Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America (review)

Alice Kehoe concludes a review of two books about Ishi with the words, " Ishi seems to have become a genre," and Orin Starn refers to it as "the new cult of Ishi" (Kehoe 2004, Starn 2004:61). Theodora Kroeber's 1961 book, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian In North America (1961), introduced this American Indian man to the U.S. and the world's reading public. That work has sold about a million copies; it was excerpted in Reader's Digest, was followed by a version for school children, and inspired several films, both feature and documentary. Ishi became an icon in murals celebrating California diversity, as well as an emblem for radical Indians in the 1960s. But once it was realized, in 1998, that when Ishi died in 1915 his body had been autopsied and his brain removed and pickled in formaldehyde and sent—somewhere—the stakes grew higher and the writing more voluminous. Richard Burrill produced two new books " rediscovering" Ishi and two of Alfred Kroeber's sons, Karl and Clifton, put together an interestingly balanced collection of papers, Ishi in Three Centuries (2003).

Then came Orin Starn's revisionist tale, Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last 'Wild" Indian (2004), in which the author reports on the quest for the repatriation of that organ and along the way calls into question much about Theodora Kroeber's book—its intentions, objectivity, and a good number of facts. Where Theodora Kroeber saw only good in the relationship between her late husband and his colleagues and Ishi, Starn, writing in the revisionist mode to which we have become accustomed, presents the doubts and suspicions that have been expressed both by critical anthropologists and contemporary Indians.

Douglas Cazaux Sackman writes that he almost gave up this project when he learned that Starn's book was in preparation, but he persisted with the encouragement of his editors (x). It is well that he did, because although there is substantial overlap with all the other works, Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America introduces new elements into the story. In his words, "it is an entirely new narrative exploring different aspects of our shared American history that the meeting of these two men illuminate" (x). And he offers a reasonable and understanding picture of Ishi himself and of the relationship with Kroeber, T. T. Waterman, and Saxton Pope.

Sackman begins his book with parallel biographies of Ishi and Kroeber, each "...in Three Worlds," and builds on the notion that they are both "wild men in the wilderness of modern America." There are so many references to Ishi as "wild" in the press of his times—even by Alfred Kroeber himself—. Thus that it is no stretch to build on that word for a presentation of the life of the "last of the Yahi Indians." To apply it to the highly educated and sophisticated New Yorker, A. L. Kroeber, is another matter, but Sackman will connect both of them to the condition of modernity in the United States, seen by him as a "wilderness" (175).

After retelling Ishi's cultural and historical background and the circumstances that led to his coming out of "the wild," Sackman devotes a similar section to Kroeber's background, largely based on Theodora's other book, Alfred Kroeber, A Personal Configuration (1970). He briefly presents Alfred's early years growing up, and studying nature, in Manhattan, and then his years at Columbia University, where he first completed an M.A. in English and then worked for his Ph.D. in anthropology under Franz Boas. The third section deals with Kroeber's first decade in California, before the arrival of Ishi. Kroeber established a museum and the first department of anthropology west of Chicago in San Francisco and Berkeley, respectively, and he traveled tirelessly through the rest of California in search of information about and...