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| ESSAY: HOMECOMING | |
 April 27, 2001 
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| (chanting in the Yahi
language )
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: A few months ago, the ashes of one of America's most famous Indians, a man who never told us his name, but whom generations of schoolchildren knew simply as Ishi, were finally buried, 83 years after his death. When white Californians first saw Ishi in 1911, he was naked and nearly starved, crouching behind a slaughterhouse in Oroville. He was late in his forties. More notably, he was the lone survivor of the Yahi Indians, a tribe that had lived in California for thousands of years. As a boy, as a young reader, I came to think of Ishi as a kind of saving remnant from the pages of Theodora Kroeber's wonderful book "Ishi, the Last of his Tribe." In those same years, I did not recognize the living Indian staring back at me, my reflection in the mirror, but I did recognize that Ishi turned the story of California inside out. It was Ishi's luck to be guided into his new life by two anthropologists, T.T. Waterman and Alfred Kroeber, although neither man would be able to protect him from his immediate notoriety as the last wild Indian of North America. A train, a ferry, a streetcar brought Ishi to the University of California's anthropology museum, then in San Francisco. There he would be on display, for many Californians wanted to see the stone-age man, the archer, the man who made fire by rubbing wood together. Californians wanted to hear him sing. [Singing in the Yahi language] RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: But Ishi was just as interested in the people who came to see him. He recognized regular visitors, distinguished, for example, a Chinese visitor from the white faces. Once, when he got invited to the theater, he spent the entire performance staring at the audience. When he went to the ocean, it was the bathers on the beach who fascinated him more than the surf. For five years Ishi lived here in San Francisco. He wore the white man's clothes. He made a small living as a janitor in the museum where he lived, a few blocks away. He used to come down here to the avenues just off Judah to do his shopping. In those years he spoke a kind of pidgin English, and the scientists who studied him spoke enough of his native Yahi to call him Ishi, which means, simply, "man." He tolerated our custom of handshakes, but he always said that the scent of the white man reminded him of deer hide. It was from Ishi that Californians would hear about those last decades of the 19th century, when the already diminished Yahi tribe found itself under attack and pressed in by white settlers who'd come West looking for bright dust with their murderous fire sticks. To hear Ishi's account of those cruel years is to have every history of the old West, every John Ford movie, turned inside out: The Indian becomes the perceiver of history. But Ishi's last years, the San Francisco years, are as important for Americans to consider as his tribe's last frenzied decades, running, hiding, and diseased. In San Francisco, the so-called Stone Age man showed himself remarkably capable of adaptation. Ishi was not, as myth has it, the last Indian in America; he was an example of the Indian who survives. In 1916, Ishi died of tuberculosis. His body, not his spirit, was defenseless against modern infection. 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. Thus was Ishi's brain returned to California in a jar. At a time when Californians drove SUV's nicknamed "Aztec" and "Cherokee," and when an Indian tribe announced plans to erect a casino near the entrance of Yosemite, and at a time when many living Californians looked like Ishi, though the United States prefers to call us Hispanics, Ishi returned home. After his long journey, his remains were buried by a neighboring tribe near Mount Shasta, in a location where outsiders will never find him. (Chanting in the Yahi language) RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: May you rest in peace, dear Ishi. I'm Richard Rodriguez. |
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