An edition of Ishi in Two Worlds a Biogr (1961)

Ishi in two worlds

a biography of the last wild Indian in North America

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  • 4.0 (3 ratings)
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  • 3 Currently reading
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Last edited by MARC Bot
April 30, 2025 | History
An edition of Ishi in Two Worlds a Biogr (1961)

Ishi in two worlds

a biography of the last wild Indian in North America

  • 4.0 (3 ratings)
  • 53 Want to read
  • 3 Currently reading
  • 4 Have read

"The life story of Ishi, the Yahi Indian, lone survivor of a doomed tribe, is unique in the annals of North American anthropology. For more than forty years, Theodora Kroeber's biography has been sharing this tragic and absorbing drama with readers all over the world. Ishi stumbled into the twentieth century on the morning of August 29, 1911, when, desperate with hunger and with terror of the white murderers of his family, he was found in the corral of a slaughterhouse near Oroville, California. Finally identified as an Indian by an anthropologist, Ishi was brought to San Francisco by Professor T. T. Waterman and lived there the rest of his life under the care and protection of Alfred Kroeber and the staff of the University of California's Museum of Anthropology. Karl Kroeber adds an informative tribute to the text, describing how the book came to be and how Theodora Kroeber's approach to the project was both a product of her era and of her insight and her empathy."--book jacket.

Publish Date
Language
English
Pages
254

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Previews available in: English

Edition Availability
Cover of: Ishi in two worlds
Ishi in two worlds: a biography of the last wild Indian in North America
2002, University of California Press
in English
Cover of: Ishi in two worlds
Cover of: Ishi in Two Worlds
Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America
February 1, 1964, University of California Press
Paperback in English - 1st paper-bound edition edition
Cover of: Ishi, in Two Worlds, a Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America 2
Ishi, in Two Worlds, a Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America 2
1962-01-01, University of California Press
in English
Cover of: Ishi in two worlds

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Book Details


Edition Notes

Bibliography: p. [245]-254.

Published in
Berkeley

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
970/.004/97, B
Library of Congress
E99.Y23 K76 2002

The Physical Object

Pagination
xxiii, 254 p., [14] p. of plates :
Number of pages
254

Edition Identifiers

Open Library
OL3469131M
Internet Archive
ishiintwoworldsb0000kroe_f3i9
ISBN 10
0520229401
LCCN
2005532000, 61007530
OCLC/WorldCat
50805975
LibraryThing
169674
Goodreads
1244652

Work Identifiers

Work ID
OL5729418W

Work Description

Naiomi Alderman described the book as follows in the Guardian Newspaper;
"On 29 August 1911, a 50-year-old man, a member of the Yahi group of the Native American Yana people, walked out of the forest near Oroville, California, and was captured by the local sheriff. He was known at the time and popularised in the press as “the last wild Indian”.

He called himself “Ishi” – a word in the Yahi language that means simply “man”. He was the very last of his people, and had been living in the wilderness alone, travelling to places he remembered from the time when his tribe had flourished, in the hope of finding some remnant of those he’d grown up with. When he realised they were truly all gone, when a series of forest fires meant he was close to starvation, he allowed himself to be found and taken in.

Knowing that he was the last surviving Yahi, Ishi was desperate to communicate some of the culture that would be entirely lost when he was gone. He ended up living with the director of the museum of anthropology at the University of California, Alfred Kroeber. He taught Kroeber as much as he could: demonstrated the skills of flint-knapping, explained his language, told the stories of his people one last time so they could be written down and preserved. He was particularly fond of children, Kroeber recorded. Ishi died in 1916, of tuberculosis. After his death, Alfred’s wife, Theodora, wrote a remarkable book about him, Ishi in Two Worlds, which relays as much of the Yahi culture as the anthropologists were able to record, and talks about Ishi’s own accounts of his life. To read it is to touch an intricate and beautiful civilisation that is now entirely gone, a place that can only be momentarily resurrected by an imaginative act, as unreachable as an alien world.

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