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<-- Back to research projects Ishi was a Yahi Indian, the last survivor of his group. The Yahis were killed off in a series of terrible massacres taking place in the late 1800's north of Oroville, California. 7 people survived this massacre, and went into hiding together in the mountains: one was Ishi, about 12 years old at the time. 40 years later, with the rest of his people all dead, Ishi emerged in Oroville. Since he spoke not a word of English, the anthropologist A.L. Kroeber was contacted, and his colleague T.T. Waterman went up to identify the language Ishis spoke. Ishi came back to the Bay Area with Waterman, and spent the rest of his days living in San Francisco, ironically at the University of California Museum of Anthropology, where he worked with anthropologists on his language and culture. He became instantly famous as "The Last Wild Indian," and his charismatic personality won him scores of friends. Sadly, he died five years later of tuberculosis. Ishi's fame has been renewed several times in books, notably by Theodora Kroeber's Ishi in Two Worlds, and more recently Karl and Clifton Kroeber's Ishi in Three Centuries, and Orin Starn's Ishi's Brain. In the last summer of his life, Ishi worked with linguist Edward Sapir, who collected word lists, paradigms and half a dozen long tales from him. These were written in Yahi in a set of 6 notebooks. Part way through the summer, Ishi became too ill to work any more. The stories were never completely translated, and Sapir never worked them up or published them. Upon Sapir's own untimely death, the notebooks came to Kroeber, and were subsequently misplaced for years. Only 6 years after Kroeber's death did they reappear, and were placed in the Bancroft Library here on campus in the 1980's. Leanne Hinton, Herb Luthin and others have been working on a long-term project to complete the translation and analysis of Ishi's tales. The ultimate goals is their publication as part of Sapir's collected works. Selected publications from the project so far: Hinton, 1987. A report on the Yanan Project, University of California, Berkeley: an introduction. SIU Occasional papers on linguistics: papers from the 1987 Hokan-Penutian languages workshop. p. 1. Hinton, 1987. Yana morphology: a thumbnail sketch. SIU Occasional papers on linguistics: papers from the 1987 Hokan-Penutian Languages workshop. pp. 7-16. Hinton, 1992 Ishi's Tale of Lizard. (Children's book) Ferrar, Strauss and Giroux. (Reprinted in paperback, 1995) Hinton, 1999. Ishi's Brain. News from Native California 12 (4): 4-9. Hinton and Luthin, 2002. A Story of Lizard. (Ishi, narrator. Edward Sapir, collector. Hinton and Luthin, translators.) In Surviving through the Days: A California Indian Reader, ed. By Herb Luthin. University of California Press. Luthin and Hinton, 2003. What Ishi's stories tell us about Ishi. in Ishi in Three Centuries. Ed. By Karl and Clifton Kroeber. University of Nebraska Press. Luthin and Hinton, 2003. The story of Lizard. in Ishi in Three Centuries. Ed. By Karl and Clifton Kroeber. University of Nebraska Press. Golla, Victor. Ishi's language. in Ishi in Three Centuries. Ed. By Karl and Clifton Kroeber. University of Nebraska Press. Jean Perry, 2003. When the world was new: Ishi's stories. in Ishi in Three Centuries. Ed. By Karl and Clifton Kroeber. University of Nebraska Press. |
