“‘I Will Not Tell Anything About Myself’: Ishi, Ethnographic Refusal and Redirecting the Power of Narrative.”
In August 1911, the last surviving member of the Yahi people, whose family had been hunted and killed as part of the nineteenth-century Anglo genocide against California’s native people, came down out of the Shasta mountains. He was starving, traumatized, and alone. His story caught the attention of the academic community, and soon he was living in the University of California’s Anthropology museum and working formally as a janitor, but informally as a living exhibit. Over the nearly five years he lived in the white world before passing away from tuberculosis, he captivated the attention of the public. His exploits were the topic of a weekly column in a San Francisco newspaper.
His encounter with the “modern” world was a fascinating story. He had never seen more than a few dozen people at the same time, but San Francisco was a crowded city. He had lived on food pilfered from local ranches, but in San Francisco developed a taste for coconut layer cake and doughnuts. But he became a colorful shorthand for the “last Indian,” and therefore, by extension, the impossibility of indigenous peoples’ ability to survive into the modern world, and the naturalness (as opposed to violence) of their disappearance.
In this talk, I will share some of the work my coauthor and I have done in our book manuscript to leverage the power of an incredibly compelling story toward an honest and authentic representation of California’s Native past. His story is hard to ignore, but one he himself didn’t want to tell. Working with it raises important questions about whose story this is, who can tell it, and how that can be done with integrity. It also engages some of the issues that our ongoing work on stories in the QEP.
