Last Wild Man in North America

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This reads almost like something from a Stephen King novel! .... Another example of "Ghoulism" by so-called anthropologists... SkyWarrior

Repatriation from Smithsonian -Ishi Goes Home

Tuesday, August 8, 2000, 12:00 a.m. Pacific

After decades, Smithsonian to return native's brain to California Indians

by Michelle Locke
The Associated Press

BERKELEY, Calif. - Ishi, the "Last Wild Man in North America," is coming home.

In life, the American Indian was put on display as a museum exhibit after he walked out of the wilderness in 1911. In death, he suffered the same fate when his brain was shipped off to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

"It's about time," said Larry Myers, executive secretary of the California Native American Heritage Commission. "This should never have happened."

California Indians are scheduled to take formal possession of Ishi's brain today in a private ceremony at the Smithsonian, said museum spokesman Randall Kremer.

They will reunite it with Ishi's cremated remains, which have spent decades in a cemetery south of San Francisco, for a secret burial ceremony in the foothills of Mount Lassen in far Northern California.

The story of Ishi goes back 89 years ago this month when he was found near Oroville in remote Butte County.

He soon drew the attention of University of California anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, a revered campus figure whose name is emblazoned on the UC Berkeley anthropology building.

Soon, Ishi was installed in the university's anthropology museum, then in San Francisco, where he worked as janitor's assistant and was treated as a living link to the Stone Age, making spears, bows and arrows as visitors
watched.

He never told his name. Anthropologists came up with Ishi, which means "man" in a local Indian dialect.

Ishi died in 1916 of what doctors believed was tuberculosis.

Before his death, Ishi had made it clear he did not wish to be autopsied, believing that bodies should be burned quickly to release the soul. Kroeber, who was in New York when Ishi died, ordered that Ishi's body be cremated. But his colleagues couldn't resist, autopsying Ishi and removing his brain. In an unexplained inconsistency, Kroeber later sent the brain to the Smithsonian.

Ishi became a figure in California folklore. He was the subject of the 1961 book "Ishi in Two Worlds" - written by Kroeber's widow, Theodora - that became part of the history lesson plan for California fourth-graders.

Then, in 1997, the Butte County Native American Cultural Committee began trying to locate Ishi's remains.

The University of California at San Francisco tracked the brain to the Smithsonian.

The Smithsonian then began its repatriation process, eventually determining that the Butte County group was not related to Ishi.
Although Ishi was known as the "last of the Yahi," the investigation found that Ishi had ties to the Yana tribe, descendants of whom live on in the Pit River tribe and Redding Rancheria, Kremer said.

The museum said last May it was returning the brain to those tribes. Pit River tribe member Mickey Gemmill told the San Jose Mercury News it is time for Ishi to come home.

"If there was anyone exploited by non-Indians to the max, it was Ishi," he said. "Hopefully, he will be at last at rest and at peace and free to join his family and ancestors."
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``After death, spirits travel south looking
for an entrance into the other world. They
go down into the ground or climb up
in the sky and ride the wind.''

Ishi's brain will travel this week across the concourse at Dulles International Airport, through a security scanner and onto a United Airlines 757, brought aboard as carry-on luggage.

California's legendary Indian is coming home -- the final journey for the ``last of the Yahi,'' who stumbled out of the wilderness near Oroville in 1911 and became a living exhibit of Stone Age man in a San Francisco museum. Generations of the state's schoolchildren have learned his story.

In a solemn procession, tribal elders plan to retrieve Ishi's brain from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where it has languished in a tank for the past eight decades. By reuniting it with his cremated remains and then burying it in Ishi's homeland in the foothills of Mount Lassen, tribal elders believe Ishi's troubled spirit finally will be set free.

``If there was anyone exploited by non-Indians to the max, it was Ishi,'' said Mickey Gemmill, a spiritual healer of the Pit River tribe who is part of the group going to Washington on Monday. ``Hopefully, he will be at last at rest and at peace and free to join his family and ancestors.''

The odyssey of Ishi's brain spotlights a dark chapter in Northern California's history when the government paid bounty hunters to slaughter and scalp American Indians. It illustrates the lingering resentment many American Indians feel for those who harbor the bones and sacred artifacts of their ancestors. And it has created a rift among anthropologists at the University of California-Berkeley over the ethics of treating humans as scientific specimens.

For a while, the fate of Ishi's brain was caught in a political tug-of-war. California legislators accused the Smithsonian of ``holding the brain hostage''; an editorial cartoon lampooned the venerable institution as pea-brained.

``Poor Ishi,'' said Tom Killion, director of repatriation at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. ``He would be rolling in his grave if he knew all the shenanigans.''

Decades of mystery

The whereabouts of Ishi's brain -- separated from the rest of his body in an autopsy before he was cremated in 1916 -- was a mystery for more than 80 years.

But in June 1998, motivated by American Indians near Oroville who were seeking Ishi's remains, a UC-San Francisco historian and a Duke University anthropologist traced it to the Smithsonian.

At first, historian Nancy Rockafellar was told by a Smithsonian staff member that the brain was not there, that it was ``old folklore and it doesn't exist.''

But anthropologist Orin Starn discovered letters from 1917 detailing the best way to package and ship Ishi's brain to Washington, D.C. He went right to the repatriation office, and this time the brain was located: stainless steel tank No. 6 at a Smithsonian warehouse in Maryland.

For decades, it sat in the same vat with a dozen others, including eight from American Indians. Under pressure from tribes over the past several years, most have been returned to their descendants, as have about 4,000 other American Indian skeletal remains at the Smithsonian.

``None of those cases gained the notoriety of the single repatriation of this signal Indian,'' said Killion of the Smithsonian. ``He's just come forward as this icon of everything that brought the repatriation legislation about.''

For years, American Indians worked to convince legislators that the collection of their ancestors' bones was repugnant and unnecessary. In 1989, Congress enacted a law requiring the Smithsonian, as well as all other museums and universities, to return their human remains and sacred objects to their tribal descendants.

``Why do they have our people boxed up and sitting in warehouses today? To us, that's very crazy,'' said Gemmill. ``They dig us up like dinosaurs and fossils. We're still here. We're still real people.''

The Smithsonian houses about 30,000 human remains from around the world, including about 18,500 from American Indians. They formed a library for anthropologists studying everything from the causes of cancer to the links between brain size and race.

Ishi's brain was weighed and measured, but the Smithsonian says no further study was done. The brain was never sectioned and remains in one piece. It was never displayed.

`We found you'

A 59-year-old logging truck driver, Angle and several other Indians from Butte County vowed in 1997 to ``locate and place Ishi's remains and spirit to his native homeland.'' With his brain and body separated, they believe Ishi has been in spiritual limbo.

In March 1999, Angle and his delegation from Oroville, 50 miles north of Sacramento, traveled to Washington. Hoping to verify the brain was Ishi's and had been treated respectfully, they gathered in a conference room at the Smithsonian.

For the viewing, the Smithsonian had transferred the brain to a gallon-size jar and covered it with a sheet.

The smoke detector was turned off. Then, to purify the room, a spiritual man burned sage, healing grasses and warm wood. Angle delicately removed the sheet.

At the bottom of the jar sat the brain. It was wrapped in cheesecloth with two numbered tags attached.

Removed from the alcohol solution and placed on towel, it was unwrapped like a mummy.

``At that moment, I don't think we needed to see any numbers or anything. We knew it was the brain of Ishi,'' Angle said. ``We all felt his presence. It was just a tremendous emotional thing. Everybody was crying.''

When the group regained its composure, Angle made a pledge: ``We've searched. We found you. We've come to take you home.''

The Smithsonian told him that the repatriation act required that only living relatives or those who were ``culturally affiliated'' could claim the brain. But who could that be? After all, Ishi was long-considered ``the last of his tribe.''

The delay frustrated Angle as well as California legislators who held hearings in April 1999 to pressure the Smithsonian to speed up the process. Even the lieutenant governor weighed in: ``Talk about your brainless federal bureaucracy. Every schoolchild has been taught that Ishi was the last of the Yahis,'' said Cruz M. Bustamante.

``He's got relatives, albeit distantly for sure, but they are related to him,'' Killion said.

The brain would be put in the hands of Gemmill of the Pit River tribe and members of the Redding Rancheria, both groups with Yana ancestry. The Yahi were a subgroup of the larger Yana tribe that lived in the shadow of Mount Lassen and shared similar languages and some cultural traditions.

The decision deeply disappointed Angle, who thought the Smithsonian should have done a more thorough investigation, including DNA testing.

Accepting the fact that they would not be part of Ishi's burial, Angle and a group of sympathetic scholars and American Indians gathered at the top of Table Mountain behind Oroville. As the sun set over the Coastal Range across the valley to the west and hundreds of birds fluttered in the canyon below, a bonfire was lit.

Back in spotlight

Ishi gained near mythic status after the 1961 publication of the book, ``Ishi in Two Worlds.'' Written in 1961 by Theodora Kroeber, wife of the famed anthropologist who brought Ishi to Berkeley, it was translated into 18 languages and became part of California history lessons for fourth-graders across the state.

The book turned the tale of one Indian into a symbol of the destruction of American Indians across the country.

In Northern California, many tribes, including the Yahi, were nearly wiped out by white bounty hunters during the gold rush years. One boasted of his blanket of scalps. Many were heralded as heroes.

In 1854 alone, the federal government paid the state of California $1 million in expense claims stemming from hunts. Some county governments paid bounties of $5 a head, 50 cents a scalp.

From 1850 to 1900, the California Indian population plunged from 200,000 to 50,000.

In a span of about 20 years ending in 1870, Ishi's tribe plunged from about 400 people to near extinction.

Ishi's father was killed in a massacre along Mill Creek in 1866. But Ishi and his mother survived, along with several others. And for about the next 40 years, they lived camouflaged by thick brush on a ledge above Deer Creek, bending branches instead of breaking them to leave no path.

In 1908, a survey crew discovered the hiding place and stole as souvenirs their bows and arrows, cooking utensils and fur capes -- all tools needed to survive another winter.

The raid was the death knell for this weakened group. Over the next three years, all would die but Ishi. In a sign of mourning, he took a smoldering stick and singed his entire head of hair.

It was still short when he staggered, lonely and starving, out of the wilderness on Aug. 29, 1911, the sole survivor of his vanquished band.

The American Indian who was found crouched alongside a corral near a slaughterhouse, speaking a language no one knew, made news across the country. Papers proclaimed Ishi the ``Wild Indian of Oroville,'' ``a primordial savage of the Stone Age.''

Presence still felt

Once Ishi entered the white world, much of that myth became tied to UC-Berkeley -- a powerful connection that remains today.

A corner of the Phoebe Hearst Museum is reserved for an Ishi exhibit. Teaching kits can be borrowed that contain Ishi photos and cassette tapes of Yahi songs he recorded on wax cylinders. A campus courtyard is named in his honor.

The tributes have their roots in the complicated relationship forged between Ishi and Professor Alfred L. Kroeber, founder of the university's anthropology department and the scientist who took control of Ishi's future.

Was Kroeber the friend to Ishi he proclaimed to be? Or did his career ambitions to build a museum to rival the Smithsonian press him to exploit Ishi by treating him more as a specimen?

``Hold Indian till arrival,'' Kroeber wrote in a telegram to the Butte County sheriff keeping Ishi at the Oroville jail. He assured the sheriff he would ``take charge and be responsible for him.''

On Labor Day 1911, Ishi was dressed in a gray checked suit with a cutaway jacket and straw hat and taken to the Oroville train station. Barefoot and carrying shoes in his hand, he smiled at photographers as he boarded the train to San Francisco.

He held tightly to his seat, his knuckles turning white, and jumped when the whistle blew.

When Ishi stepped off the ferry onto Market Street, the San Francisco Examiner proclaimed Ishi ``the greatest anthropological treasure they have ever captured.''

Kroeber and his colleagues set to work, weighing and measuring him, making plaster casts of his feet.

``The odor of his body is faintly musty, and suggests the smell of tanned deer hide. Bones small,'' Dr. Saxton Pope wrote of him. ``The molars are well worn but in good condition. Ears are well formed, of good size, and the lobes are pierced for rings.''

Ishi refused to divulge his given name because doing so would have been a serious breech of tribal etiquette. Kroeber called him Ishi, a Yahi word meaning ``full-grown man.''

The newly formed anthropology department operated its museum on Parnassus Heights in San Francisco, where UC-San Francisco's Medical Center is now located. For $25 a week, Ishi worked as a janitor there and was given a room near a collection of skeletons. For an American Indian who was afraid to even utter the name of his dead relatives, the ``bone room'' frightened and depressed him.

Kroeber declined numerous offers from circuses and vaudeville troupes to make a sideshow out of this primitive man.

But on Sundays, he opened the museum doors to hundreds of tourists who came to watch Ishi twirl sticks to make fire, chip arrowheads and demonstrate archery with his bows and arrows.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs, learning that Ishi was living at the museum, sent someone to investigate his treatment. Ishi was given the option of moving home to the wilds of Deer Creek or going to a reservation.

Ishi declined both vehemently, saying, ``I will grow old here and die in this house.''

In 1914, Ishi took Kroeber, fellow anthropologist T.T. Waterman, Pope and Pope's son for a month-long expedition to his rugged homeland, a terrain that remains virtually undeveloped today. In the land of vertical cliffs and wild gorges, Ishi taught them archery, salmon-spearing and how to find edible roots. In the evenings, Ishi sang the songs of his people and taught 11-year-old Saxton Pope the Yahi circle dance. Kroeber took hundreds of photographs that Berkeley still maintains in its archives.

But before the summer of 1915 ended, Ishi had contracted tuberculosis. The Pacific Island exhibit at the museum was boxed up, and Ishi's cot was placed in the sunny room overlooking Golden Gate Park.

Kroeber was on sabbatical in New York when he learned Ishi was terminally ill. He wrote to the curator of the museum, E.W. Gifford, instructing him to oppose any autopsy. ``If there is any talk about the interest of science, say for me that science can go to hell,'' Kroeber wrote. ``We propose to stand by our friends.''

Ishi's brain was removed, preserved and cataloged: ``Weighs 1300 grams . . . shows no gross abnormalities . . . the skull is small and rather thick.''

Wrongly believing cremation was part of the Yahi custom, the rest of Ishi's body was cremated along with artifacts that were meaningful to him, including a quiver of arrows, a basket of acorn flakes and a purse of tobacco.

The ashes were poured into a small black Pueblo jar -- a well-meaning gesture, but from a tribe that had no relationship to the Yahi. On it, the words were inscribed: ``Ishi, the last Yahi Indian, died March 25, 1916.''

They were placed in a niche at Olivet Memorial Cemetery in Colma where they remained until they were moved recently to the Redding Rancheria.

``He was industrious, kindly, obliging, invariably even tempered, ready of smile and thoroughly endeared himself to all with whom he came in contact,'' Kroeber would write. ``With his death the Yahi passed away.''

Reversal

What happened next would baffle Ishi scholars decades later: Kroeber offered Ishi's brain to the Smithsonian -- ``compliments of the University of California.''

``There is no one here who can put it to scientific use,'' Kroeber wrote to Smithsonian curator Ales Hrdlicka seven months after Ishi's death. ``If you wish it, I shall be glad to deposit it in the National museum collection.''

To think that the man for whom they named Kroeber Hall would willingly send the brain to the Smithsonian was unfathomable -- and embarrassing.

The discovery of the missing brain at the Smithsonian was chilling to Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a department anthropologist.

``Essentially he was valued more as an informant than as a human being,'' she said. ``We have never acknowledged the ghosts in our own closet. I feel that Ishi is one of our ghosts.''

She began a campaign to have the department apologize. But some of the old-time faculty were adamantly opposed.

George Foster, who was a student of Kroeber's before his death in 1960, was among them. ``He spoke of Ishi with real affection,'' said Foster, 86, professor emeritus.

``The apology is out of order,'' he added. ``It's a bad case of presentism -- judging the past by the present. If you look at the record, he was treated very well.''

Scheper-Hughes took her apology to the California statehouse in April 1999 during hearings to put pressure on the Smithsonian to release Ishi's brain:

``What happened to Ishi's body, in the name of science, was a perversion of our core anthropological values,'' she told the legislators. ``We are sorry for our department's role, however unintentional, in the final betrayal of Ishi.''

Karl Kroeber, the anthropologist's 74-year-old son, accused Scheper-Hughes and those who agree with her of exploiting Ishi in their own way.

``These people don't really care about Ishi,'' said Karl Kroeber, a Columbia University humanities professor who was born after Ishi died. ``If you talk about exploitation, these are the people who are using him for their own agendas.''

His father, on the other hand, ``regarded Ishi as a personal friend, a person he regarded as an equal and also as a person for whom he was responsible.''

``Was there anybody else in 1911 except maybe three or four anthropologists in the country who had any appreciation of the culture that had been destroyed?'' Karl Kroeber asked. ``This is the kind of thing that's forgotten.''

Source of inspiration

Today, Ishi's image is on a mural at a medical building at UC-San Francisco; his likeness appears behind bars at the Oroville historical museum. Both the wilderness from which he emerged and a Sierra Club chapter bear his name.

He has become a pop culture presence, the focus of a documentary and two made-for-TV movies, one starring Jon Voight as Kroeber and Graham Greene as Ishi.

Souvenir seekers have become a problem in Ishi's old haunts. The spot where Ishi's father was killed, for example, ``was destroyed by artifact hunters,'' said Jerald Johnson, an Ishi expert at Sacramento State University who has retraced the Indian's path. ``I don't recognize it anymore.''

Rich Mertes, a 35-year-old school teacher, is one of them. He has written poetry about Ishi's brain in its ``formaldehyde reservation,'' and has coined the term ``pulling an Ishi,'' to describe when he shuns modern technology for the more archaic, like using a typewriter instead of a computer.

But his favorite tribute to Ishi is to go to what he believes was once Ishi's urban retreat: a tiny, igloo-shaped cave nearly hidden on Mount Sutro behind what was once Ishi's museum home.

Drawn by urban legends about the existence of Ishi's cave, Mertes and his friends fanned out over the steep, wooded hillside and rediscovered the cave.

A doorknob led them to it. Wrapped in hardware store packaging, the doorknob lay in front of the vertical crack in a rock outcropping that led to the cave.

``I remember Ishi said his favorite inventions were matches, glue, running water and doorknobs,'' Mertes said. ``I assume someone would have left it as an offering. Maybe it was a symbol to guide us.''

Mertes seeks refuge there frequently, lighting candles and playing a cassette tape of Ishi singing the songs that had been originally recorded on wax cylinders.

``I felt pretty connected to Ishi,'' said Mertes, a San Francisco native who has studied Eastern religions. ``It was mostly a personal ceremony of wanting the spirit of a man who I think lived in harmony with the earth -- hoping that somehow it could bleed out into the wider world.''

The final act

At the Smithsonian this week, Gemmill and a tribal entourage will gather around the brain. They will have a deerskin to wrap it in and pack it for travel.

They plan to fly it home, changing planes in San Francisco for a second flight to Redding where his ashes are waiting. The ashes will be poured into a precious Yana basket that will also hold the brain. They plan to destroy the Pueblo jar purchased by the Berkeley professors in 1916.

A group of no more than five tribal members, including Gemmill, will travel deep into Yahi country to bury Ishi. Angle, who started the effort to bring Ishi home, is not invited.

``Our elders, our spiritual people have agreed that the final resting place of Ishi's remains will be in his home area. However we're not going to ever tell anybody where it is. That's the only way to protect and preserve his burial area. Today, right now, someone is digging into Indian graves,'' Gemmill said. ``The wishes of the Indian community is that the exploitation cease.''

Gemmill said he will gently sweep his sacred eagle's wing and claw over the Yana basket as it is placed into the earth. He will chant and pray for Ishi's safe journey.

And then, if his Yahi destiny is fulfilled, Ishi's spirit will ride the wind.

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