Ishi in Three Centuries

Kroeber, Karl and Clifton Kroeber (Eds.) Ishi in Three Centuries. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003, 415 pp. ISBN 0-8032-2757-4 $49.95. For those who were undergraduates in the 60s, lshi is one of those words that continues to elicit strong, emotional response. Theodora Kroeber's lshi in Two Worlds, first published in 1961, was quickly accepted as a defining text for young and progressive White Americans. It injected a new and vital thread in the discourse of political discontent spanning the years from the Civil Rights Movement, the Kennedy and King assassinations, and the Peace Movement, to Wounded Knee and beyond. Both Natives and Whites, especially the young, were galvanized politically by the heartbreaking story of a Native American - the last Yahi, who, hunted, exhausted and starving, came out of hiding in Oroville, California in 1911 to live the remainder of his life, a scant four years and seven months, at the Anthropological Museum of the University of California in San Francisco. Theodora's husband, Alfred Kroeber, a student of Franz Boas, was Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Director of the recently established Museum. While Theodora Kroeber's book was hardly political in intent, it is hard to imagine that it did not inspire somehow the emergence of a new awareness of the Native American tragedy, an awareness that was to lead directly to the American Indian Movement. After lshi, ignorance and inaction ceased to be options. Ishi's story also spawned an industry that includes amongst its products, novels, plays, and TV dramas.1 In the zeal to serve market priorities, portrayals of lshi stray quite far from the person whom Alfred Kroeber described as having lived out his life in a manner that contradicts the victimizing myth of the vanishing American Indian.2 His story has also sparked intense debate within the academy in response to particularly the passage of the North American Graves and Repatriation Act of 1990, and the 1999 discovery that Ishi's brain had been autopsied and removed to the Smithsonian under Kroeber's authority in 1916. The sometimes rancorous debate is driven not only by ethical issues surrounding the iconic lshi (not to speak of the iconic anthropologist) and the repatriation of his remains, and renewed discussion about the conduct and purposes of anthropology, but also by the de rigueur politics and opportunism that bedevil university affairs. It is in this context that lshi in Three Centuries emerges as a compendious, remarkably fair-minded documentation of all major aspects of current lshi research and an admirably even-handed airing of issues that animate the debate. What is so exceptional, though, is that the book is edited by Alfred and Theodora's two sons, Kari and Clifton Kroeber: Kari a professor of Humanities at Columbia, and Clifton a professor of Hispanic American history at Occidental. …

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