"Ishi" Documentary Film Review (10 Questions)

By Kim Patrick Noyes for History 210

#1: Anne Makepeace wrote "Ishi" while Pamela Roberts and Judd Riff directed and produced it.

#2: Ishi was born in his tribal homeland in what is now Butte County. As a child he survived the 1866 Three Knolls Massacre in which his father and other relatives and tribal band members were killed, 40 souls in all. After decades of survival avoiding contact with the New Arrivals, er, his people's rivals he and the few survivors of his band had a run-in with a surveying party in 1908. These fine people took his dying mother's blanket and all the tools they needed to survive after they fled upon the surveyors entering their camp. In 1911 he showed up at a ranch and got in line with cattle to be slaughtered in an apparent suicide attempt. He was arrested and thrown into an asylum but then rescued by Professor Kroeber who brought him to the Bay Area.

#3: Initially Kroeber described Ishi in terms one would describe a wild animal with a great amount of detachment referring to him as "uncivilized and uncontaminated". Over time Kroeber developed a deep and abiding affection for and friendship with Ishi whom became one of his best friends as he recognized Ishi's humanity and intelligence and inner goodness.

#4: The following were some of the most notable massacres of the Yahi people by bounty hunting murderers: 1865 Workman Massacre (40 dead), 1865 Silva Massacre (30 dead), 1866 Three Knolls Massacre (40 dead), 1867 Campo Seco Massacre (45 dead), 1871 Kingsley Cave Massacre (30 dead). These all occurred in the Yahi homeland in the Butte County area of Northern California in the foothills northeast of what is now Oroville and Chico.

#5: In 1853 18 treaties with aboriginal California groups were signed but not ratified until 1906. In 1854 the Aid To Indigent Indians Act was inacted to forcibly assimilated those California aboriginals who were still alive by allowing their children to be forcibly adopted into non-native families due to the parents self-identifying as being aboriginal which led to most such peoples ceasing to self-identify as natives.

#6: Ishi turned SF Anthropology Museum into a popular attraction, to wit, a "Sunday Institution" as opposed to a weekday and Saturday attraction which much less attraction at that. People came to view Ishi much like they would go view a circus freak show as opposed to visiting him out of respect or scientific curiosity.

#7: Once Ishi moved to The City he adopted the museum and its staff as his new home and family and elected to remain there over the other option of moving to the reservation. He continued to cooperate with researchers the rest of his life and teach them as much as they taught him. He died of tuberculosis in Berkeley in 1916.

#8: The significance of the San Francisco Pan Pacific Expo of 1915 to the aboriginal people of North America was that they were officially conquered from sea to shining sea. They were now viewed by their conquerors as a romanticized relic of the past with a tinge of nostalgia and sympathy, but not deeply so. Ishi was offered the chance at the expo to be adopted into the Blackfeet Tribe but stongly rejected the idea choosing to proudly maintain his ethnic identity.

#9: Professor Kroeber's response to the news Ishi was on his death bed was to stridently defend Ishi's honor and dignity and wishes and demand Ishi's remains not be subject to an autopsy. In response to the concept that there might be scientific value in such an undertaking he stated "This man is our friend... science be damned".

#10: The most obvious manifestation in the film to the scientific cultural emphasis on North American aboriginal "disappearance not survival" comes in the very emphasis by anthropologists like Kroeber and linguists like Sapir on preserving details of the aboriginal languages and cultures as if they were dead languages and prehistoric societies that are already gone and not merely alive in the present but having adapted to the new paradigm in which they found themselves. This attitude was a reflection of the broader attitudes of society as a whole to the aboriginal peoples of North America whom were immersed in triumphalism at the apparent completion of Manifest Destiny. This mindset was from where Kroeber and Waterman were coming from when they first met Ishi but that changed as Ishi changed them through his teaching them even more than they taught him.