Re-Reading Ishi's Story

Interpreting Representation in Three Worlds

Norman K. Denzin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367687472
• eBook ISBN: 9781000358407
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Psychology

Rereading Ishi's Story offers a manifesto of sorts through a critical reading of an anthropological classic, Theodora Kroeber's 1961 book, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America.

The heart of the analysis involves a five-play cycle, built around Gerald Vizenor's trickster-survivance model. It gives Ishi a voice he never had in Kroeber's book and imagines an Ishi who was not the happy warrior in Kroeber's book. The author follows the story line in Kroeber's book, focusing on key events as recounted by Alfred Kroeber and his associates Saxton Pope and Thomas Waterman. Chapter 1 tells Ishi's story in his own words; Chapter 2 retells Ishi's capture narrative, which includes the recording of his story of the wood ducks; Chapter 3 builds on stories told about Ishi by Zumwalt Jr.; Chapter 4 criticizes Kroeber and associates for making Ishi return to his homeland, asking him to 'play' Indian; and Chapter 5 takes up his death and the recovery of his brain. The concluding chapters address repatriation practices, genocide, Indigenous ethics, discourses of forgiveness, and a performance autoethnography ethic for this new century, returning to the Kroebers and their autoethnographic practices.

This book continues a four-volume project on Native Americans, the postmodern Wild West shows, museums, violence, genocide, and the modern U.S. American use of the Native American in a collective search for an authentic identity (Denzin, 2015, 2013, 2011, 2008). It will be of great interest to scholars and students of qualitative inquiry, anthropology, and Native American studies.

Part 1

1
You can call me Ishi

The story of a trickster

Let’s begin here:

Dear reader, this is my story. You need to hear from me first. My name is Ishi, but you could call me Ishmael, for I too am an exile, a social outcast, a victim of robbery, the last surviving member of a small society (Melville, 1851; Kroeber, 1961, p. 4). The anthropologists named me Ishi. Kroeber said I was the last man of the Stone Age. I was born in 1860 and died in 1916. I came out of the Northern California mountains in an undershirt and rags. First, you put me in jail, and then you put me on a train and took me to San Francisco and put me in a museum next to a room that contained human bones. You dressed me up in Western clothes and then asked me to pose bare chested for photographers and journalists.

You said I was shy at first but gentle and had a good sense of humor. You said I sometimes used pantomime to make myself understood. You said I blushed easily, was easily embarrassed, and I learned very little English (Kroeber 1961, pp. 124–25). The newspapers said I was civilization’s last wild man, a well-born Yahi. You put me behind glass. You recorded my voice and transcribed my stories. Hucksters wanted the museum to promote a two-man act of me and Kroeber. It would be for educational and edifying purposes (Kroeber, 1961, p. 129). On Sunday afternoons between two and four-thirty, Kroeber and I received visitors at the museum. Later, the museum made a movie of me entering, leaving, and working in my little museum house (Kroeber, 1961, p.132).

Call me Ishi. It was never my name. I never told them my real name. Kroeber, the Big Chiep, named me Ishi, which means “man” in Yana, my language, one of the people. I am the last man. I am absence. I am Gerald Vizenor’s post-Indian. You gave me a watch, but I cannot tell time.

Call me Ishi. I lived in exile, a fugitive pursued by pioneers and miners bent on genocide, $0.25 a scalp, $5 for an Indian’s head. I am part of your creation story. I was there before there was a beginning—before there were Native Americans (Vizenor, 1949, p. Vii). There are no real Native Americans or Indians. The word is an invention. I am a simulation. I am trickster, coyote, a make-believe aboriginal.

You put me on stage as if in a Wild West show, like one of the Fox Indians in George Catlin’s Traveling Indian Gallery (Denzin, 2013; Catlin, 1848a, 1848b). I told tricky Wood Duck stories, smiled, made bows and arrows, chipped arrowheads out of pieces of broken glass and built campfires.

I said I want to grow old here.

I was like Gloria Anzaldua’s New Mestiza, safely locked up in a reservationor urban ghetto, or behind glass in the museum (Anzaldua, 1987, p. 183, paraphrase). I never learned how to shake hands, I never went bare chested, wore leather clothes, or feathers. I smiled at tourists. I was more than a starved-out Yahi from the wilds of Dear Creek.

Big Chiep said I had perceptive powers far keener than those of highly educated white men, a higher mentality than most aboriginals. You said I proved that a savage from the wilds can be civilized.

I gained 40 pounds in two months of captivity.

I was a Native hunter in a museum. I bought a certificate that said I was a Yahi, but there is nobody left from my tribe.

I am a tribe of one. I am my own sovereign tribal nation. I am an artist. I am a man. I am as real as every fictional Indian: noble savage, proud warrior Tonto, Little Beaver, Squanto, Pocahontas, Chief Joseph, Geronimo, Sacajawea, Crazy Horse, Hiawatha Big Foot. Yippee ki-yay. I even went to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. And a Sioux warrior asked what tribe is this Indian?

Everywhere I turned, they were taking my picture. I became an expert on matters of lighting, posing, and exposure. They sold photographs of me to tourists. They dressed me up as a civilized man in a suit, tie, and leather shoes. I died of TB in a museum. They divided my estate between the state and the hospital. The medical school got $265. You found my brain in a vat at the Smithsonian. Friends returned my brain and my ashes to a sacred site in my homeland.

My name is Ishmael, or “I am Ishmael,“ but rather “Call me Ishmael” (Melville, 1851). Never call me Ishi. My name is Ishmael, or “I am Ishmael,” but rather “Call me Ishmael,” your orphan, your outcast (Melville, 1851).

***

Another version of the story begins with this 1911 report in the Oroville Register:

Dateline: August 29: An aboriginal Indian, clad ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Dramatis personae
• PART I
• PART II
• Appendix
• Reference
• Index