Cylinder
recordings of Ishi
Recorded
September 1911 – April 1914
148
cylinders; 5 hours, 41 minutes
These recordings represent, depending on your orientation,
a) an astonishing, nearly textbook effort to preserve and extrapolate a
vanishing culture in the form of a single individual or b) a pathetic tragedy
in which the “last wild Indian” was discovered, brought to civilization,
studied and recorded, kept on display in a museum, and dismembered after death
for the sake of science.
Or both.
On August 19, 1911, a starving Ishi entered civilization,
near Oroville, California, hard by the Lassen Peak wilderness. There Ishi had
lived for 50 years, mostly alone, the last member of the Yahi tribe. His people
had been hunted by whites, seen their food sources dwindle, succumbed to new
diseases brought in by the immigrants.
He was taken in by UC-Berkeley professors, housed and
employed by them as they studied him, sometimes demonstrating his woodcraft to
touring schoolchildren. Ishi was perhaps the last Stone Age man on the
continent, still making tools and weapons by hand. He communicated all he could
of his Yahi language and culture. Susceptible to European diseases, he
succumbed to tuberculosis on March 25, 1916.
Despite the efforts of his friends,
Ishi was autopsied and cremated – save for his brain which was placed in a jar
and sent to the Smithsonian Institution. Meanwhile, write-ups of Ishi’s life,
both fictional and non-fictional, by the widow of the museum director who studied
him, made the case popular in the early 1960s. Other books, and films and even a
play, have followed.
Ironically, Ishi turned out not
to be the “last of his tribe,’ as he was branded; eventually his brain was
found and repatriated to his closest living relatives, the Yana. The
recordings, of use to specialists, are housed at Berkeley. A 22-second excerpt
of Ishi chanting can be found here.
The contact with Ishi
undoubtedly extended his life as much as it endangered it. And who wouldn’t, if
he or she were the last person in their left, try to set down everything about it
that they could? Was it worth that to become a museum exhibit? He was asked
thousands of questions about his people; I don’t see any evidence of anyone
ever asking him what he thought of us.
The
National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all
the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up
next: Sophie Tucker and ‘Some of These Days.’
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