Ishi In Two Worlds.avi

[0:00]In 1769, the Spanish first settled in California. About 310,000 Native people were living there already. At the time of contact, California had at least 70 distinct spoken Native languages and at least as many American Indian cultures. California was also the most densely populated part of North America when Europeans first arrived in the 18th century. Even today, California has more people than any other state. Such indigenous variety in such a small area is known only in two other places on Earth, the Sudan and New Guinea. The best known California Indian is Ishi of the Yahi tribe. The Yahi, a subdivision of the Yana, like all Native people were victims of America's insatiable greed for land, which resulted in America's own final solution, a euphemism for genocide. There were government-backed policies aimed at the systematic and wholesale destruction of traditional Native people and culture. Manifest destiny is the 19th-century idea that America was predestined to expand across the continent. Implicit was the ethnocentric notion that so-called primitive people were to die, be displaced, be assimilated, and that Anglo culture was pre-ordained by God or nature to dominate. Manifest destiny mandated that Native land be annexed and Indian people be relocated, assimilated, enslaved, or murdered for no crime at all except owning land which foreign invaders would take by any means possible, including political maneuvering, broken treaties, imprisonment on reservations, destruction of food supplies and war. In California, vigilantes, bounty hunters, and miners persecuted Native people to extinction in order to take their land. Settlers massacred men, women, children, and infants with the same efficiency that the forest was felled for farmland and cleared for pasture. Thousands of women and children were legally murdered, abducted and enslaved, and forcibly removed from ancient land holdings. Native women were raped and forced into prostitution with no legal representation. In California, towns offered bounty hunters cash for every Indian head or scalp they obtained. Rewards ranged from $5 apiece for severed heads in Shasta City in 1855 to 25 cents for a scalp in Honey Lake in 1863. Over the years, white settlers acting upon the most extreme racist motivation pursued a policy of systematic eradication. From 1850 to 1863, state law provided for the indenture of California Indians. Indian property was free for the taking because Indians were not permitted to testify in court. It was impossible to prosecute any crimes committed against Indians. By the 1860s, surviving Yana had been forced off of their land and were working as domestic servants and field laborers in the Sacramento Valley. By 1872, there were fewer than 70 Yana left, and only a few Yahi. By 1900, no aboriginal people could support traditional lifestyle or subsistence patterns anywhere on the continent. Ishi was born in the early 1860s during this time of ethnic cleansing. The Yana people, of which the Yahi are the southernmost branch, were at one time about 1500 individuals, but quickly declined with the discovery of gold in 1848, which brought its tidal wave of 49ers. After the Three Knolls massacre in 1865, which Ishi survived as a small boy, the Yahi lived in hiding to avoid all contact with white people. Only 12 other Yahi, the last people of the once flourishing Yahi tribe, escaped by running, hiding, playing dead, or jumping into the creek and floating downstream among the cadavers. For three full years before walking out of the hills, Ishi had lived in total solitude as the last living speaker of his language. His surviving band of Yahi had held out in hiding against impossible odds longer than any other Native tribe on the continent. Ishi's family lived in hiding by day and moved around only at night. In the late 19th century, whites thought the Yahi to be extinct, but for several decades a tiny group did remain. To avoid detection, they lived in carefully camouflaged shelters hidden on rock-faced ravines and in the remotest parts of their ancestral territory. They dared only move about at night, stepping from stone to stone and leaving no prints. Their paths ran beneath the chaparral and they sometimes crept about on hands and knees, leaving no visible trails. They bent no branches and cut no wood. They spoke their ancient language softly around small smokeless fires. In their last desperate years, the Yahi stories were still told in whispers and their collective memory was preserved by this small group of survivors. The man later known as Ishi, along with only four others, struggled to maintain the Yahi way of life. In the fall of 1908, only Ishi, his aging mother, an old man, and his younger sister remained in well-camouflaged camps along Deer Creek. But when land surveyors had encountered an Indian, probably Ishi, two local men searched for and found their secret camp, which the Yahi called Wah-wah-nupo-muttuna, or Bear's Hiding Place. They discovered only a paralyzed and terrified old woman, Ishi's mother, who was shaken out of her blanket and died soon after. The old man and the young women may have drowned while trying to flee. The surveyors gathered the blankets, baskets, arrows, tools, and food and every artifact they could find to sell as souvenirs. Now, Ishi was totally alone. Yet, for three more years, totally isolated and in mourning, he would wander around the landscape that once had been the homeland of his people. No one could speak his language anymore. Ishi wandered out of the wilderness near Oroville, California on August 29, 1911. He was found by butchers outside a slaughterhouse, where he was observed leaning against the corral fence. He was in pitiful condition, alone, starving, emaciated with his hair singed short in mourning. They called off the barking dogs. One young man raised an iron spike to hit him but felt so bad after seeing how weak this stranger was. When he did not respond to Spanish or English, the white men noticed his ears were pierced with knotted leather thongs and his nasal septum was ornately pierced with a small splint of wood. Not knowing what else to do, they gave him a cigarette, which he smoked in cupped hands. And then the butchers called the authorities who put Ishi in jail. The newspapers ran an article about a wild man who came out of the hills. Ishi was eventually rescued by T.T. Waterman, Saxton Pope, and Alfred Kroeber, who had recently founded America's second Department of Anthropology at the University of California in Berkeley. Kroeber was himself the very first PhD graduate of America's first Anthropology Department, founded at Columbia University by Franz Boas. Boas wanted to document Native cultures, thinking they would completely disappear. Boas formulated and advocated a four-field approach to anthropology, still in use today, that included the study of culture, human physical variation, language, and archaeology to be of equal importance for a scientific understanding of humanity. Kroeber took Ishi to live at the University Museum of Anthropology, where he hired linguists to try to understand his language and elicit information about how his people had lived in hiding, hunting antelope, elk, and deer, and fishing salmon and gathering acorns. The Yana had no agriculture. They were hunters and gatherers, an example of an ancient life way that all human beings utilized for over 99% of our species existence. How did Ishi see us? Saxton Pope wrote, Ishi looked upon us as sophisticated children, smart, but not wise. We knew many things, but much of our knowledge is false. He knew nature, which is always true. He was kind and self-restrained, and though everything had been taken from him, he bore no bitterness. Kroeber was director of the newly formed museum, which was to be Ishi's home for the remaining five years of his life. It was here that Ishi was employed as a janitor for $25 a month, sweeping around exhibits, helping with installations, making artifacts, and making reconstructive Native huts, like the ones he lived in the remote wilderness along Deer Creek. Ishi became a living museum exhibit, something like a sideshow attraction. His presence drew gigantic crowds to see a real living noble savage or wild man. He often knapped arrowheads and handed them to children in the crowd. In 1916, Ishi died of tuberculosis, a disease he was exposed to in San Francisco by unprotected contact with Anglos. With his death, his language and culture, which had existed for millennia, went extinct. Ishi died knowing that Americans had committed a total genocide of his people and culture, yet he never showed any sign of hatred. When he died, he simply said, you stay, I go. Upon hearing of Ishi's death, Alfred Kroeber wrote from Europe. We propose to stand by our friend. If there is any talk of the interest of science and save for me, then science can go to hell. But in the end, Ishi's brain was preserved and sent to the Smithsonian in Washington. It would take another 100 years for it to be repatriated to the Maidu tribe, Ishi's closest living descendants. Can crimes committed against Native Americans be reprieved? What does it mean for modern Americans to live on land that was stolen and its owners murdered or displaced? About 2.5 million Native people exist today, or about 1.5% of the US population. How have Native cultures changed over time and how much have they assimilated? How can we, or should we integrate our history of conquest and genocide? Is there a statute of limitations on ethnic cleansing? Do treaties expire over time? Is this a topic we should discuss or is it better to forget the past, rewrite our history, or pretend crimes against humanity never took place in America? What do you think? Our national heritage includes genocide and slavery. Does this history preclude the possibility of responsible and moral public policy today? Does this relate to questions of immigration and universal healthcare, for example? How does our collective past and the decisions of preceding generations affect you?