challenging existing Eurocentric beliefs about so-called primitive cultures. In the two generations that had by then passed since the California Gold Rush began, the few remaining “uncontaminated” adherents of indigenous culture had gone from being seen as threatening opponents to unique resources whose knowledge needed to be extracted and recorded lest it be lost forever. Kroeber’s associate, T.T. Waterman, traveled to Oroville and found that the man responded to words from the Yana language spoken by a decimated western Sierras group that had lived north of Oroville. A native Yana speaker, Sam Batwi, was brought in and it was determined that the man was seemingly the final remnant of a small southern Yana group called Yahi. They had endured massacres in 1865, 1866, and 1871, after which the few survivors went into hiding for decades deep in the wooded canyons, driven by justifiable fear of the consequences of further interaction with white settlers. The man’s camp near Mill Creek had been ransacked by surveyors in 1908, after which his three remaining companions, including his mother and sister, either died or disappeared, and his ability to survive in the wilderness was compromised. The significance of the discovery of this camp was such that Waterman had been dispatched to the area in 1910 to seek its inhabitants but had not made contact. Under the authority of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, on September 4, 1911, Waterman removed the man from the custody of the local sheriff and brought him back to the nascent anthropology museum at the campus of the University of California’s Associated Colleges in San Francisco, where he was to spend most of the rest of his life. Since Yahi tradition held interdictions on an individual speaking his own name and since he had no companions to address him by his name, Kroeber decided he should be called Ishi, an Anglicized interpretation of the Yana/Yahi word for “man.” He was given a nominal position as a janitor at the museum but in large part spent his time informing his hosts about his culture, language, and traditions. His weekend demonstrations of cultural practices, especially those involving fire making and creating projectile points, quickly became a popular public attraction that brought thousands of visitors to the museum. The present projectile point was presumably made in this context, likely between 1911 and 1914. It is an excellent example of his distinctive workmanship, which was unusually fine. Ishi’s situation at the museum was complex, to say the least. While modern observers have criticized his treatment there as exploitive, Kroeber and Waterman clearly felt he was a willing informant and collaborator who recognized the importance of preserving what he could of his culture. Though they made him available for the above-mentioned cultural demonstrations, their writings reveal that they wished to avoid turning him into a spectacle like that suffered by the African Pygmy Ota Benga (although Waterman initially advocated displaying him behind glass in a diorama), and they even sometimes attempted to counter the lurid newspaper accounts of the behavior of the “Last Wild Indian” that were frequent headlines until his death. Inaccurate as it was, his media celebrity was fueled in part by the fact that he was not confined to the museum but moved about the city with considerable visibility, particularly enjoying trolley cars, ferry boats, and exploring the forestland near the museum. He generally was perceived by those he interacted with as unusually good-natured, and Waterman FIG. 5 (below): The Affiliated Colleges in Parnassus Heights, San Francisco. Photo courtesy of UCSF.
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