Wild Men Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America

by Sackman, Douglas Cazaux

• ISBN13: 9780195178524
• ISBN10: 0195178521
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-01-19
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

When Ishi, "the last wild Indian," came out of hiding in August of 1911, he was quickly whisked away by train to San Francisco to meet Alfred Kroeber, one of the fathers of American anthropology. When Kroeber and Ishi came face to face, it was a momentous event, not only for each man, but for the cultures they represented. Each stood on the brink: one was in danger of losing something vital while the other was in danger of disappearing altogether. Ishi was a survivor, and viewed the bright lights of the big city with a mixture of awe and bemusement. What surprised everyone is how handily he adapted himself to the modern city while maintaining his sense of self and his culture. He and his people had ingeniously used everything they could get their hands on from whites to survive in hiding, and now Ishi was doing the same in San Francisco. The wild man was in fact doubly civilized--he had his own culture, and he opened himself up to that of modern America. Kroeber was professionally trained to document Ishi's culture, his civilization. What he didn't count on was how deeply working with the man would lead him to question his own profession and his civilization--how it would rekindle a wildness of his own. Though Ishi's story has been told before in film and fiction, Wild Men is the first book to focus on the depth of Ishi and Kroeber's friendship and to explore what their intertwined stories tell us about Indian survival in modern America and about America's fascination with the wild even as it was becoming ever-more urban and modern. Wild Men is about two individuals and two worlds intimately brought together in ways that turned out to be at once inspiring and tragic. Each man stood looking at the other from the opposite edge of a chasm: they reached out in the hope of keeping the other from falling in.

Author Biography

Douglas Cazaux Sackman is Professor of History at the University ofPuget Sound.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Prologue: One Small Step	p. 1
The Yahi in Three Worlds	p. 13
Genesis: The First World	p. 13
Genocide: The Second World	p. 16
Renaissance: The Third World	p. 44
The Anthropologist in Three Worlds	p. 55
Origins: New York City and Environs	p. 55
The University: Columbia and Anthropology	p. 64
The New World: San Francisco and Rekwoi	p. 75
"Worlds of Stuff"	p. 87
Wowunupo'mu tetna	p. 87
Oroville	p. 103
Making Tracks	p. 114
City Lights	p. 146
Nature Walks in the City and the Sierras	p. 180
The Call of the Wild	p. 208
Nature Men	p. 208
Photo Album and Scrapbook: Trip to "Ishi's Old Haunts" May 13-June 2, 1914	p. 215
Death Mask	p. 248
End of the Trail	p. 248
"Science Can Go to Hell"	p. 265
Epilogue: The Hearth of Prometheus and the Wilderness of Ishi	p. 286
Afterword: Google Earth, Earthquake Weather	p. 299
Notes	p. 327
Index	p. 355
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