By Kelly Moody
I recently acquired some materials on the last surviving Yahi Indian, Ishi, of whom we studied and watched a documentary on in class a couple of weeks ago. After the first mention of Ishi in class awhile ago, it was a much talked about subject with me and a few of my friends. It turned out that one of my friends had a copy of "Ishi, In Two Worlds" by Theodora Kroeber(the wife of the famous anthropologist that worked with Ishi when he came out of seclusion in the woods) I also found a book entitled "Ishi's Brain" by Orin Starn totally by chance in a thrift book store. One of the books is original commentary on the events that occurred involving Ishi's family and tribal history, his initial exposure to 'civilization' and a lot of data and accounts of his time in San Francisco, as well as original quotes and letters from Ishi's doctor and Alfred Kroeber himself around the time of Ishi's death. The other book is interesting, because it is from a modern standpoint looking back at the collection of information written and collected about Ishi including "Ishi, In Two Worlds", questioning the validity of some things, questioning the meaning drawn from the study of Ishi---what it means to put him as a standard for all Yahi Indians (this could be a wrong generalization to make), assuming that he was the last of the Indians; it also analyzes the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death, that is what happened to his body after he died and why. There is some speculation that Ishi's brain is still preserved in a laboratory somewhere and noone knows where it is. The best thing about the book is the positive light that is portrayed onto Alfred Kroeber. Because of the way Ishi was treated compared to today's standards we automatically look at him in a negative light, but apparently he was a very open-minded man of his day. What anthropology was turning into, what he contributed a large part of, was redefining it with a lack of bias, forming more genuine opinions about the similarities and differences in human beings. Kroeber viewed Ishi as an equal even if he was living in a museum, putting his 'culture on display', it was all an attempt to make the world understand that this man was not a mere 'animal'.
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2 comments:
Joanna Andrusko
Primal Religions
Ahh I don't really understand how this blog thing works I hope I can publish comments as part of my blog?? I don't have a response to this post but I did want to write about the subject of Ishi. I also did further research about Ishi for my historiography class. We had to write a paper on whether or not we thought good historical accounts could be written without first-hand accounts. I brought up the subject of Ishi because here, for example, is an entire civilization we will never know more than very little about. I am not here to debate the issue of great white men history and whether or not it is effective. But it is interesting to note the losses we as a society experience when that is the only history we have. It is the only history we were concerned with up until the development of anthropology. Therefore we as a world have exterminated thousands of societies that we will never encounter again simply because for several hundred years we were not interested in them. What have we lost? What could primitive societies in Polynesia have taught us? The aboriginal peoples? Think of our society, and how vital we feel all of our knowledge is to the world. Imagine if we were not given the chance to pass on our wisdoms to future generations. Can you imagine the tragedies felt by native societies as they witnessed the end of their race? So much they felt needed to be passed on to protect the earth and no opportunity
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