Ishi in Three Centuries (review)

Only one chapter in this anthology, a childhood recollection of Ishi by Fred H. Zumwalt, Jr., was written (in 1962) by someone who actually spent time with the famous "last of the Yahi Indians." This chapter is vivid and moving and is the first real news since Theodora Kroeber's landmark book, Ishi in Two Worlds, in 1961. Still, Ishi, who died in 1916, remains mysterious.

Ishi (his "museum nickname," as Gerald Vizenor reminds us) did leave a large collection of stone and glass points that he flaked in his short years (1911–1916) at the University of California's museum, in San Francisco, and hundreds of Edison cylinders recorded with his voice. Steven Shackley presents a painstaking analysis of Ishi's lithic techniques and patterns, finally making a strong argument that Ishi was not necessarily Yahi. Ira Jackness contributes an equally careful and fascinating account of the wax cylinders' history and of their use by various scholars to record Ishi's voice.

Shackley's work puts into question the validity of A. L. Kroeber's analytic concept of isolate Californian "tribes" and "tribelets." Orin Starn adds to this case, writing about the surprising number of Spanish words in Ishi's vocabulary, and Victor Golla offers a fine discussion of the academic invention of "the Yahi language." Jean Perry completes and translates Edward Sapir's probably best-known Ishi text fragment in a literal, elegantly simple way. Herbert Luthin and Leanne Hinton offer two essays that both tell us more about the man's language use and, by inference, his mind—the first an analysis of another of Ishi's texts, and the other a modest and probable psychological appraisal of his narrative style.

These seven essays are well placed at the center of the book. Most of the twenty further essays, addresses, letters, bureaucratic documents, and editorial introductions that surround them add little of such substance, although there are exceptions beyond Zumwalt's memoir.

Grace Buzaljko's establishment of Dr. Saxton Pope's responsibility for the infamous medical dissection of Ishi's corpse seems irrefutable. The dissection, which A. L. Kroeber tried to stop, nonetheless led to Kroeber's sending the preserved brain to the Smithsonian Institution in 1917. Karen Biestman offers a clear-eyed assessment of the classic 1961 work of his widow, Theodora Kroeber, as a backdrop against which to consider the contemporary (when Biestman wrote) problem of the brain—a problem that threatened the reputations of both A. L. Kroeber and the University of California, Berkeley.

The new anthology is as much about academic and family reputations as it is about the native survivor who found refuge, friends, and work in the museum in San Francisco, ninety-three years ago. Ishi in Three Centuries resulted from a 1999 conference on the repatriation of Ishi's brain to an appropriate California Indian Tribe—a successful process that had been accompanied, however, by a controversial apology from the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley for its putative, long-ago collusion in the exploitation and desecration of Ishi.

In the book's less substantive chapters, contributors bend over backward to amend old overstatements; render defensive, theory-based readings of old news that does not, on its surface, put A. L. Kroeber in a good light; and read highly selectively from Kroeber's large and often discomfiting California oeuvre. However understandably, Karl and Clifton Kroeber, A. L. Kroeber's sons, as well as George Foster, a student of the senior Kroeber and past chair of the Berkeley department, swing precipitously from angry derision of the great man's critics and of Ishi's alleged, present-day exploiters (all left anonymous and thus generalized) to affectionate remembrances of the editors' father in defense of his good intentions. Native American critics—Gerald Vizenor, Jace Weaver, and Louis Owens—use their pages to grind other axes and to create alternative heroes.

A reader needs fairly detailed...