:17:47]Into the wilderness he came from and the secret place where his remains were finally buried in the year 2000.

[00:17:54]On a hillside near the rivers and the canyons of the Deer Creek country.

[00:17:59]Where his people had lived for thousands of years and where no one who is not Yahi will ever know exactly where he rests.

[00:18:06]If this investigation opened something for you, share it with one person who needs to hear it. And before you go, do you think what happened to Ishi after he walked out of the wilderness in 1911 represented the best that the civilization around him could offer?

[00:18:22]Or something it should have done differently? Leave your answer in the comments.

[00:18:26]I read everyone.