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"THE LITTLE HISTORY OF PITIFUL EVENTS" The Epistemological and Moral Contexts of Kroeber's Californian Ethnology THOMAS BUCKLEY There may be a half a dozen full-blooded Mattole scattered in and near their ancient land. The Government census of 1910 gives 10, with two or three times as many mixed bloods; but these figures may refer in part to Athabascans of other divisions, who here and there have drifted into the district. The Mattole had their share offighting with the whites , the memory ofwhich is even obscurer than the little history of most such pitiful events. Attempts were also made to herd them onto the reservations of Humboldt and Mendocino Counties. But like most of the endeavors of this sort in the early days ofAmerican California, these round-ups were almost as inefficient and unpersisted in as they were totally ill-judged in plan and heartless in intent, and all they accomplished was the violent dispersal, disintegration, and wasting away of the suffering tribes subjected to the process. (Kroeber 1925: 143) There is a remarkable set of photographs, made in 1915, showing the last known "Yahi Indian," the man called "Ishi," standing with four anthropologists of varying degrees of eminence (in Damell1990, following p. 172). The most powerful of these pictures shows Ishi posed between a debonair Paul Radin and an "impulsive" Thomas Talbot Waterman (T. Kroeber 1970: 149). To Waterman's left stand Edward Sapir and, finally, Robert Lowie, the tallest of Thomas Buckley is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and the American Studies Program, University of Massachusetts, Boston. He has done field work and advocacy anthropology among Native Californians since the early 1970s and is completing a compilation of his writing on Yurok Indian culture and history, which includes chapters on the history of anthropology in northwestern California and on A. L. Kroeber. 257 258 THOMAS BUCKLEY the group, leaning in upon it (cf. Golla 1984: 195). Looking utterly displaced and almost forgotten among the large and looming anthropologists, Ishi seems to wish to merge with the leafy background, and soon will: he is already ill with tuberculosis and his death is less than a year away. Alfred Louis Kroeber, whom an informed viewer might expect to see in this photograph, is missing. In 1911, when Ishi emerged as a middle-aged man out of a lifetime ofhiding from invading whites, he was taken to the University of California's Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco. There he was made at home as an ethnographic research subject, a living exhibit (a "Stone Age Man"), a janitor, and, as it developed, a friend to several anthropologists and other university personnel . His chief benefactor and one of his three closest friends, of course, was Kroeber, then Chairman of the University's Department of Anthropology and Curator of its Museum (T. Kroeber 1961). In the late spring of 1915 Kroeber had begun a long-planned year's leave from the university that took him first to Zuni Pueblo, in New Mexico, and then to New York, England, and Germany (1916a & b). He returned to New York and the American Museum of Natural History in November, and he was there when Ishi died on March 25, 1916. Informed by colleagues of his friend's imminent end, Kroeber insisted that Yahi burial practices be observed when the time came: I do not ... see that an autopsy would lead to anything of consequence, but would resolve itself into a general dissection. Please shut down on it. As to disposal of the body, I must ask you as my personal representative to yield nothing at all under any circumstances. If there is any talk about the interests ofscience, say for me that science can go to hell. I cannot believe that any scientific value is materially involved. We have hundreds of Indian skeletons that nobody ever comes to study. The prime interest in this case would be of a morbid romantic nature. (AK/E. W. Gifford 3/24/15, in T. Kroeber 1961: 234) The letter arrived too late. Ishi's corpse was cut to pieces while it was "still warm" by another of his friends, the surgeon Saxton Pope, its internal organs removed, weighed, and examined, with the skull being found to be "small and rather thick" (Pope 1920: 209, 212) The sources of Kroeber's anguish were complex. His pain was sharpened by the unhappy coincidence of the death of his first wife, Henriette Rothschild, from the same disease in 1913-a...

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