Orin Starn  

2004 Season

Orin Starn is a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University and director of Duke’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Bibliography

Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian (2004)
Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes (1999)
Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest (1997)

Excerpt

One

A “compromise between science and sentiment”

It’s hard to write about even now, but my story begins with a death, a difficult death: Saturday, March 25, 1916, sometime in the afternoon. The body of Ishi, the last known surviving “wild” California Indian, lay on the autopsy table at a San Francisco hospital. He had died, with blood gushing from his nose and mouth, just a few hours before. “Considerably emaciated Indian 168 cm. in length,” the doctor noted. In his final months the tuberculosis had wasted Ishi to skin and bone, and his long black hair was streaked with gray. The doctor, Jean V. Cooke, a well-regarded young pathologist, made a straight cut down the torso, peeling back the thin yellow layer of fat to remove and examine the liver, lungs, and heart. He sawed around the skullcap and lifted out the brain—oyster-white, furrowed, and glistening under the lights. Cooke weighed the organ and completed the rest of his measurements and note taking. Then he stitched up the cadaver for transport to a local undertaker for embalming.

The newspapers were already preparing their stories about Ishi’s death for the evening editions. Ishi was famous, after all. The capture in 1911 of the “Wild Man of Deer Creek” had caused a national sensation and turned him into an early-twentieth-century American celebrity. After hiding out for decades in the hills of northern California, he’d been found hungry and half-naked near the town of Oroville. The well-known Berkeley anthropologist Alfred Kroeber brought Ishi to live in his museum above San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Kroeber told the newspapers that this “uncontaminated and uncivilized” Indian was an unprecedented find for his young science of anthropology, then devoted to the study of primitive peoples. Thousands of San Franciscans streamed to the museum to watch this last survivor of his small Yahi tribe demonstrate how to chip stone arrowheads, or, if the weather was nice, to construct a little Indian house of branches and bark on the hill in back. Ishi lived for almost five years in San Francisco. He had fallen sick at the end of 1915, and died on March 25, 1916, in the hospital next to his museum home.

As the newspapers had it, Ishi’s death was more than just the passing of a single man, or even a tribe. It ended an epoch in human history. “ ishi, last of stone age indians, is dead,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle. Most Californians of that time assumed that their growing state’s Indian tribes belonged to an earlier, inferior evolutionary stage—and were doomed to extinction. The land’s first peoples would evaporate “like the dissipating mist in the presence of the morning sun of the Saxon,” a San Francisco newspaperman had predicted in 1850. As if settling the West were a fact of nature and a primordial plan rather than the will of those in power, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny absolved Americans from any personal responsibility for occupying another people’s land, killing those who resisted, and confining the remainder to reservations.