Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: Ishi's Tale of Lizard Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 23 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-09-03 15:11:49 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 03:21:15 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 03:21:15

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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292 Jean Perry They went out to hunt deer, They went out to hunt birds, They went out to catch fish. “It will be like this,” they said. Now they ate, the story people. The deer came from the north along the mountains, And the grizzly bear. “This is how it will be,” they said. They made sunflower seeds out of sand. “They will go like this,” they said. “And there will be salt, Strew sunflower seeds and salt over deer meat, Like this.” They made grasshoppers out of snow. “Acorns are called this,” they said. They made acorns out of rain. “They beat acorns down from a tree with a stick,” People will say. “They will eat in this way now,” they said. Now they went to hunt deer. Lizard made arrows. They were taught. NOTE These translations are my own, and I take full responsibility for them. 1 would like to thank those who helped, especially Ken Whistler, without whom this work would not have been possible, and Herb Luthin, Leanne Hinton, and Mike Nichols for their help in the early stages of this project. Special thanks to Ken Whistler, Herb Luthin, and my husband, Merle Olives, for moral support during the hard times; to Florence Shaughnessy, who guided my understanding of Ishi’s world; to Ishi, who told these stories; and to the elders who taught him. 16 The Story of Lizard HERBERT LUTHIN AND LEANNE HINTON INTRODUCTION BY HERBERT W. LUTHIN Ishi, the narrator of this story, is something of a legend in the history of postContact Native America and is a touchstone figure in California anthropology. His story is well known it’s been told in books, articles, and films — so I won’t do much more than summarize it here. But it’s only fair to say that the “legend” of Ishi is nothing if not a conflicted one. The subtitle to Theodora Kroeber’s celebrated Ishi source book, Ishi in Two — Worlds, provides us with a good starting point in this regard: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America. Whatever he may have been to himself, for non-Indians Ishi, quite simply, stood as an icon of the natural man, a latter-day remnant of pre-Contact Native America. The irony, of course, is that Ishi lived anything but a natural human life, was anything but a pre-Contact “natural man. Ishi was the last Yahi. His tribe (the southernmost division of the Yana group), after decades of conflict with settlers and prospectors, skirmishes with the U.S. Army, and what can only be called the wanton “poaching” of white vigilantes who killed for sport, was all but wiped out along with the rest of the Yana in a concerted campaign of genocide carried out by local militia groups. Ishi was born into this shattered world — probably in 1862 about two years before the “final solution” massacres took place. Ishi survived because his band survived, decimated but intact, only to be surprised a year later by vigilantes in their Mill Creek camp and decimated once more. Only a handful, perhaps as many as a dozen, escaped — among them the little boy Ishi, his mother, and an older sister. This small group then went into deep hiding, vanishing almost without a trace for forty years. Except for a few scattered incidents, as far as anyone knew, by 1872 the Yahi were functionally extinct. But life went on for Ishi’s people in hiding. With no births, though (there were no marriageable children in the group when it slipped “underground”), 293