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Don Sakal on Ishi the last surviving Native American Yahi Indian A tribute: some paragraphs from Don’s pending novel:
... So eluding and enduring a people were some of these California Native Americans that it was not until 1911 when the last Stone Age surviving wild Native American Indian was finally discovered… Indeed, sixty-two years after the gold rush had begun, and one hundred and twenty-four years after the United States government had already been formed (Constitution signed, September 17, 1787) a real live Stone Age wild Indian man was discovered still living in America’s wild in the wilderness in northern California…
... When Ishi first walked out of the greater Sierra-Cascade Conjoin… into the town of Oroville, California (in August 1911)… America was astonished… long believed that all the Yahi Indian people were dead a half century earlier…
... It was soon learned that a band of some fifty Yahi people had managed to avoid or elude American society for about five decades. After Ishi shared his life story with Anthropologists at the University of California (not an easy task, as no person was able to speak Ishi’s language), he remained there as a respectable and honored anthropological resource until his death on March 25, 1916 (Ishi died after contracting tuberculosis from white people)...
... Before his death, Ishi took the University Professors (who became his true and dear friends) to his native homelands, and together they mapped and documented important Indian sites, plants and Yahi survival skills while camping about for months...
Ishi is considered to be both the last surviving Native American Yahi Indian and Stone Age survivor in America. Ishi is credited for having bridged a very important gap between the two worlds of modern industrialized society and the Stone Age…
.... Although, Ishi taught America much about its own heritage, to his friends Ishi was probably best known for his enlightened peaceful spirit, and it is this characteristic trait that has relevance to this book. Theodore T. Waterman, Professor of Anthropology at Berkeley, and respected best friend of Ishi, described Ishi’s character as being that of a “unique gentlemanliness”, which was “beyond all civilized breeding and training”, and he summarized Ishi’s character by saying that Ishi was uniquely an “outward expression of a pure inward spirit”… This character of Ishi’s is most important to this book, because it reveals that Stone Age people may differ from modern people in some subtle way…
... Perhaps Ishi understood and appreciated and accepted the true nature of things better than civilized people do today (despite our superior intellect)… Ishi’s life experience had included watching his people be rounded up and murdered, which somewhat parallels Anne Frank’s experience during the inhuman Aloft Hitler’s German holocaust when segregating and murdering the Jewish people… The numbers of massacres of Yahi people were smaller than for the Jewish people… but the emotional experiences were still similar...
... Somehow, despite Ishi having endured the horrors and hardships of seeing his people murdered, and continuously aware that Americans might find and kill him too, Ishi continued to accept life as each new day came his way. Even after every other person in his clan was gone, Ishi lived on alone like a signal beautiful flower firmly accorded in the soil of a hillside that had already eroded away. Indeed, “a unique gentlemanliness… beyond all civilized breeding and training… an outward expression of a pure inward spirit…” were all words that Professor Waterman had used to try and credit Ishi with something very special…
... Professor Waterman was the first person to communicate with Ishi in the Butte county jail where the so-called “wild man” had been housed immediately after his capture (mostly for his own personal protection from civilized people). After reading about the discovery, University Professors wasted no time in taking charge of the situation and communicating with Washington D.C. about the significance of the wild Indian discovery and about the care that needed to be instituted regarding the situation. Soon the University had charge of the situation...
... After Professor Waterman arrived at the Butte County jail he began reading a list of Yana Indian words (the Yana were ancestor to the Yahi Indians some four thousand years earlier). After saying hundreds of Yana words, which Ishi did not understand, finally there was one word that had not change via the evolution of Yana to Yahi dialect, and that word was pine (as in yellow pine or pine tree,), which Ishi’s jail cot or bed was make out of. Finally the two men began to communicate to both their grand delights, but ever so slowly, as they repeated the Yana/Yahi word “siwini, siwini” (meaning pine) and repeatedly tapped on the pine wood frame to Ishi’s jail cot...
... Dr. Waterman was younger than Ishi and so it was natural for him to show respect to Ishi, because after all this was a older person, and importantly, a Native American Indian man who must have endured unimaginable hardships and possessed superior survival skills and understanding to most anyone. Dr. Waterman certainly appreciated Ishi and presented himself humbly and Ishi likely sensed it, although, surely Dr. Waterman had to hide some frustrations as he moved forward with the hundreds of more words to better try and communicate with Ishi. (Yahi language was never interpreted entirely, and so it remains mostly a mystery today within the hundreds of hours of recorded Yahi stories and songs that Ishi made on wax cylinders at the university, which can still be heard. Ishi understood that his good professor friends were very interested in documenting the Yahi culture with respect, and so he did his best to communicate until his death in 1916 and much did become known as result of his efforts.)...
... Actually, Ishi’s story really started some years earlier before his discovery in 1911. In November 1908, a surveyor team in northeastern California, hired by the Oro Light and Power Company, traveled to Deer Creek (a watershed of Mount Lassen or the southern most Cascade peak) and they stumbled upon an Indian man fishing. Curious, the next day, the surveyors set out and managed to find a small Yahi Indian village. Although, the Indian man that they had seen fishing the day before was not in the village, three other people were. As the surveyors approached the village, an old man and young woman fled and escaped the scene while an elderly woman who was very sick and could not run had to hide under some blankets hoping to go unnoticed...
... Yahi concerns about their safety were valid, as the surveyors wasted no time ransacking the little village, and as they did so they discovered the old sick women lying helplessly. The surveyors looked at the old women’s face and eyes and they knew that she was too sick to move (likely heart failure as her legs were so swollen). However, instead of offering her a sip of water or a helping hand of any kind, they instead choose to continue to ransack the village and took the old sick women’s food and stole everything thing they could carry out. Supposedly, their thoughts were that they would need many Indian artifacts as proof of these Yahi Indian’s existence before anyone would believe their story about seeing these remaining Indians...
... Later, Ishi told university Anthropologists that the 1908 surveying encounter was actually with Ishi’s mother (the sickened old woman) and younger sister (the young women who fled). Sadly, after that incident, Ishi never saw his sister or the elderly man who escaped with her again (it is difficult to know for certain if they survived beyond Ishi’s time). Ishi said that they likely drowned in the rapids or fell off a bluff and or were attacked and consumed by a mountain lion, as Ishi could find no trace of them over the next several years despite going to all the familiar places where they surely would have returned to. (Later, when Ishi returned with the university professors to his homeland, he said that he was uneasy about his ancestors’ spirits. However, after leaving his professor friend’s camp one evening and taking off on his own for one night, he returned the next day at ease about things. Ishi said that he had heard his sister’s voice calling him and that he now knew that his people had found their way (whatever that means). Indeed, no one knows for certain what Ishi meant, but one might assume that Ishi had a vision, which brought him a sense of closure with his people...
... It was shortly after Ishi lost his sister and his older friend, who had been like an uncle to him, that Ishi’s mother died of her sickness and Ishi was then totally alone from 1908 through 1911. For those three years, while all alone, Ishi was still living with the assumption that white people were hunting him and would kill him if he were ever captured. Ishi’s lonely mourning was overwhelming. With no food to be found and another winter soon approaching, Ishi finally decided to start walking south, not really caring about whether he might be captured or killed by white people or some other Indian tribe that he might encounter (Ishi had no idea that he was the last surviving wild Stone Age Indian in the area, let alone the all of the United States)...
... Yet, after his discovery, Ishi did not seem overwhelmingly depressed from grief and loneness, but instead he had morale and interest about his new situation. On the one hand Ishi had given up realizing that he was too starved to remain another winter in the wild, but on the other hand he risked being killed by letting himself be known and captured by the white people. Once in the accompaniment of Professor Waterman, Ishi must have felt a sense of security. Soon, Ishi’s child-like interest was actively exploring and interacting with all the new phenomena of modern civilization around him...
... Eventually, Professor Waterman and other scholars learn about the many Yahi hardships, such as, when Ishi was a young boy and saw his father murdered by white people during a Yahi village massacre at Three Knolls on the Mill Creek (about seven cross-country miles from where this story takes place). Ishi and his mother had escaped the slaughter, which killed his father, by jumping into the river, Mill Creek, and floating downstream amongst the freshly dead bloody bodies of their immediate tribe family. The Indian massacre at Three Knolls was but only one of many horrible historical happenings...
... One other historic case that’s documented was called the Kingsley Cave massacre, which occurred by Mill Creek sometime between 1867-1868. At Kingsley Cave, white people had slaughtered many Yahi Indians after trapping them in the large cave there whereby they could not escape. As the white people shot the large groups of trapped helpless Native American Yahi Indians to death, they noticed that their rifle rounds were ripping apart the babies even beyond their liking. So, during the slaughter, rifles (.56-caliber Spencer) were exchanged for revolvers (.38-caliber Smith and Wesson) to lessen the grossness of infantile murder, which continued even thereafter as Indian bounties had encouraged such massacres. (Today Kingsley Cave is located about two miles from Wild Horse Corral in the Ishi Wilderness, but it is not listed on the Ishi Wilderness or National Forest Service maps. If the reader ever goes there, remember that all these sites mentioned are federally protected, and so look, but do not disturb anything.)...
...There were many American insults against the Yahi Indians (too many to name in this story). These terrible happenings can be read about in more detail in the book Ishi In Two Worlds, written by Theodora Kroeber, in 1961, wife of professor Alfred Kroeber who was in charged of the museum where Ishi spent his later life. Professor Alfred Kroeber was senior to Professor Waterman’s and another best friend to Ishi. It is amazing that Ishi was able endear anyone in the outside world after so many of his people (even his father) had been killed by the white people. Somehow, Ishi managed to trust his intuitive reason that some white people like Professors Waterman and Kroeber, and later best friend Physician and Surgeon Dr. Pope were all good souls...
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MAGALIA-PINES FAMILY PRACTICE MEDICAL CLINIC |
