Audience Member
Why We Never Played Cowboys and Indians When I Was a Kid
California's legacy toward its Indian past is something you never really hear about. I know more than most people, I think, because I know why you never hear about it. One of the hardest adjustments about moving to Washington from California was getting used to the fact that place names are no longer Spanish--though it's true that the first place I lived was Port Angeles--and instead are Indian. At that, the Indians of the part of California where I grew up were wiped out by disease, mostly, long before they could have been killed by people looking for the bounty. (Yes, Californian Indians had a bounty on them for a time after California became a state.) The languages of most of the Californian tribes are not merely dead but extinct. It's true that the last speaker of Yahi died nearly a hundred years ago, but that was probably a hundred years longer than the last speaker of a lot of other languages.
In 1911, a man of about forty-nine years walked out of the forest near Oroville, California. No one was left alive who spoke his language. When he was finally able to understand requests for his name, he said no one was left to name him. He was called Ishi, which means "man" in the language of the Yahi, his people. No Yahi were left alive but him. Their last camp had been raided three years earlier; before that, the tribe had been considered extinct since the Three Knolls Massacre of 1865, when Ishi was only a few years old. He was taken into custody for his own protection and eventually ended up living in a museum of anthropology because he had nowhere else to go. He taught the anthropologists what he could about his people, though of course it was made more difficult by the fact that they first had to learn to communicate with him. Another tribe with a similar language existed, but no one was sure about the accuracy of any translations.
Ishi's story is one of the most depressing in American history, I think. The men who slaughtered his tribe were made heroes. Ishi's beliefs held that no one could reach the afterlife if their body was not whole in death, but the anthropologists could not stop him from being autopsied--and then cremated. The ashes were interred with some of his possessions, but after all, what good would it do? He would have believed there was no afterlife for him given what they did to him. He lived in a museum because there was nowhere else for him to go--his land was given to ranchers, and anyway could he have supported himself alone on it? He developed pneumonia because of a lack of immunity to Old World illnesses, but people still demanded to see him and therefore he was still put on display. And after all, he was put on display. Even just the fact that he didn't have a name because there was no one left to name him is pretty sad. The fact that there was no one who knew his language.
The information is presented in a fairly matter-of-fact way, no doubt in part because it's too late to do anything about it. At the same time, there is a tone to the voice of narrator Linda Hunt which makes clear that she's none too happy about the things she's having to tell. The few remaining people who knew the living Ishi were interviewed for the film, but he died about seventy-five years before the film was made and there were not many of those left. Mostly, the story is told through photos and writings of the dead. It is also worth noting how the attitudes of those around him changed as time went by; by the time Ishi died, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber considered him a friend, not merely an exhibit. Possibly the doctors might have been more willing to obey his wishes had they gotten to know him as a person as well, but of course they never would have had the opportunity. Even many people who did meet him were perfectly willing to make up stories about him if it would sell newspapers.
Of course, California doesn't hold a monopoly on mistreating its native people. (It's funny how "nativist" sentiment in the US seldom extends to the people who were actually there first.) On the other hand, [i]Last of the Mohicans[/i] isn't actually about the last of the Mohicans, because Mohicans still exist. There are no more Yahi. In fact, there are no more Yana, the larger group of which the Yahi were part. The Spanish put Indians who lived on the Mission grounds into barracks divided by sex, which wiped out some tribes. Many others died of disease. And then, when California became a state, there was actually a bounty on Indians, most of whom were killed because they lived in areas where gold had been found. Ishi's probable ancestral land is now a wilderness area, but mostly, tribes in California lived on good land which is now cities and farms. What Ishi represents changes as attitudes changed, but since he first made contact with white people, he has been as much symbol as man, no matter what his name means.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/12/23
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