Starn is an anthropologist at Duke whose area of dissertation study was Peruvian farmers’ organization. He grew up in Berkeley and camped in the mountains where Ishi spent his last years in the wild. In his forties he decided to try to connect with native California and update the story told in Theodora Kroeber’s Ishi in Two Worlds (1961).
Ishi was “captured” by Adolph Kessler in August 1911 at a slaughterhouse outside Oroville, southeast of Chico. Alfred Kroeber, head of Berkeley’s anthropology department, arranged to have Ishi brought to San Francisco and housed at Berkeley’s museum there. He lived five more years, eventually dying of tuberculosis in 1916. He learned some English, related tribal stories to Edward Sapir, who traveled out from Columbia to record them, and used to go next door to the hospital, where he became friends with the head of surgery, Saxton Pope. It was Pope who made the decision to have Ishi autopsied, even though Kroeber (who was away at the time) was against it. Ishi’s body was cremated and the ashes put in a (probably Santa Clara Pueblo) pot, which was then placed in a Columbarium at Olivet Memorial Park Cemetery. Thomas Waterman, Kroeber’s assistant, supervised all this.
After Ishi’s death and the death of Kroeber’s first wife, Henriette Rothschild (also from tuberculosis), Alfred Kroeber married Theodora, a widow with two children, Clifton (her first husband was Clifton Brown) and Theodore. Alfred and Theodora had two children, Ursula (K. LeGuin) and Karl Kroeber, the Columbia Romantics professor. Theodora quizzed Alfred about Ishi and eventually wrote Ishi in Two Worlds, published by the University of California Press just after Alfred’s death in 1961.
Starn recounts the work of Berkeley archaeologist Martin Baumhoff and his student Jerald Johnson on the Yahi, a small tribe that probably never numbered more than a few hundred people who wintered in the lower foothills near the Sacramento Valley and summered in the high country. They made baskets (never pottery) and lived in cone-shaped brush houses, By the time Ishi was born, probably about 1860, the whites had already begun a campaign of exterminating the hill-country Indians, who at intervals descended into their settlements to steal and even kill settlers. Ishi would never have known the idyllic life of the wild sometimes ascribed to him, but was always, along with his few fellow tribesmen, a fugitive.
In 1997 Starn got in touch with Art Angle, whose Maidu tribe were hardly friends of the Yahi in the old days, but who wanted to repatriate Ishi’s remains for burial in the highlands. Art had heard from old Maidu relatives that Ishi's brain had been pickled and displayed for money. Starn knew that Theodora’s book had mentioned Ishi’s brain having been “preserved,” but she apparently thought it had been cremated with the rest of him.
Starn begins researching and discovers that much of Theodora’s book is inaccurate, exaggerated, or romanticized. She was right, though, about Ishi’s people being exterminated; Starn doesn’t think genocide too strong a word for the whites’ extirpation of the hill-country Indians.
Starn seeks out Nancy Rockafellar, a historian of science at the University of California at San Francisco, because he knows she’s been inquiring into the story of Ishi’s brain. She tells him it went to the Smithsonian, and she has been informed it was destroyed.
In “Dr. Kroeber’s Pet Buffalo,” Starn considers how much Ishi was exploited and how much he might have benefited from his stay in San Francisco, concluding that the truth was somewhere between Art Angle’s view of Ishi’s exploitation and Theodora Kroeber’s of the perfect friendship between Ishi and Alfred Kroeber.
Starn finds letters at the Berkeley Library confirming that Ishi’s brain was sent to the Smithsonian; the surprise is that Kroeber was the one making the offer and doing the sending. Then he contacts the Smithsonian, visits, and finds the brain is still there. He tells Art Angle, who plans a Maidu visit to the Smithsonian. Starn reports the encounter between the museum’s bureaucrats and the Maidu group, who are shown the brain. But the museum officials say they have to look for Ishi’s heirs.
Starn explains some of the problems of tribal continuity and Indian identity in a chapter that concludes with the Smithsonian announcement that Ishi’s brain will go to Mickey Gemmill and the Redding Rancheria and Pit River Tribe because of language continuity; Gemmill is a Yana. Starn shifts his attention to Gemmill, an activist in the 70s Red Power movement, and goes to meet him at an “Ancestral Gathering” or “Big Time.”
Starn goes to Grizzly Bear’s Hiding Place with his father, Jed Riffe (who made the film Ishi the Last Yahi), Brian Bibby and Jim Johnston, the two men who rediscovered the spot in 1991. Art Angle is supposed to ride in on horseback to meet them, but gets lost.
Eventually, in August, 2000, Gemmill and the northern tribesmen retrieve Ishi’s brain and bury it, along with his ashes and the pieces of the Pueblo pot they had to break to get the ashes out, in a Pit River basket in a forested place in Deer Creek Canyon. They invite Tom Killion from the Smithsonian, but not Starn and apparently not any of the Maidu. In the fall there is a public celebration in Dersch Meadow in Mount Lassen State Park to which Starn is invited. Lorraine Frazier represents the Maidu, Tom Killion is there along with Jed Riffe, Nancy Rockafellar and about two hundred others.
Although he’s generally pleased about Ishi’s repatriation, Starn has his doubts about whether it’s something Ishi would have wanted—either the northern tribe’s burying him or even the Maidu. “Everyone at Dersch Meadow . . . had his or her own investment in assuming we had done right by Ishi.”
Two years after Ishi’s burial Starn returns to Mill Creek to play three of Ishi’s recorded songs for some mountain Maidu speakers. They have no objection to the gambling songs, which are just mainly scat singing, but they say about the third, “He should not have sung that song.” It’s apparently a medicine man’s song, and possibly bad medicine. ( )

Starn’s book, written in 2004, is a great companion piece to Kroeber’s 1960 book on Ishi. Starn’s writing is clear and descriptive, while Kroeber’s is ornate and, as it turns out, somewhat dishonest. The original Ishi story, as it appeared in 1960, can be seen as a romanticized product of its times. In it, Ishi is portrayed as the noble savage. His story is the precursor to all things Kevin Costner, an oversimplified attempt to expiate white guilt. Starn’s book attempts to set the record straight, and even chronicles the betrayal of Ishi by his white friends, who, contrary to Ishi’s wishes, allowed an autopsy of Ishi when he died, and even surreptitiously removed his brain to be pickled and sent to the Smithsonian! It’s part detective story, part social history, part anthropological corrective, and entirely readable. I strongly recommend it.

From Ishi, et al, at downstreamer ( )