Ishi's Brain by Orin Starn

Author:Orin Starn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

THE MAIDU GO TO WASHINGTON

After the Oroville Opportunity Bulletin reported the story, the news about the discovery of Ishi’s brain spread fast. It even made NBC’s Tonight Show. “Brain Found in Washington,” deadpanned host Jay Leno in his nightly spoof of the latest headlines. Although the story was buried inside the New York Times, Washington Post, and other East Coast papers, it made the front pages of California’s leading newspapers. “Academic Detectives Find the Long-Lost Brain of Ishi,” led the Los Angeles Times. The article detailed the investigation of U.C. San Francisco’s Nancy Rockafellar, then my find of the trove of letters leading to the Smithsonian and the missing brain. It was my few minutes in the spotlight. The phone rang for several days, with calls ranging from our local Durham Herald-Sun to the BBC and the Canadian Broadcasting Service.

Like Leno, some people saw humor in the idea of a mummified brain lost and found. If the search for the missing organ had a bit of a detective novel’s twists and turns, the revelation that a leading anthropologist had mailed the excised body part of a famous person across the country seemed straight out of a bad horror movie. The hostess on NPR’s Weekend Edition seemed bored when I spoke in our interview about Ishi and the devastation visited upon Native California in the nineteenth century—another droning, politically correct professor, I could almost hear her thinking. She perked up considerably, however, at the story of Hrdlika’s “reference brain collection”—and the idea of the museum warehouse as a proverbial mad scientist’s laboratory where pickled organs floated in tanks like tropical fish. “That’s great,” she chuckled.

Indians across the country began e-mailing me their reactions. Maurice Eben, a Nevada Paiute and the chairman of the National Congress of the American Indian, wrote to say how angry he was at Ishi’s white friends in San Francisco. From his standpoint, Kroeber and the others were the “uncivilized” ones. “It is a sad fact that the U.S. government found a need to take the brains and skulls from the battlefield, but to have known Ishi and to have allowed the removal for their purpose is demeaning and uncivilized on their part.” A San Diego woman thanked me for uncovering Ishi’s “desecration” and hoped the revelation would speed repatriation. Unidentified Indian bones in museum collections should be honored “with a decent mass burial at a national holocaust memorial,” she added. Aleš Hrdlika may have gathered bones to advance science, but these Indians considered his endeavor to be just more white arrogance and exploitation of Native America. They saw no humor at all in the fact that Ishi’s brain had ended up in a steel tank.

I also heard from whites who were moved by Ishi’s story. “I am almost 80 years old, 90% blind but somebody who has a ‘hero,’” one Maryland woman wrote. She related having admired Ishi ever since first reading Theodora Kroeber’s Ishi in Two Worlds back in 1964. A convict wrote from one of

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