Group Tries to Rebury Tribe’s Last Survivor

LASSEN NATIONAL PARK, Calif. — Armed with nothing more than a profound sense of obligation, a group of Native Americans is trying to write a long-delayed final chapter to the bizarre story of Ishi, the last Yahi Indian, who became a national sensation when he emerged from the wilderness in 1911.

The outlines of Ishi’s life are familiar to generations of California schoolchildren. Close to starvation, he wandered into the outskirts of Oroville, years after most people thought the last of his tribe had been hunted down by settlers retaliating for raids on their cattle and homes.

The nearly naked Indian, his hair burned off in a traditional Yahi gesture of mourning, caused an uproar when he was seen near Oroville’s slaughterhouse. He was thought to be in his late 40s. Dubbed by the press “The Last Wild Man in America,” he first was jailed, then handed over to anthropologists by the town’s sheriff. They took him to San Francisco.

Ishi spent his final years as a living exhibit in the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, demonstrating for thousands of visitors the Yahi art of making bows and arrows.

Put on the payroll as a janitor, he lived in the museum’s basement. Free to come and go, Ishi rode cable cars and visited schools, demonstrating arrow making for the children. He hunted with his physician, Saxton Pope, and frequently stayed overnight at anthropologist Thomas T. Waterman’s home.

More than anything else, his final years opened a window onto the vanished life of the Yahi, hunters and gatherers who roamed the foothills of the southern Cascades for thousands of years before they were wiped out.

Upon his death in 1916, Ishi’s brain was removed and preserved and his body was cremated. His ashes were sent to a cemetery in Colma, just south of San Francisco, where they rest in a simple black urn inside a marble-and-stained-glass columbarium. His brain initially was held at UC San Francisco.

Now, 81 years after his death, a group of Native Americans wants to return Ishi’s remains to his homeland.

Tragic Aspects of His Life

The Butte County Native American Cultural Committee says all the attention lavished on Ishi ignores the final tragedy of his life: that his remains are kept outside his homeland and away from his people.

“Ishi himself is not completely together,” said Arthur Angle, director of the committee. “He is incomplete because he is not in his homeland. And the Yahi tribe is not complete because he is out of the homeland.”

When he was a boy, Ishi later told anthropologists, he and the last handful of Yahi fled deep into their rugged homeland in a desperate, doomed attempt to preserve their aboriginal way of life. There, one by one, they died. By 1908, only Ishi remained. He would live alone in the wilderness for nearly four more years.

After Ishi walked out of the wilderness, Alfred L. Kroeber and Waterman were the anthropologists who first studied, then befriended him. They laboriously communicated with him, teaching him rudimentary English and faithfully recording his Yahi stories. At one point, they traveled back to the Yahi homeland for a four-week camping trip with Ishi.

“I have lost my best friend in the world,” Waterman mourned in a letter to Kroeber after Ishi died of tuberculosis.

Some Native Americans now say that the story the anthropologists presented to the world stressed the romantic image of Ishi as a man of two cultures and glossed over the tragic aspects of his life.

“I wouldn’t use the term ‘hero,’ ” said Larry Myer, director of the state’s Native American Heritage Commission in Sacramento. “The man was the survivor of a holocaust who deserves to be treated with a tremendous amount of respect and sensitivity.”

Ishi’s story put a human face on Indian history, Myer said, but “for Native Americans in California, Ishi is a double-edged sword. Because he was called the ‘Last Wild Indian,’ for a long time there were a lot of people who thought that Indian was the last Indian left alive.”

Books have been written and movies made about Ishi. Jed Riffe, an Oakland-based filmmaker, has produced two documentaries and is working on a feature film.

“Each of us, at some time or another, has felt like a stranger in a strange land,” Riffe said. “I think that is why Ishi strikes such a chord. This man who lost everything, then came into this 20th century world, and was able to keep his sense of who he was.”

After he died, Ishi gradually faded from public consciousness until 1961, when Kroeber’s wife, Theodora, published “Ishi Between Two Worlds,” a highly sympathetic portrait.

“There was a generation of anthropologists who just wanted to forget the embarrassment of an Indian living in a museum,” said Ira Jacknis, a research anthropologist at UC Berkeley.

But with the book, Jacknis said, the interest in Ishi was reborn.

In 1966, then-10-year-old Jeff McInturf, a descendant of Oroville’s first white settlers who was living in the former gold-mining town, and his father, Haskel, read the story.

The boy asked his father why there was no memorial in town, and together they launched a public campaign, winning the right to build one near the slaughterhouse where the townsfolk found Ishi.

Using stones gathered from Deer Creek, deep inside Ishi’s homeland, the father and son built a simple monument, adorned with a plaque.

“For thousands of years the Yahi Indians roamed the foothills between Mt. Lassen and the Sacramento Valley,” the plaque says. “Settlement of this region by the white man brought death to the Yahi by gun, by disease and by hunger.”

In a recent interview, Haskel McInturf said he tries to be “diplomatic and tactful” but also honest when asked what Ishi represents.

“He is an example of the cruelties, the inhumanities, the injustice dealt to almost every tribe in North America by those who came here and displaced them,” the retired schoolteacher said.

In 1986, Congress set aside 41,000 mountainous acres inside Lassen National Forest east of Red Bluff as the Ishi Wilderness. Each year, thousands of people visit its steep canyons and basalt caves.

The people of Oroville, many of them descendants of the settlers and miners who hunted down Ishi’s people, unveiled an additional memorial two years ago. It is a mural of Ishi painted on a wall of the old jail where he was first held.

“There is still a lot of racism and prejudice in this town, but it is changing,” said Freda Flint, head of the mural project. “People came up to me after the mural was dedicated and said they felt this was a wonderful beginning of recognizing the heritage of Native Americans and their contribution.”

Angle said it was the mural that convinced him the time was right to put Ishi’s spirit to rest. He said the tribes of Butte County realize that their quest will test the limits of the law and the goodwill of the institutions that dealt with Ishi in his final years.

Together, four tribes in Butte County--some of them traditional enemies of the Yahi--are petitioning the federal government, the University of California and other agencies, asking them for help in relocating Ishi’s remains.

Those bureaucracies and institutions say the Native Americans face an uphill battle.

“We will have to invent the wheel to make this happen,” said Rosemary Joyce, director of the Phoebe Hearst Museum and an associate professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley. “But it is a wheel that should be invented.”

Returning Him as ‘a Complete Spirit’

Although hundreds of artifacts made by Ishi remain in the museum’s collection, no one, Joyce said, seems to know what happened to his brain. UC San Francisco, where his autopsy was performed, says it does not have it. Nor does it seem to be at the museum, which holds the nation’s third-largest inventory of Native American remains.

Even if the brain was found at either institution, Joyce said, it is not clear that it would fall under the provisions of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. That federal law calls for any institution receiving federal funds to inventory its holdings of remains and funerary artifacts, and consult with Native Americans on repatriating those items.

In Ishi’s case, repatriation is not the issue, Joyce said, because he died in San Francisco. The law applies only to the return of remains and objects removed from burial sites.

For Butte County Native Americans, the distinction is meaningless. Ishi died outside his homeland only because he left it after his people were destroyed, they say.

“I am not his blood relative, but I am a Native American” said Angle. “We are determined to perform this duty according to Native American ritual. We need to look at what we can do for him in the best way we can, to put him to rest in a proper way.”

The county cultural committee took its first step toward repatriation last month, meeting with U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management representatives in Butte County. The committee sought--and received--permission to rebury Ishi in the Ishi Wilderness once the brain is found.

“It is very important that he be returned here as a complete person, a complete spirit,” Angle said. “If you look at the native country where he came from--the open streams, the brush, the animals, and then you go to this Colma cemetery where he is interred. . . .” He paused and shook his head. “It just doesn’t fit.”

Indeed, there is a jarring incongruity between Ishi’s simple urn, inscribed with the words “ISHI, THE LAST YAHI INDIAN,” and the ornate columbarium at Olivet Memorial Park where the ashes are housed along with those of hundreds of other people.

The niche holding the urn is at eye level above a highly polished marble floor. Taped organ music plays softly, continuously. Most of the nearby niches are adorned with plastic flowers.

Ishi’s displays a spray of dried wildflowers, acorns and arrows, reminders of his homeland and way of life. The arrangement has been there as long as anyone can remember.

“I think he should be allowed to rest in peace here, undisturbed,” said Robert Lefebvre, Olivet’s manager.

But Lefebvre, who calls himself part Native American, said he sympathizes with those who would see Ishi laid to rest in his homeland.

“I understand, I respect their desire to bring back the Indian culture,” he said. “But if this were my relative, I wouldn’t want anybody to disturb him.”

Deep in the Ishi Wilderness, Lisa Sedlacek wonders how anyone can doubt Ishi’s rightful place.

For 11 years, as a trail manager with the U.S. Forest Service, Sedlacek has explored the trails the Yahi once trod.

The wilderness is a land of mountain lions, black bears, rattlesnakes and towering digger pines. Salmon still leap in Mill and Deer creeks, where Ishi once fished and swam. Eagles still circle Black Rock, the soaring lava rock that towers above Mill Creek. Smoke from campfires still blackens the ceilings of caves carved at its base, where the Yahi cooked their meals and spent their nights.

So little has changed since the Yahi lived here, Sedlacek said, that “if Ishi returned today, he would recognize it.”

Squatting near Deer Creek, where archeologists believe a large group of Yahi once lived, Sedlacek said there is something “unsettled about his death. . . . I have the greatest respect for the Native American people who lived here. This would be a way of saying we’re sorry.”