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"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.
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Subjects
Biography, Yana Indians, Indianen, Biographies, Yana (Indiens), Indians of North America, Indianer, Indians of north america, biography, Ishi, -1916, Yanna Indians, Indians of north america, southwest, new, Long Now Manual for CivilizationPeople
Ishi, Ishi (d. 1916), Ishi (-1916)Times
1911, Yahi, last of his kindShowing 5 featured editions. View all 27 editions?
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Ishi in two worlds: a biography of the last wild Indian in North America
2002, University of California Press
in English
0520229401 9780520229402
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Ishi in two worlds: a biography of the last wild Indian in North America
1976, University of California Press
in English
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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
0520006755 9780520006751
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Ishi, in Two Worlds, a Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America 2
1962-01-01, University of California Press
in English
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Ishi in two worlds: a biography of the last wild Indian in North America.
1961, University of California Press
in English
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Book Details
Edition Notes
Bibliography: p. [245]-254.
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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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