Ishi, Ishi's Brain, Yahi, Native American Repatriation, Alfred Kroeber, Orin Starn, Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian. Now in Bookstores from W.W. Norton and Company...Orin Starn's Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian. Captured in the hills of northern California in 1911, Ishi, the last survivor of his Yahi tribe, was brought to San Francisco by the famous anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, and became a living museum display until his death five years later. Ishi's Brain is a first-person account by anthropologist Orin Starn, who sought to unravel the mystery of Ishi's life and death and to locate his brain in the archives of the Smithsonian museum in the hope of finally repatriating Ishi's remains. The trail to Ishi's brain leads Starn into the painful history of Indian extermination in the Gold Rush era, the strange and sometimes scandalous role of anthropology, and the changing, mixed-up world of Native California today. His book gives us an absorbing new portrait of the life and legend of America's last "wild" Indian.eading Orin Starn's pages, the reader must feel anger and shame for what civilized America did to the "wild" man named Ishi. But by telling this story with great intellectual candor and human feeling, Starn finally gives Ishi a fitting memorial and he offers the reader the sense of justice restored, which is the highest gift of tragedy. Richard Rodriguez, author of Brown: The Last Discovery of America. Books by Orin Starn: Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes Duke University Press, 1999. Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest (co-edited with Richard G. Fox)Rutgers, Rutgers University Press, 1997. The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics (co-edited with Carlos Ivan Degregori and Robin Kirk), Duke University Press, 1995. Orin Starn is Sally Dalton Robinson Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University Native California Today: The single best starting point for information about Native California today is News from Native California, a Berkeley-based magazine published by Heyday Books. Their web-site, http://heydaybooks.com/news/, contains links to other organizations, and, among other resources, a calendar of on-going Native Californian cultural events. Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, http://www.aicls.org, is an important group that also maintains a useful web-site. Films about Ishi: The best documentary about Ishi is Jed Riffe's Ishi, the Last Yahi (1992). Riffe has also made a shorter film called Bear's Hiding Place: Ishi's Last Refuge (1998) about the search for the famous hideout of Ishi and his people. The 1992 The Last of His Tribe (1992) is a feature film starring Graham Green as Ishi and Jon Voight as Alfred Kroeber. Ishi photo gallery: Lorraine Frazier of the Mooretown Rancheria speaks at the Ishi Memorial Ceremony at Dersch Meadow, 2000 (Photograph by James Clifford) Poster from the Redding Rancheria and Pit River Tribe for Ishi Memorial at Dersch Meadow, 2001 Headline of Oroville newspaper announcing the discovery of Ishi's brain at the Smithsonian Institution, 1999 The Maidu delegation to Washington from left, the author, Rosalie Bertram, Joe Marine, Art Angle, Lorraine Frazier, Gus Martin, Sharon Guzman-Mix, Bruce Steidl Ishi in the Oroville jail, August 29, 1911. He had been captured at the town's slaughterhouse the night before (Copyright 1992 Jed Riffe/Rattlesnake Prouductions) "Ishi and Companion at Iamin Mool" by Frank Day, 1973. This spot on the Feather River was later flooded by Lake Oroville, the reservoir created when the river was dammed (Courtesy of Herb Puffer) Vera Clark McKeen with brother Benjamin at about the time of the family's possible encounter with Ishi near Yankee Hill, 1911. A metate, or grinding stone, and tin cans at Grizzly Bear's Hiding Place, 1999. Squeezing into Ishi's Cave in San Francisco, 2000. Ishi and Alfred Kroeber, 1911. Kroeber called Ishi the "most uncontaminated and uncivilized man in the world today."(Copyright 1992 Jed Riffe/Rattlesnake Productions) Ishi poses with bow and arrow on his return trip to Deer Creek, 1914 (Copyright 1992 Jed Riffe/Rattlesnake Productions) Ishi, 1914 (Copyright 1992 Jed Riffe/Rattlesnake Productions) Ishi Sound Recording: The following recording was made by Ishi in San Francisco in 1914. A full, remastered cassette of Ishi's songs and stories is available from Wild Sanctuary Music and for sale, among other places, at the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley (Reproduced by permission of Wild Sanctuary Music). San Francisco Chronicle's review of Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last 'Wild' Indian: Great legends are allegories, stories that impart a deep moral lesson even if they have to fudge the facts to do so. Over the decades, the story of Ishi, typically billed as "California's last wild Indian," grew to legendary proportions. Now, "Ishi's Brain: In Search of the Last 'Wild' Indian," by Orin Starn, an anthropologist at Duke University, aims to strip away the moralistic veneer of the Ishi legend. Told like a detective story, "Ishi's Brain" is a compelling, and at times, agonizing story of human fallibility, of conflicting good intentions gone awry. First the history: In 1911, a half-naked, starving man stumbled into the yard of a slaughterhouse outside of Oroville (Butte County), about 150 miles northeast of San Francisco. He did not understand any language spoken to him including a local Indian tongue, Maidu. Someone suggested that he might have belonged to a tribe that, many years earlier, was believed to be responsible for raids on white townspeople. The day after he was found, the town paper ran a banner headline: "Aboriginal Indian, the last of the Deer Creeks, captured near Oroville." Alfred Kroeber, of the University of California at Berkeley, immediately sent a colleague to Oroville to take custody of the Indian. (At the time, American Indians were considered wards of the state, receiving citizenship only in 1924.) The anthropologist ascertained that the Indian spoke a dialect of Yana. The scientist consequently dubbed the language "Yahi," and named the Indian "Ishi," which sounded like "I'citi," his word for "man." He appeared to be the last surviving member of his tribe. Kroeber moved Ishi into quarters in his new museum by Golden Gate Park. Ishi became friendly with the museum staff, demonstrated how to chip arrowheads for tourists and recounted songs and stories into early audio recording devices for the Berkeley anthropologists. In March 1916, he died of tuberculosis. Against Ishi's expressed wishes, a doctor autopsied his body, removing and preserving his brain. The body was later cremated in a private ceremony and the ashes stored in a black Pueblo Indian pot at the Olivet Memorial Park in Colma. In 1961, Kroeber's wife, Theodora, published "Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America." Told with all the flourish and moral underpinnings of a legend, it became a best-seller. As Starn points out, even though Theodora vividly described the massacres of the Yahi people, Ishi's forbearers, she wanted her story to be about healing: Ishi survived thanks to the kindness of her husband, Alfred, and other white protectors. Once settled at the museum, Ishi embraced these people as his "intimate friends," Theodora wrote. But Theodora was loose with facts and omitted some key points, including the fate of Ishi's brain. Starn spent about two years poking around into the history of Ishi. Even Starn's library research takes on an air of suspense with the rich mosaic of detail he provides: "I decided to take one more look at the Bancroft Library. The Bancroft closed at three, which only left me forty-five minutes before the doors shut for good until after the New Year. ... I checked my bag, signed the register, and showed my ID as now required to enter the library's oak-paneled reading room." At last, Ishi's pickled brain is found. It is floating around in a vat of preserving solution (along with 32 other brains) in a Maryland warehouse maintained by the Smithsonian Institution. No one was happy. Indian tribes were angry that the Smithsonian still had the brain. Officials at the Smithsonian were vexed by the uproar over a specimen that had been forgotten for decades. Sorting out the legitimate heirs to the brain of someone billed as the "last" of his kind was fraught with tension. Leaders of one tribe, the Maidu, had set Starn on the trail of the brain. But another tribe, the Pit River Indians, claimed closer linguistic ties to Ishi. The Pit River Indians won and then snubbed the Maidu by not inviting them to the burial ceremony. Starn does not shirk from describing these clashes. Many of his characters' decisions are flawed by ambition. Ishi, too, comes under scrutiny. Starn locates a couple of Indians who can understand some of the songs that Ishi recorded decades ago. They are dismayed. "He shouldn't have sung those songs," explains an elderly woman. "They were given by the spirit to the medicine man." Why would Ishi choose those songs? Starn wonders. He recalls hearing a story told by Indians that cast Ishi as a malevolent shaman expelled by his tribe. But even as he seeks to correct the historical record, Starn, like Theodora, wants to be a peacemaker. He wants us to understand everybody's motives -- the doctor who chose to dissect Ishi; Kroeber, who packed off the brain to a distant museum; Theodora, who sugar-coated the story; the Smithsonian officials, who tarried over the decision to repatriate Ishi's remains; the Indian tribes who clashed over the right to bury the brain. By leaving the nuances and complexities in the story, Starn has completed the transformation of Ishi -- from man, to legend, and now, at last, back into mortal man again. Elizabeth Corcoran is a contributing editor to Forbes Los Angeles Times Review of Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian: The identification tag bore the number 60884, which was meaningless until you opened the catalog and scanned down the row of entries. 60882: Ivory charms (elephant tusks) from Abyssinia. 60883: Set of current postage stamps from the Philippine Islands. 60884: Brain of Ishi (California Indian). The year was 1917. The catalog belonged to the Smithsonian Institution, and California's most famous Native American had been dead for nearly a year -- dead, cremated and memorialized -- all except for the business of Item No. 60884. Floating in a jar of formalin, it must have looked no different than the other brains in the collection -- including explorer John Wesley Powell's -- each wrapped in cheesecloth, suspended in this solution for eternity. In time -- decades later, in fact -- it was placed in ethyl alcohol and transferred to Tank 6, Pod 3 of the Smithsonian's Wet Collection in Suitland, Md. As good as missing. Missing, that is, until Orin Starn, a cultural anthropologist at Duke University, came along and rediscovered it. "Ishi's Brain" is Starn's intimate, provocative, even cathartic account of Ishi's long journey home. It is -- along with the more scholarly collection of essays, "Ishi in Three Centuries" -- a valuable addition to the 1961 seminal biography, "Ishi in Two Worlds," by Theodora Kroeber, wife of the anthropologist most singularly associated with Ishi's fate. Like Banquo's ghost, Ishi will not go away. It was inopportune for him to step into the world that late summer day in 1911, wandering down from the foothills half-starved and alone, like the sole survivor of some terrible massacre, setting the dogs in the Oroville slaughterhouse to barking and reminding us of the warfare and genocide that had in a little more than 50 years reduced the California Indian population from 300,000 to 20,000. No wonder we pretended he was something he wasn't. The truth was too shameful, too frightening. The San Francisco Examiner called him a "savage of the most primitive type." As "aboriginal in his mode of life as though he inhabited the heart of an African jungle," said the San Francisco Call. The "most uncontaminated and uncivilized man in the world today," said Alfred Kroeber, head of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Kroeber had Ishi brought from Oroville to San Francisco and set him up at the university's Museum of Anthropology as janitor, caretaker and specimen-in-residence. He earned $25 a week making fire, producing animal sounds and creating his art for visitors. Anthropology at the time was a new science, concerned mostly with the study of "primitive people." At one extreme, it attempted to rationalize the brutal sweep of colonialism -- from slavery to the Indian wars -- by finding evidence of the racial superiority of Caucasians (mostly in the measurements of conveniently selected skulls). Kroeber, on the other hand, a student of the liberal-minded Franz Boas, practiced "salvage anthropology," which held that all cultures, no matter their fate, are to be valued for their customs, cultures and mores. Thus began Kroeber's five-year cultural study of Ishi, and by extension the Yahi tribe, of which he was deemed the last living member. Though Ishi preferred not to speak about his recent past, he shared generously his skills and his songs. Today we can still see him in black-and-white photos, posed in loincloth on a riverbank, and we can hear his voice on an early recording. So thoroughly was his presence documented that it is difficult to believe that he was among us for only five years before dying of tuberculosis on March 25, 1916. Starn picks up the story in the winter of 1997. While researching a book about Ishi, he learned that a Northern California tribe, the Maidu, was attempting to repatriate Ishi's ashes from a cemetery south of San Francisco to the foothills of Mt. Lassen. Rumors, however, persisted that Ishi's brain had been secreted away after the autopsy. Starn plays it like a mystery, crosscutting past and present, interviewing or profiling anyone, living or dead, whose identity had somehow become entangled with Ishi's. Eventually he breaks the case when he finds a series of letters between Kroeber and the head of the physical anthropology department of the Smithsonian, Ales Hrdlicka. "Dear Dr. Hrdlicka," Kroeber wrote on Oct. 27, 1916, "I find that at Ishi's death last spring his brain was removed and preserved. There is no one here who can put it to scientific use. If you wish it, I shall be glad to deposit it in the National Museum collection." Hrdlicka wrote back 10 days later: "I hardly need say that we shall be very glad to receive and take care of Ishi's brain, and if a suitable opportunity occurs to have it properly worked up." And soon thereafter, Ishi's brain, wrapped in cotton and excelsior, was shipped in a brown paper package to the Smithsonian by Wells Fargo. How do we explain Kroeber's actions? He was a man who by all accounts viewed Ishi as a friend. We know that he was in New York at the time of Ishi's death and vigorously objected to the autopsy. "Ishi in Three Centuries," edited by Kroeber's sons -- Karl Kroeber, professor of humanities at Columbia University, and Clifton Kroeber, professor emeritus of history at Occidental College -- attempts in part to answer this question. Its contributing essayists, perhaps not surprisingly, are conciliatory, arguing that to criticize Kroeber is to lose sight of his humanity, as surely as some lost sight of Ishi's. According to Gerald Vizenor, professor of Native American studies at Berkeley, Kroeber was "not sentimental enough, and anthropology was not ethical enough," and in her essay, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes speculates that Kroeber's final disregard for Ishi was "an act of disordered mourning, of ravaged grief." If grief and guilt kept us from seeing Ishi for who he was, then certainly the work of the Maidu and Yana peoples of the Redding Rancheria and Pit River tribes, who stepped beyond the tragedy of the past and fought for Ishi's repatriation, is courageous. Starn's conclusion, covering the ceremonies that marked the return of Ishi's brain and its burial along with his ashes in Deer Creek Canyon on Aug. 10, 2000, is all the more poignant for their determination and rectitude. But who was Ishi? If we think of him as a Stone Age Indian, we commit an act of racism on a historical level. Indians, Vizenor writes, have long been defined by their absence, not their presence, in American society, and this absence, willful and intentional, allows us to define them as we need them to be, not as who they are. Ishi, Vizenor reminds, was not his real name but a construct devised by Kroeber. Perhaps the greatest service of these books is to draw Ishi closer to us. Hardly the "wild Indian," Ishi grew up in hiding from white settlers, never knowing what it was like to roam the hills without fear of being gunned down. His life and his family's were filled, by necessity, with scavenging and improvising: picking up Spanish words, using iron nails for harpoon tips, window glass for arrowheads, stealing canned food, sacks of flour and livestock. In San Francisco, he liked pillows and beds and was enamored of screened porches and matches. He was quick to joke and smile, but he most likely suffered, as a man who was aware that his days were over. As Scheper-Hughes suggests, Ishi knew he was "at the end of his existential rope. Though not of his choosing, Ishi accepted his final destiny with patience, good humor, and grace. He was exceptionally learned in the art of waiting." Understanding Ishi's humanity will always be the real challenge. Poet Yusef Komunyakaa imagines Ishi in the San Francisco museum in his "Quatrains for Ishi": Here, in this ancient dust on artifacts pillaged from Egypt & Peru, I know why a man like you laughs with one hand over his mouth. Also, I know if I think of you As me, you'll disappear.... Ishi certainly was a strange gift to us. At a time when native culture in the state had been nearly eradicated, he stepped from the wilderness and greeted us in friendship, and by his manner extended a forgiveness that is unaccountable and unwarranted. Nearly 100 years later, we seem close to reciprocating the gesture. Reviewed by Thomas Curwen, a staff writer for the Times and a regular contributor to the Book Review. Archaeology Magazine's review of Orin Starn's Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian: In 1911, the "last Stone Age Indian" wandered out of the hills of northern California and became a national sensation. Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber brought Ishi, as he became known, to San Francisco, where he was put up at a museum and employed to demonstrate traditional crafts. Upon his death five years later, Ishi's body was autopsied against his express wishes. Anthropologist Orin Starn's fascinating Ishi's Brain: In Search of the Last "Wild" Indian (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004; $25.95), tells the story of the recent effort to repatriate Ishi's remains, especially his brain, which was stored in the Smithsonian for decades. Starn was directly involved in the campaign to rebury Ishi and gives a compelling first-person account of one of American anthropology's strangest, saddest chapters. Chico News and Review's review of Orin Starn's Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian: Ishi, the "last Yahi," has been styled for nearly a century as a larger-than-life legend, a relic from a primitive time when Indians ran "wild" as white civilization's Manifest Destiny began to rage around--and over--them. But that's Ishi the legend. A book released Feb. 9 lets readers know Ishi as much more. The bluntly titled Ishi's Brain: In Search of American's Last "Wild" Indian reads like a mystery novel, accessibly written with descriptive language and well-developed characters at every turn. Alternately sad, horrifying, inspirational and just plain creepy, Ishi's Brain shows what Northern California's most famous Indian can teach current generations about history and healing. Anthropologist Orin Starn pulls no punches in recounting his journey to discover if the rumors were true: that Ishi suffered a disturbing, final injustice. After Ishi died in 1916 of tuberculosis, his brain, the literal and symbolic centerpiece of the book, was preserved against his wishes that he not have an autopsy. According to his people's tradition and spiritual beliefs, his body would have to be buried whole, in his homeland, for his soul to be at peace. When Starn, a Duke University associate professor, speaks at Chico's Barnes & Noble bookstore on Feb. 21, he will be just 10 miles as the crow flies from where Ishi and the last members of his family remained undetected for years at what they called Wowunupo Mu Tetna, Grizzly Bear's Hiding Place, up what is now Highway 32 toward Deer Creek. Ishi was thought to be the last surviving member of the Yahi tribe, although later research indicated that he was likely of mixed blood--perhaps Yana or Maidu. "The story of the destruction of his people was much more complicated than we had assumed," Starn said. Ishi's Brain includes gruesome accounts of white settlers killing Indians, including children. The state of California funded a $1 million Indian-hunting campaign in 1850, and virtually all newspapers of the time called for the extermination or exile of the natives, since some Indians had raided pioneer homes and killed whites. Starn writes, too, of Chico founder John Bidwell--also complex in that he seized Mechoopda land and exploited Indians for labor but at the same time protected them from murdering bands of settlers. By the time anthropologist Alfred Kroeber brought Ishi to live, work and exhibit his skills in the University of California anthropology museum in San Francisco, Indians were considered remnants of a past best forgotten. It was Kroeber's second wife, Theodora, who told Ishi's story in Ishi in Two Worlds, published in 1961, and the subsequent children's book, Ishi, Last of His Tribe. The books brought attention to the horrors dealt Native Americans. But they were also, Starn found, rife with errors. "I was very surprised as I went back to look at primary sources," he said, that Kroeber got names, locations and even facts such as the date Ishi came out of the wilderness--Aug. 28, 1911--wrong. "She made up details and parts of the story in order to tell the story she wanted to and add to the pathos." Mainstream white America has had an inconsistent attitude toward Native Americans, Starn pointed out. By the early 1900s, the perception had shifted from one of hated "redskins" to a romanticization of the population that had been decimated, assimilated or herded to reservations. In the 1960s and '70s, some saw the old Indian way of life as a refuge from modern trappings. But in the last 15 years or so, Starn said, "one sees a return of a skeptical, negative view of native Californians because of casinos [and] the fact that Indians have money and influence. Americans have always expected that Indians would be victims and we could sympathize with them as underdogs and losers." Starn himself had romanticized Ishi and Indian ways as a boy, and at 19, in 1981, the Berkeley native sought to "help" natives, dropping out of school and driving to the Navajo Reservation with a friend in a Volkswagen bug to volunteer--not even realizing that Native Americans lived on in California. But the idea of the "noble savage" reduces Ishi to a caricature, Starn said. In writing Ishi's Brain, he wanted to go beyond the Kroeber-sanitized version of Ishi, living purely and uninfluenced by whites. "Part of the project is humanizing Ishi," Starn said. In doing so, he wanted to be balanced and frank. In the book, Starn is candid about what he witnessed, including some of the local Native Americans' squabbles and the Smithsonian's alternating helpfulness and defensiveness. Starn did worry that Ishi's Brain "would sound too much like the National Enquirer, like I was trying to sell the macabre angle of the story." Starn's involvement with the missing brain began when he heard that Art Angle of Oroville, who is Maidu, and his Butte County Native American Cultural Committee were petitioning local and state politicians to get Ishi's cremated remains repatriated from Olivet Memorial Park near Colma, where they had sat in a Pueblo pot since his death. When he first contacted Angle, Starn recounts in his book, he was nervous. "Anthropologists have often been guilty of snooping uninvited into other people's lives," said Starn, who had the dual problem of being white and an anthropologist. But the pair's first meeting spurred Starn on a quest to find out, once and for all, what had been done with Ishi's brain. Berkeley officials had told Angle outright that there was no way Kroeber would have preserved the native man's brain, but Angle wasn't buying it--and neither did Starn. Nancy Rockafellar, a UC San Francisco historian who had been tasked with tracking the brain after an article about Angle appeared in the Los Angeles Times, told Starn of the rumor that the preserved brain had been sent to the Smithsonian--and perhaps even destroyed to avoid a scandal. One afternoon, just before closing time at Berkeley's Bancroft Library, Starn decided to poke around in a box of letters that had to do with, not Ishi, but the Smithsonian. "I was astounded to find this correspondence," he said, "to all of a sudden see the words 'Ishi's brain' on these faded, old letters, and this fancy certificate saying, 'Brain of Ishi (California Indian).'" Starn recounts that he reflexively stood up and backed away from the table, "I couldn't quite believe that that had happened," he said, that Kroeber would pack his friend's brain in cotton and ship it cross-country via Wells Fargo express to Ale×s Hrdlic×ka for the anthropologist's vast brain collection. Ishi's brain, Smithsonian item No. 60884, was in a Maryland storage facility, in Hrdlic×ka's "wet collection" wrapped in cheesecloth and floating in Pod 3, Tank 6, among 32 other brains. When a delegation of Maidu traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with members of the Smithsonian's repatriation office, Starn was invited. That he had proved the location of the brain "created a degree of trust with native advocates." There, Smithsonian officials, who had said they didn't know anyone had been looking for the brain, finally brought it out for the delegation to see. "It was an extremely emotional moment. That fact of Ishi's brain sitting there in a jar on the table was a very graphic, jarring sight." The organ symbolized at once terror and survival, Starn said, and it moved Native Americans in the room to tears. "For me, as a modern-day anthropologist, to see Ishi's brain there as a result of action that had been taken by one of my own disciplinary ancestors also made the moment more personal and wrenching for me," he said. The next step was to get the brain back into Native American custody. The movement toward repatriation in the late 1980s, Starn writes, "allowed whites to assuage their guilt about the mistreatment of Indians--yet without any costly sacrifice of their own, such as giving up land once seized by tribes." Well into the 20th century, anthropologists and others dug up Indian graveyards and ceremonial sites with abandon. The Smithsonian alone has 18,000 Indian skeletons in its collection. Ultimately, the Smithsonian chose to repatriate the brain to the Redding Rancheria and Pit River tribes, considering them Ishi's closest cultural relatives--a move that offended Angle and other members of the Butte County Native American Cultural Committee, who had spent years searching for the brain and paving the way to repatriation. "Usually, anthropologists tend to write a bit at a distance," Starn said, but, "I felt the Smithsonian should have granted joint custody of the brain to the Butte County Native American Cultural Commission [as well]." Yet Starn also came to be on good terms with those who ultimately retrieved the brain and details their journey toward closure as well. In 2000, Native Americans gathered privately in the foothills of Lassen Peak to join Ishi's brain with his cremated remains, which had been recovered from the cemetery. "I think the final burial of Ishi was both important for Ishi and for contemporary Native Americans," Starn said. Though clearly a gifted writer, Starn admits that he detests the task, suffering from long bouts of writer's block. "In this case, I felt it was especially difficult, because Ishi's story is such an important one," he said. "I felt a special obligation. "I certainly would have liked to have known Ishi," he said. "I would have loved to have sat down with him and talked about San Francisco, his life, my life. He was a special and interesting person. Reviewed by Devanie Angel Natural History Magazine's review of Orin Starn's Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian: When Orin Starn visited the Olivet Memorial Park cemetery, just south of San Francisco, several years ago, he could not help noting how strange it was that America's last "wild" Indian now rested in a stark white columbarium flanked by a row of faux Greek columns. Ishi had spent most of his fifty-odd years hunting and gathering along the creeks of northern California. Now his ashes lay behind the glass window of Niche 601, in a black pot of Pueblo Indian origin. Ishi's history, it seems, had ended as incongruously as it had begun. In August 1911 newspapers nationwide reported the discovery of a starving man crouching in the backyard of a slaughterhouse near the northern California town of Oroville. He wore only a tattered denim shirt, carried a rough sack with some manzanita berries and dried meat inside, and spoke a language no one understood. The anthropologist Alfred Lewis Kroeber, suspecting that Ishi was a cultural fossil, had him brought to San Francisco. Kroeber settled Ishi at the newly opened Museum of Anthropology and saw to it that he was hired as a part-time janitor. Ishi ultimately adapted well, even to his duties as a "living exhibit," putting on Sunday demonstrations of arrowhead making and other native arts for eager crowds of visitors. He learned to converse in broken English and developed a taste for doughnuts and ice-cream sodas. Professors came west to interview him, take down his utterances, and make wax cylinders of his chants. When he died of tuberculosis in March 1916, the San Francisco Examiner reported that he had been cremated "according to the customs of the California tribes," along with his bow and arrows, some acorn meal, and a pouch of tobacco. But Ishi's story had only begun. Over the years, Californians transformed him into an icon of an unspoiled past they'd never known, the one that existed before the missions, the forty-niners, the farmers, and the freeways turned the state's promised land into a nightmare. In 1961 Kroeber's widow Theodora wrote a best seller portraying Ishi as a noble savage; the book became a favorite of the 1960s flower children. In the 1980s and 1990s, newly empowered Native Americans began to retell Ishi's story as a case study in cultural imperialism. In 1997 Art Angle, a political activist and a descendent of the Maidu, neighbors of Ishi's Yahi kinfolk, organized an effort to rebury Ishi in the old Yahi territory near Mount Lassen. Rumors circulated among some of the Maidu that Ishi's brain had been removed for scientific study just after his death, though it was not clear what had happened to it after that. Starn, a cultural anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, played a role in finding the brain, which had been preserved in a jar and sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and he writes with undisguised empathy for the California tribespeople who brought Ishi home. But he's too much of a scholar not to note the cultural ironies of the case. Little is known of Ishi's Yahi ancestors, and practically nothing of Ishi himself. But even before he set foot in San Francisco, Ishi was no unspoiled innocent. He wore garments of factory-made cloth, foraged for food near homesteads and general stores, and even spoke a few words in the language of his neighbors (Maidu and perhaps Spanish). The various tribes of native Americans who contributed to bringing about his reinterment have more culture in common with each other--and with the residents of Brooklyn--than they do with Ishi's ancestors. They drive gasoline-powered vehicles, watch the NFL on the tube, and pay more heed to Arnold Schwarzenegger than to the spirits of the hills and woodlands. In the end, the lessons of Ishi's story have more to do with managing cultural identity in the modern era than with returning to Ishi's way of life. Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Supernova Story, is the W. K. T. Sahm professor of physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.