The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

coming to our senses 359
His Tribe (1964). Consequently, what we know and remember about Ishi today is
based mostly on what Theodora wrote.
Ishi in Two Worlds directly confronted what Kroeber had studiously avoided: the
history of the California Indian genocide at the hands of white settlers and ranchers.
Chapters 3 through 5 of her book stand as one of the most unflinching renditions
of the brutality and savagery of California’s white settler history. And because
of Theodora Kroeber’s compelling rendition of Ishi’s life and times, Ishi lent a face,
a name, and a personalized narrative to the hidden genocide of his people. Ishi
came to represent more than the life of a single man but to symbolize, instead, the
broader experience of Native Americans.
By contrast to the permanency of Theodora’s simple text, the fragile plastic
cylinders on which Kroeber (and later Sapir) recorded Ishi’s songs and folktales
were stored too close to the heaters in the anthropology museum archives, and a
great many melted. One of the early recordings that remains, however, is Ishi’s
telling of the Yahi myth “Coyote Sleeps with His Sister,” which has been carefully
transcribed by Leanne Hinton and her students at U.C. Berkeley and compared
with similar and related tales collected from nearby tribes. At the conference entitled
“Legacies of Ishi,” held in Oroville on May 12, 2000, Professor Hinton remarked
on Ishi’s intense enjoyment in telling this long tale, with its many complicated
subtexts filled with intimate details of Yahi practices of acorn gathering,
cooking, and home-keeping. Why Ishi, a man who was by all accounts excessively
modest (even prudish), chose to recount this particular tale with its explicitly sexual
content dealing with a profound Yahi taboo—brother-sister incest—remained
a bit of a mystery to Hinton. But the theme must have been a powerful one for Ishi,
an adult male, who was forced to live, travel, and hide out with blood relations, all
of them sexually restricted to him. Among the many forms of violence suffered by
Ishi at the hands of the white miners and ranchers who hunted his people were
the restrictions on his sexuality and of his right to reproduce. This was genocide
in another form. Even after his capture or rescue by whites, Ishi’s sexuality was often
the butt of public jokes. The local press had, for example, invented Ishi’s supposed
sexual infatuation for Lily Lena, a lowbrow music hall entertainer from London
who appeared at the Orpheum Theater in San Francisco in the fall of 1911.
But Kroeber pointed out (1911b) that Ishi was far more impressed with the architecture
of the building and with the crowds below the balcony where he was sitting
than he was with Miss Lena, to whom he paid scant attention.
In this same short, journalistic piece Kroeber recounts the arrival of Ishi to San
Francisco on Labor Day, 1911. When the man called Ishi stepped off the ferry boat
and into the glare of electric lights, hotel runners, and clanging trolley cars on Market
Street, he was frightened and distraught. Ishi, Kroeber writes, was “a curious
and pathetic figure in those [first] days. Timid, gentle, an almost ever-pervading
fear held down and concealed to the best of his ability, he nevertheless startled
and leaped at the slightest sudden sound. A new sight, or the crowding around of