ONEOFMANYFEATHERS'
Ishi- The Last Yahi
In August of 1911, Ishi, weak and worn thin from 50 years of hiding from the white man, stumbled out of the foothills near Mount Lassen. He was the last of his people. He was the last Yahi. The whites had through disease, military campains, and virtual enslavement, had reduced the Yani from some 20,000 to just one last survivor. Behind him, he left a world of tradition and past memories and entered the white mans 20th century world where he would later die of tuberculos.
From the year of 1911 until 1916, Ishi lived at the Anthropology Museum, which he called the Hi a wowi, when translated means family house. Ishi was befriended by an anthropologist from Berkeley named Thomas Waterman. Waterman, who spoke a dialect which Ishi could decipher, brought Ishi to what then was the Parnassus Campus. Ishi was free to return to his homelands but Ishi chose to remain at the museum where he became a living interpreter of his culture. Here he was studied and lived as an living exhibit of his people and culture.
While residing at the museum, Ishi taught Waterman and others how to make arrows and other tools. Ishi gave much while never revealing his own name. Ishi simply meant "man" in his language. Ishi was fascinated with trolly cars which he would frequently ride. He was a gentle and unassuming man and was described by those who knew him as curious, very friendly with a personality of self-examination.
Exposed to the new world of diseases all foreign to the Yahi, Ishi contracted tuberculosis and died on March 25, 1916. This man we call Ishi, helped others learn by teaching what his people and his culture was like. His teachings resulted in the printing of books and much more. Ishi left behind a legacy of priceless information about his people. Most of all he left behind an example of a courageous human spirit that bridged the different worlds between the white man and his. He was cremated along with his bow, five arrows and other personal treasures.
The Yahi Indians, a tribe that had lived in California for thousands of years, let no one ever forget Ishi or his his tribe's last decades of running, hiding, and dying from disease.
When Ishi passed away, the Yahi passed away .
The archer, the man who made fire by rubbing wood together.
Can you hear him sing?
Despite the protests of his friend Kroeber, Ishi's body was defiled by an autopsy, and his brain went into a jar, all the way back to the Smithsonian in Washington. It will remain the shame of the Smithsonian that throughout the 20th century it accumulated thousands of Indian remains. Only in 1989 did the Congress require the museum to begin to repatriate the bones and body parts and skulls that the museum has kept in jars and boxes.
After his long journey, his remains were buried by a neighboring tribe near Mount Shasta, in a location where outsiders will never find him.
Remember