Ishi

Many Native American bands ceased to exist as the last members of tribes or bands died. Many suffered the fate of Ishi, known as the last Yahi Indian of California.

Born around i860, Ishi wandered into a northern California town called Oroville in 1911. His hair was short; he had burned it off when the last of his family had died. Cutting your hair when someone you loved or had ties to died was not only a Yahi mourning custom, but a custom of several other Native American bands or nations as well.

At first, the townspeople didn’t know what to do with this sad-looking Indian man. He couldn’t speak English, and they couldn’t speak Yahi. He was put in jail and given food. An anthropologist, T. T. Waterman, came to see Ishi. Waterman knew some Yana words, a different dialect from the same language family. When Ishi recognized some of the words. Waterman brought Ishi to the University of California Museum of Anthropology. He arranged for a man of the Yana band to help interpret.

It was against Yahi custom to tell your name, so the anthropologists named him Ishi, which means “man” in Yana. Ishi lived in the museum. He was recorded telling stories and singing songs so that his language could be preserved. He also demonstrated how to make arrow points to the public. Anthropologists today believe that Ishi may have had a mixed heritage that included Wintu or Nomlaki because his arrow points more closely resembled those of those bands.

Ishi was also exposed to a different type of life in San Francisco. Anthropologists reported that he seemed most impressed by the large crowds of people. The wife of one of the anthropologists who learned from Ishi, Theodora Kroeber, wrote Ishi’s story in Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America.

In 1914, Ishi took anthropologists Waterman and Alfred Kroeber to his home at Deer Creek. Soon afterward, Ishi developed tuberculosis. Five years after entering Oroville, Ishi died on March 25,1916, the last of the Yahi.