The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

362 critical reflections
When he resumed his anthropological career full time in 1922, Kroeber threw
himself into new fields and approaches. He took up archeology and experimented
with more objective, statistical methods, which gave him some distance from the
more personal, intimate, and psychological aspects of human life. The individual
and the small group were now interpreted as part of a much larger design that
Kroeber called the “superorganic.” Similarly, his new interest in “culture areas” allowed
Kroeber to compile masses of statistically comparable data for the whole of
native California (T. Kroeber 1970:163). In all, it was a flight into objectivism driven
by a desire to map the inevitable ebb and flow of cultures, which Kroeber came to
believe were as inevitable as cycles of night and day, birth and death.
It is easy today with the advantage of hindsight to identify the blind spots of our
anthropological predecessors—in this instance, Kroeber’s intellectual denial of the
genocide of Northern California Indians and his seemingly callous behavior toward
Ishi’s remains. Kroeber was not indifferent toward his living native Californian
informants, and the Kroeber compound on Arch Street in North Berkeley was
frequently host to Kroeber’s key informants and friends, some of whom lived with
the family for weeks at a time (ibid.:158–59). And in the 1950s, at the end of Kroeber’s
long and distinguished career, he emerged from his normal reticence toward
“applied anthropology” to argue the side of California Indians in a major land
claims case, Indians v. the United States of America (ibid.:221). Although he found the
case dispiriting, the Indians did eventually win the suit, and six years after Kroeber’s
death the Indians were awarded a token sum for their collective losses (Shea
2000:50). Theodora Kroeber (1970) described the land claims case as conceived in
white guilt and in bad faith. Eighteen years after the case was first opened, President
Johnson authorized a bill that awarded eight hundred dollars to each “properly
identified” and “qualified” Indian man, woman, and child alive in the United
States in September 1968. It was just the “sort of expensive but meaningless denouement
that Kroeber had most feared” (ibid.:223).
Still, it is reasonable to ask what might have been done differently. What options
did Kroeber have? Before Ishi became ill might Kroeber have considered
broaching the delicate topic of just where and to whom Ishi had been headed
when he was caught on the run in Oroville? If it was (as some present-day Maidu
Indians believe) to find sanctuary among related native peoples, might not that
have been a possible solution? And after Ishi’s health began to fail, were the museum
and hospital the best places for the man to have been confined? To this
day there is a strong investment in the idea that Ishi was a happy man (see Gerald
Vizenor’s satire [2000:esp. pp. 137–59]) who enjoyed his new life among his
white friends, who was charmed by matches, window shades, and other manifestations
of the white man’s ingenuity, and who was content in his roles of museum
janitor and Sunday exhibit. Perhaps he was. But the evidence (see esp.
Heizer and T. Kroeber 1979) leans toward another interpretation—that Ishi was
simply bone tired of life on the run. The Museum of Anthropology was his end
of the line. Although it was not of his choosing, Ishi accepted his final destiny