Surviving In Another Modern World

Ishi, 'last wild Indian,' embraced adventure of life in S.F.

Gary Kamiya

September 12, 2014

E.H. Kemp, AP

FILE--An Indian known as Ishi is shown in this July 1912 portrait made in San Francisco. Nearly 90 years after an Indian known as Ishi walked out of the wilderness and was put on display as the "Last Wild Man in North America," his brain is being brought back home from the Smithsonian Institution to California for a proper burial. (AP Photo/Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology/UC Berkeley Regents, E.H. Kemp, File) Ran on: 11-13-2011 Ishi, the last Southern Yana Indian, wasn't the best singer.

Ishi spent decades hiding out from white settlers' genocidal campaign against California Indians. Then he spent five years as an object of civilization's fascination with his vanished way of life.

Last week's Portals told the story of how Ishi's tiny band of Yahi Indians stayed out of settlers' view for almost 50 years in their river canyon territory near Mount Lassen. Finally, Ishi was the only Yahi left. In 1911, starving and exhausted, this middle-aged man - the last "wild," or aboriginal, Indian in North America - stumbled out of the woods and into a corral near Oroville in Butte County.

Two professors of anthropology at UC Berkeley, Thomas Waterman and Alfred Kroeber, learned about this mysterious arrival from the Stone Age and brought him to San Francisco. Kroeber, a seminal figure in the new field, gave him a room in the new Museum of Anthropology on Parnassus Avenue and the name Ishi.

With the exception of a single trip to his people's old territory, Ishi was to live the rest of his life in the city.

As Kroeber's widow, Theodora Kroeber, wrote in her classic 1961 book, "Ishi in Two Worlds," the shy, gentle Indian was initially overwhelmed by the new world he had entered. Unexpected sounds, like cannon fire from the Presidio, unnerved him.

But he soon embraced his new life. As Kroeber notes, only extraordinary mental toughness and spiritual equilibrium could have enabled him to endure decades of concealment and the loss of everyone he'd ever known.

"Ishi had kept his morale through grief and an absolute solitariness; the impact of civilization could not budge it," Kroeber writes. Through everything, Ishi preserved his sense of self.

The public was curious about the "wild man," and the Museum of Anthropology was about to have an opening party to which 1,000 guests were invited. The last thing Waterman and Alfred Kroeber wanted, however, was to turn Ishi into a freak show.

Ishi was asked if he wanted to be there, and was told he could stay for as long as he liked in one of the smaller exhibition rooms. He agreed.

"He was excited about the party, which as he understood it was to be on the sensible lines of an Indian house warming to which you invited your guests for a feast," Theodora Kroeber writes.

Friends with doctor

Ishi enjoyed the reception, which set the stage for his subsequent relations with the public. Every Sunday afternoon, from 2 to 4:30 p.m., Alfred Kroeber and Ishi would hold court at the museum. Kroeber answered questions, translating for Ishi, and Ishi would demonstrate a skill such as stringing a bow or making arrowheads, which he would then give to a member of the audience.

Besides Kroeber and Waterman, both of whom had him over to their houses for dinner, Ishi was close to a physician named Saxton Pope. The doctor asked Ishi to teach him the art of archery, and the two men began practicing on the grass at the edge of Sutro Forest.

They spent hours together, speaking a pidgin Yana-English. Pope adored Ishi, and Ishi thought that Popey, as he called the doctor, was "quite the brightest, the least predictable, and the most fascinating person in the world."

He also respected Pope as a kuwi, or powerful healer. "It would be difficult, truly, to say which of the two meant the most to the other," Theodora Kroeber writes.

Neither Alfred Kroeber nor Waterman could afford to pay the modest sum Ishi needed for food, transportation, entertainment and sundries, so the museum arranged for him to have a job as janitor and draw a salary. Ishi was a proud man who valued his financial independence - from time to time he would ask to see his money and would absorbedly count it.

Inner Sunset strolls

Ishi's time in San Francisco was mostly his own. He enjoyed walking down to the shops on Seventh Avenue and Judah Street, greeting storekeepers and chatting regularly with two small girls he befriended.

He also liked riding on streetcars and ferries: One of his favorite trips was from the museum to UC Berkeley. And he explored the thick forest behind the Museum of Anthropology, making occasional visits to a cave on Mount Sutro.

In May 1914, Kroeber and Pope, along with Pope's 11-year-old son, accompanied Ishi on a camping trip to the Yahi's old territory. Ishi was apprehensive at first, but then "gave himself over to the venture, at last wholly," Kroeber's widow writes. "Going back to the old heartland in the company of the three living people who meant most to him would seem to have been an adventure emotionally akin to a psychoanalysis."

But if it was healing for Ishi to visit the scene of his old life, he had no desire to return to it permanently. By the end of the trip, Ishi was "eager to be back in the museum, to be home."

Fatal illness

Exposure to so many people in his new home, however, proved fatal. In fall 1915, he became seriously ill with tuberculosis - a disease for which he, like other native peoples, had no immunity.

At first, Ishi was hospitalized, but once he realized he was dying, he made it clear that he wanted to die at home, and he was moved back to the museum on Parnassus Avenue.

"Ishi lived on with good days and bad, stoical, uncomplaining, interested in whatever went on, affectionate and responsive, until the spring," Kroeber writes. "He died on March 25, 1916. Popey, his kuwi, was with him at the end."

Alfred Kroeber, who was traveling at the time, wanted him cremated in accordance with what he believed was Yahi practice. "Say for me that science can go to hell. We propose to stand by our friends," Kroeber wrote to the museum's acting director, Edward Gifford.

Pope, however, decided that his responsibility to science overrode Kroeber's wishes, and he persuaded Gifford to have Ishi's brain removed before the body was cremated.

Battle over brain

As Orin Starn notes in "Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last 'Wild' Indian," Kroeber, confronted with a fait accompli, had Ishi's brain shipped to the Smithsonian. It was stored there for decades before being returned in 2000 to Indian groups in California, who buried it in Yahi territory.

Of Ishi, his friend Pope wrote, "He looked upon us as sophisticated children - smart, but not wise. We knew many things, and much that is false. He knew nature, which is always true.

"His were the qualities of character that last forever. He was kind; he had courage and self-restraint, and though all had been taken from him, there was no bitterness in his heart. His soul was that of a child, his mind that of a philosopher."

Editor's note

Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Every Saturday, Gary Kamiya's Portals of the Past will tell one of those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco's extraordinary history - from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach, to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond.

Trivia time

Last week's trivia question: What is the steepest intersection in San Francisco?

Answer: Filbert and Kearny streets.

This week's trivia question: What prominent early San Franciscan was known as the "generous miser"?

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book "Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco," awarded the 2013 Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. E-mail:metro@sfchronicle.com

Weight of the World on These Women

Laser work cuts grime, time off Acropolis' ancient maidens

Liz Alderman, New York Times

July 8, 2014

Athens --

For 2,500 years, the six sisters stood unflinching atop the Acropolis, as the fire
s of war blazed around them, bullets nicked their robes, and bombs scarred
 their curvaceous bodies. When one of them was kidnapped

in the 19th century, legend had it that the other five could be heard weeping
 in the night.

But only recently have the famed Caryatid statues, among the great divas
 of ancient Greece, had a chance to reveal their full glory.

For the last 2 1/2 years, conservators at the Acropolis Museum have been
 cleaning the maidens, Ionic columns in female form believed to have been
 sculpted by Alkamenes, a student of ancient Greece's greatest artist,

Phidias. Their initial function was to prop up a part of the Erechtheion, the
 sacred temple near the Parthenon

 that paid homage to the first kings of Athens and the Greek gods Athena
 and Poseidon.

Main attraction

Today they are star attractions in the museum; the originals outside were
 replaced with reproductions in 1979

to keep the real maidens safe.

Over the centuries, a coat of black grime came to mask their beauty.
 Now conservators have restored them to their original ivory glow,
 using a specially developed laser technology.

To coincide with the museum's fifth anniversary, the women
 - minus one - went on full display in June, gleaming from their
 modern makeover.

The missing Caryatid is installed at the British Museum in London,
 which acquired it nearly a century ago after Lord Elgin, the British
 ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, had it sawed off the
 Erechtheion's porch, along

with shiploads of adornments from the Parthenon to decorate his
 mansion in Scotland before selling the pieces to pay debts.

Greek and British authorities have long fought over the return of
 these so-called Elgin marbles, a dispute that heated up again
 recently when actors George Clooney, Matt Damon and
 Bill Murray came out in support of

 the sculptures' being returned home during an appearance in
 London for the movie "The Monuments Men."

 That ignited a firestorm in Britain, which maintains that
 Lord Elgin saved the marbles from destruction, and
 acquired them fairly.

New volley in battle

The controversy may flare anew as the British Museum plans
 an exhibition of the human body in Greek

 sculpture for next spring, using some of the marbles from the
 Parthenon.

Greeks have not been shy about using the Caryatid restoration
 to help press their case. While the Caryatids' restoration is not
 part of a specific campaign to get the marbles back, the fresh
 cleaning shows that the museum can support their return, said
 Dimitris Pantermalis, the president of the Acropolis Museum.

"We insist on a solution" to the Elgin marbles," Pantermalis said.
 "A country must be ready when it claims something, and the
 Acropolis Museum has completed this."

In the meantime, the missing Caryatid is glaring in its absence
 from the platform, a subversive display

 of resistance that is reflected one floor up in the museum,
 where large swaths of the Acropolis frieze owned by the
 British Museum are represented as chalky plaster copies
 of the originals.

On a recent weekday, Pantermalis wove through crowds
 who stood enthralled around a special dais on which the
 five remaining Caryatids were displayed. "With the
 pollution erased, we can read more about the history
of the last 2,500 years," he said.

The museum plans to clean a number of other architectural
 sculptures from the Acropolis, using the laser technology,
 said Costas Vassiliadis, a conservator who heads the
 restoration team, although he declined to

 give details because the new projects had not yet been
 announced.

Pueblo Indians of New Mexico--Pottery

Consideration of utility and meaning found in American Indian Pottery of New Mexico

'Lines on the Horizon: Native American Art' review



By Kenneth Baker

May 2, 2014 | Updated: May 3, 2014 10:08am

"

'Lines on the Horizon: Native American Art' review

By Kenneth Baker

May 2, 2014 | Updated: May 3, 2014 10:08am

"Lines on the Horizon: Native American Art From the Weisel Family Collection," opening today at the

 de Young Museum, presents problems and fascinations in about equal measure.

It no longer counts as mere political correctness to underline the irony of admiring artifacts whose makers our ancestors may have had a role in extirpating: The civil rights movement began a long, slow and far from complete reckoning with the founding American atrocity of slavery. But to my knowledge, despite several recent decades of Native American activism and isolated reversals of tribal fortune, no parallel reckoning with the blood-soaked history of native peoples has occurred.

"Dime novel" and Hollywood mythology only made it harder to imagine the violence of both internecine tribal warfare and the ultimate Western expansionist conquest of native cultures.

This knowledge inevitably shadows appreciation of the splendid textiles and ceramics in "Lines on the Horizon," objects whose value to their makers, even as trade goods, is difficult to translate into the prices that Native American artifacts command in today's auction market. Beyond matters of price, the differences between barter and market economies reflect different worldviews.

That untranslatability makes itself felt most forcefully in the case of Mimbres ceramics, stars of the current show. To modern eyes, these decorated vessels look like design masterpieces. Many modern artists have prized them, including Donald Judd (1928-94) and Tony Berlant, longtime friend and adviser to Fine Arts Museums benefactor Thomas Weisel.

But the functions of Mimbres ceramics appear far more easily inferred than the meaning of their designs. Did the angular patterns that adorn these thousand-year-old objects have meaning for their makers? Did they foreshadow our sense of decoration as gratuitous aesthetic enhancement, or did every pattern encode some reference, belief or feeling about their world?

Intriguing and difficult

The question becomes more intriguing and difficult when we focus on the ceramics' composite human and animal figures, possibly unique in this hemisphere's culture.

Did these figures represent mythic beings, imaginary transactions associated with hunting or with occult ritual? Or were they sheer design epiphanies?

We may never have an answer, as the people of the Mimbres Valley in present-day New Mexico apparently suffered cultural collapse more than 10 centuries ago and left no traces of language that might help us unriddle their lifeways.

Seeing walls filled with the Weisel Collection's gifts and promised gifts of brilliantly patterned Native American textiles reminded me of the art world's "discovery" some years ago of African American pieced quilts as abstract outsider art. Modernism seemed suddenly to acquire a past it did not know it had.

Modern American and European art has had various deflations in self-importance since its mid-20th century heyday, though today's art economy seems to reflect the opposite. One of those deflations was the recognition that the rigor and exuberance of color field and other modes of abstract painting had precedents in world culture before and socially beneath the tiers on which modernism officially conducted itself.

Native American peoples prized textiles such as we see here for their high craft achievement and their value in trade. Curatorial notes in the exhibition and its catalog tie aspects of specific pieces to the availability of materials and dyes: further signatures of a fraught history. But where do we have to stand conceptually to reconcile the disparate registers of appreciation?

"Lines on the Horizon" may strike many visitors as an almost anthropological exercise, although it justly marks a major gift to the Fine Arts Museums.

Ceramics from Acoma

For me, the encounter with ceramics from Acoma counted among the show's most arresting moments.

Anyone who has visited the high mesa in New Mexico on which a few descendants of the ancient Acoma still live has to marvel at the fateful improbability of this people's ultimately decimating encounter with European invaders, which began in the 16th century.

My recollection of such a visit 15 years ago infused "Lines on the Horizon" with an air of sadness. I wonder whether others will experience that.

Lines on the Horizon: Native American Art From the Weisel Family Collection:Textiles, ceramics, masks and effigies. Opens Saturday. Through Jan. 4. De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, S.F. (415) 750-3600, www.deyoungmuseum.org.

HUGE INDIAN MI-WOK SHELL MOUND SETTLEMENT LOST TO HISTORY

Indian artifact treasure trove paved over for Marin County homes

Archaeologists crushed that tribe declined to protect burial site

Image 1 out of 10

Lacy Atkins/SFC

The $55 million Rose Lane development in Larkspur is being built on the site of a 4,500-year-old Indian burial mound. The Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria opted to rebury and pave over the artifacts found.

By Peter Fimrite

April 22, 2014 | Updated: April 23, 2014 7:29am

A treasure trove of Coast Miwok life dating back 4,500 years - older than King Tut's tomb - was
 discovered in Marin County
 and then destroyed to make
 way for multimillion-dollar
 homes, archaeologists told
The Chronicle this week.

The American Indian burial ground and village site, so rich in history that it was dubbed the
 "grandfather midden," was
 examined and categorized
 under a shroud of secrecy
 before construction began
 this month on the $55 million Rose Lane development in Larkspur.

The 300-foot-long site contained 600 human burials, tools, musical instruments, harpoon tips,
spears and throwing sticks from a time long before the introduction of the bow and arrow. 
The bones of grizzly and black bears were also found, along with a ceremonial
 California condor burial.

"This was a site of considerable archaeological value," said Dwight Simons, a consulting
 archaeologist
 who analyzed 7,200 bones, including the largest collection of bear bones ever found in a
 prehistoric site
 in the Bay Area. "My estimate of bones and fragments in the entire site was easily over a
 million, and
 probably more than that. It was staggering."

No artifacts were saved

All of it, including stone tools and idols apparently created for trade with other tribes,
was removed,
 reburied in an undisclosed location on site and apparently graded over, destroying the
 geologic
 record and ending any chance of future study, archaeologists said. Not a single artifact
 was saved.

Lost forever was a carbon-dated record in the soil layers of indigenous life going back
 approximately to the time the Great Pyramid of Giza was built in Egypt. It was, said
 several prominent
 archaeologists, the largest, best-preserved, most ethnologically rich American Indian
 site found in
 the Bay Area in at least a century.

"It should have been protected," said Jelmer Eerkens, a professor of archaeology at
 UC Davis who
 visited the site as a guest scholar. "The developers have the right to develop their land,
 but at least
 the information contained in the site should have been protected and samples should
 have been
 saved so that they could be studied in the future."

The shell mound was first documented in Larkspur in 1907, but no one knew its
 significance until
 a developer decided to build homes, prompting an examination of the grounds.

Archaeologists brought in

The development was approved by the city in 2010, but the developer, Larkspur
 Land 8 Owner LLC,
 was required under the California Environmental Quality Act to bring in
 archaeologists to study
 the shell mound under the direction of American Indian monitors before it
 could build.

The developers hired San Francisco's Holman & Associates Archaeological
 Consultants to
 conduct an excavation, and that firm spent the past year and a half on the site, 
calling in 25
 archaeologists and 10 other specialists to study aspects of the mound. As required
 by the
 environmental act, their work was monitored by the Federated Indians of Graton
 Rancheria, who
 were designated the most likely descendants of Larkspur's indigenous people.

The American Indian leaders ultimately decided how the findings would be handled,
 and they
 defended their decision to remove and rebury the human remains and burial artifacts.

"The philosophy of the tribe in general is that we would like to protect our cultural
 resources and
 leave them as is," said Nick Tipon, a longtime member of the Sacred Sites
 Protection Committee
 of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. "The notion that these cultural
 artifacts belong to  the public is a colonial view."

But Eerkens and several other top archaeologists said a lot more could have been
 done to protect
 the shell mound. The problem was that the work was done under a confidentiality
 agreement,
 so little was known about it until March when some of the archaeologists
 discussed their work
 during a Society for California Archaeology symposium in Visalia.

An extraordinary site

It was too late by then to preserve the site and, by all accounts, the archaeologists
 at the 
symposium were stunned.

"In my 40 years as a professional archaeologist, I've never heard of an
 archaeological site
 quite like this one," said E. Breck Parkman, the senior archaeologist for the
 California State Parks.
 "A ceremonial condor burial, for example, is unheard of in California. This was
 obviously a very
 important place during prehistory."

The developer, Larkspur planning officials and officials at Holman &
 Associates all
 pointed to tribal leaders.

"We coordinated the entire time with the tribe and the archaeological team 
to make sure it was a
 collaborative effort and that things were handled in accordance with the
 tribe's wishes,"
 said Brian Olin, the senior vice president for New Home Company, which is
 part of a joint venture
 with Larkspur Land 8.

Miley Holman, the owner of the archaeological firm, referred all inquiries to
 the American Indians,
 as did Neal Toft, the Larkspur planning director.

"The city did not participate or oversee any of the archaeological digs or
 discovery," Toft said.
 "The Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria managed the oversight along
 with a qualified
 archaeologist. We were not apprised or assessed of any significant finds,
 and in fact we kept
 out of it."

Greg Sarris, the chairman for the 1,300-member tribe, was far from
 apologetic about what
 happened to the archaeological site. It is nobody else's business, he said,
 how the tribe
 chooses to handle the remains and belongings of its ancestors.

"Our policy is that those things belong to us, end of story," said Sarris,
 whose tribe recently
 opened the Graton Resort & Casino in Rohnert Park. "Let us worry
 about our own
 preservation. If we determine that they are sacred objects, we will rebury
 them because in
 our tradition many of those artifacts, be they beads, charm stones or
 whatever, go with the
 person who died. ... How would Jewish or Christian people feel if we
 wanted to dig up
 skeletal remains in a cemetery and study them? Nobody has that right."

The protection of cultural sites has been a prickly topic for decades
 in the Bay Area, where
 American Indian shell mounds were once abundant around
 San Francisco Bay. There is
 often tension, and there are sometimes courtroom battles, between
 American Indians,
 who generally want ceremonial items left alone, and archaeologists
 who want to collect
 and preserve ancient artifacts and village sites for science.

State and federal laws attempt to balance the two - protecting
 cultural sites and giving
 American Indians a say over what happens - but in most cases
 a private-property owner
 can't be forced to protect a cultural site.

The new homes, on a 22-acre former tidal estuary of Corte
 Madera Creek, across from
 Hall Middle School in central Larkspur, will include 42 senior
 housing units, eight senior
 cottage homes, six affordable-housing town houses and 29
 single-family homes. They are
 expected to go on the market in the fall for $1.9 million
 to $2.5 million.

Shrouded in secrecy

Nondisclosure agreements are relatively common when dealing with
 Indian burials because
 of the historical problems American Indians have had with looters,
 grave robbers and
 vandals, but the archaeologists believe the developer was behind the
 secrecy.

"The developer was reluctant to have any publicity because,
 well - let's face it - because
 of 'Poltergeist,' " said Simons, referring to the 1982 movie about
 a family tormented by
 ghosts and demons because their house was built on top of a burial 
ground.

They also question Larkspur planning officials, who could have
 protected the mound by
 ordering a redesign or mandating construction of a cap over the site.
 Critics suspect
 planning decisions were influenced by the fact that Larkspur is getting
 out of the deal
 a 2.43-acre piece of land to build a community center.

"It's like the fox watching the henhouse," said Al Schwitalla, an
 archaeologist hired by
 Holman & Associates to analyze artifacts at the site. He said
 radiocarbon dating was
 arbitrarily limited and DNA testing was prohibited, a move that
 prevented confirmation of
 a genetic link to Graton Rancheria tribe members.

Lost treasures

A draft report is being prepared documenting what was found inside
 the Larkspur mound,
 but the actual items are lost to science and future study. That includes
 atlatl throwing
 sticks, which were used for hunting before the bow and arrow. There
 were also thousands
 of shells and the bones of bat rays, waterfowl, deer, sea otters and
 some 100 grizzly and
 black bears. Archaeologists say the remains of the condor, a species
 revered by the Miwok,
 could be an indication that the birds were kept as pets, possibly for
 their feathers.

There were also antler tools, flutes, beads, bone awls, hairpins, game
 pieces and ritualistic
 stone objects apparently used to trade for obsidian and beads from
 Napa-area tribes,
 according to archaeologists.

"There are a lot of things that went wrong here," Eerkens said.
 "It's really a shame."

Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail:
 pfimrite@sfchronicle.com