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

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

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294 Herbert Luthin and Leanne Hinton the old just grew older, and the group gradually dwindled. By the time Ishi reached the age of forty, after nearly four decades of hiding, the last member of his group, his own aged mother, had died. That year was 1908. On August 29, 1911, naked and starving, hair still singed off in mourning three years after the death of his last human companion, Ishi gave himself up outside a slaughterhouse in Oroville. Until he walked out of hiding and into the history of twentieth-century California, Ishi’s entire life, from infancy to middle age, was spent in hiding — a sort of backcountry version of Anne Frank’s concealment. The stress of that existence, a life of constant hardship and fear of discovery, is difficult for us even to imagine. Ishi was Yahi, all right purely, deeply, fully so. But the Yahi life he knew was not the free, selfPossessing, traditional existence of his ancestors; and it is a mistake to think that Ishi can represent for us— for anyone — some animistic “free spirit” or serve asa spokesman of untrammeled Native American life and culture. Upon his discovery, Ishi became an overnight media sensation: a “wild Indian,’ a living Stone Age man — captured in the backcountry of modern California! When the news hit the stands in San Francisco, Alfred Kroeber, head of anthropology at the University of California, dispatched the linguist-anthropologist T. T. Waterman to Oroville to establish communication and bring him to the university. To protect him from exploitation (though let’s not forget that Ishi was also the anthropological “find” of a lifetime), Kroeber gave him light employment as a live-in caretaker at the university’s new Museum of Art and Anthropology as a way of providing him with pocket money and safe lodging. His days were often filled with linguistic and ethnographic work, for there was an endless stream of scholars coming to work with him, and other interested visitors seeking audience. And on Sunday afternoons, he appeared as a kind of “living exhibit” in the museum itself, chipping arrowheads, drilling fire, and demonstrating other native Yahi crafts and techniques for the public. Thus did Ishi live out the last five years of his life — in truth, in relative contentment and ease, unlikely though this may seem. Those who knew him and became his friends came to love him. He died of tuberculosis in March of 1916. Given this extraordinary life, it should comeas no surprise to learn that Ishi’s stories — which only now, eighty years after their narration, are finally being made available to scholars and the public alike — are strikingly unlike anything else known in California oral literature. In some respects, they are of a piece with known Yana tradition; in others, they are eccentric to an amazing degree. Yet we are extremely fortunate to have them, for they tell us a great deal about Yahi life and custom and even more about Ishi himself. The story presented here was taken down by the great linguist Edward Sapir, who came to California in the summer of 1915 to work with Ishi in what was to THE STORY OF LIZARD 295 be his last year. Ishi was probably already ill by the time Sapir arrived, but in August, after many weeks of steady work, his illness grew too pronounced to ignore, and he was placed in the hospital, where he died about six months later. Ishi’s untimely death was no doubt the main reason Sapir never returned to his notebooks and worked up these texts for publication. And in truth, it would have been a daunting task, for much of the work of translation and verification was not complete at the time Ishi was hospitalized. Sapir called his work with Ishi “the most time-consuming and nerve-wracking that I have ever undertaken,” noting that “Ishi’s imperturbable good humor alone made the work possible” (Golla 1984:194). Sapir recorded Ishi’s stories the hard way: by hand, in detailed phonetic transcription. All told, he recorded at least six stories, filling five notebooks more than 200 pages of text. Most of the pages are only sparsely glossed at best (indeed, two entire notebooks contain only unglossed Yahi text), and this is what poses the challenge for linguists of the Yahi Translation Project, who are trying to reconstruct their meaning.’ For that reason, it is the best-worked, bestglossed text, “A Story of Lizard,” that we present here. Even so, there are places (duly marked) where we are simply still not sure exactly what is going on. Ishi’s narrative style is often demanding, at least for those coming from a Western literary tradition. Readers may well find this to be a most difficult selection, thanks to Ishi’s stripped-down, elliptical approach to telling a story (even along one) and the short, bulletlike bursts of his delivery. Compositionally, “A Story of Lizard” is more of a suite than a story. Rather than a single overarching plot, it contains a series of episodes and situations, each with its own interior form, all of which combine to form the larger whole. Some of these episodes and situations recur cyclically a number of times. For instance, the Ya'wi, or “Pine Nutting,” episode occurs three times, in parts verbatim; and there are four separate “Arrow Making” episodes, some quite elaborately detailed. The remaining two episodes are unique. One, a “Grizzly Bear” adventure, is essentially a story within a story; the second is a “Night Dance” episode that is not matched by other elements within the tale. Rather than recounting the story sequentially, I will briefly describe the individual episodes, then explain how they are pieced together to comprise the whole. ARROW MAKING Ishi opens his tale with a glimpse of Lizard making arrows, an activity that provides the background for the entire story. In some sense it is Lizard’s unflagging industry that serves as the story's thematic center. Other adventures — the various alarms and excursions that make up the “plot” — may come and go, but the arrow making is always there.” (It is something of a joke among those of us