Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America

Ishi (c. 1861 - March 25, 1916) was the last known member of the Yahi, a group of the Yana of the U.S. state of California. Widely acclaimed in his time as the "last wild Indian" in America, Ishi lived most of his life completely outside modern culture. At 50 years of age, in 1911, one morning in 1911, Ishi was found, nearly starving, in the corral of a slaughter house in California near the present-day foothills of Lassen Peak. Ishi means "man" in the Yana language. The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber gave this name to the man because in the Yahi culture, tradition demanded that he not speak his name or that of anyone who was dead. When asked his name, he said: "I have none, because there were no people to name me," meaning that no Yahi had ever spoken his name. He was taken in by anthropologists at the University of California, Berkeley, who both studied him and hired him as a research assistant. He lived most of his remaining five years in a university building in San Francisco. In June 1915, he temporarily lived in Berkeley with the anthropologist Thomas Talbot Waterman and his family. Waterman and Alfred L. Kroeber, director of the museum, studied Ishi closely over the years and interviewed him at length to help them reconstruct Yahi culture. He described family units, naming patterns, and the ceremonies that he knew, but much tradition had been lost because there were few older survivors in the group in which he was raised. He identified material items and showed the techniques by which they were made. Ishi provided valuable information on his native Yana language, which was recorded and studied by the linguist Edward Sapir, who had previously done work on the northern dialects. The author of this book was Theodora Kroeber (1897-1979), the wife of Alfred and an anthropologist in her own right.