June 29, 2023 • 49 mins
In 1911, a Native American man, the only member of his community to survive a genocide, encountered the new Anthropology department at The University of California, Berkeley. What happened next helped to define the ethical quandaries of the field and, in a strange turn, the history of science fiction. This episode: That story and the moral stakes of imagining the past and the future.
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin, The Last Archive, A History of Truth.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
When I was a kid, there were a few books
and movies that we watched all the time because my
dad taught them every year. He's a professor of business ethics,
just not the way you'd think. Instead of case studies
about business, he teaches stories about everything. In our house,
a story was never just about what she thought it
was about. It was about something else entirely. For instance,
(00:56):
if you ask most people to describe the film Blade Runner,
nine times out of ten they're going to tell you
it's a movie about Harrison Ford hunting robots. They might
mention he's struggling with the possibility that he is also
a robot. But if you ask my dad, he'd say, no,
what we have here is a film about the unethical
Tyrrell Corporation, the company that makes the robots. Same goes
(01:17):
for writing giants, a film some might say is about
surfing without realizing it's actually about leadership. And don't get
me started about the Country Bunny and the Little gold Shoes.
You thought that was a children's book. Oh No. The
problem with my dad, though, is he's usually right even
when he sounds totally wrong. This is particularly annoying to
my mom, but eventually you get used to it. One
(01:41):
of the big stories in the Dad canon for as
long as I can remember, is a science fiction story
called The Ones Who Walk Away from Omlas. It's by
Ursula k Legwinn, the science fiction writer with.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
A clamor of bills that set the swallows soaring. The
festival of Summer came to the city Omlas, right towered
by the sea.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
This story always struck me as a rare one for
my dad, because it seems pretty straightforward about what you think.
It's about a utopia.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
How can I tell you about the people of Omolas?
They were not naive and happy children, though their children
were in fact happy. But I wish I could describe
it better. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined
it as your own fancy bids.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
In the story, Legwen asks you to imagine the best
place you can this beautiful city by the sea, golden
in the light on a feast day in summer. Whatever
sounds best to you. There it is, But of course
things aren't what they seem.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Let me describe one more thing in a basement under
one of the beautiful public buildings of Omlass, or perhaps
in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes.
There's a room. It has one locked door and no window.
A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the
board's secondhand from a cobweb window somewhere across the cellar.
(03:05):
In the room, a child is sitting. It shuts its eyes,
but it knows the door. Door is locked, and nobody
will come. The door is always locked, and nobody ever comes,
except that sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and
a person or several people are there. One of them
(03:26):
may come in and kick the child to make it
stand up. The others never come close, but peer in
at it with frightened, disgusted eyes.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
This is the dark secret of Omilas. The child in
the basement. All the happiness in Omilas rests on that
kid's suffering. It's a thought experiment. Would it be worth it?
Speaker 4 (03:48):
They all know.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
It's there, all the people of Omolas, they all know
that it has to be there. They would like to
do something for the child. But if it were done
in that day and hour, all the prosperity and beauty
and delight of Omilas would wither and be destroyed. Those
are the terms.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
It's a very famous story taught in classrooms around the
world half a century after its publication, including my dad's,
which again was weird to me because, if ever there
was a story that's just about what you think, it's
about the ones who walk away from omelas, is it
now there's a story that's just about ethics right and wrong.
Your basic meat and potato stuff A pure thought experiment,
(04:37):
or that's what I thought, until I realized it wasn't
the thought experiment at all. Welcome to the Last Archive,
the show about how we know what we know, how
we used to know things, and why it seems sometimes
lately like we don't know anything at all anymore. I'm
Ben Mattapaffrey. This episode is about the story behind that
(05:02):
thought experiment, and that story starts a little over a
century ago in a small gold rush town in California.
On August twenty eighth, nineteen eleven, at sundown that night,
at dusk, at a slaughterhouse on the outskirts of town,
(05:25):
a man named Ad Kessler was changing out of his
work clothes.
Speaker 5 (05:29):
Now, I'll try to tell you as I remember it.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
It's pretty clear in my mind there was a young
boy who hung around Kessler's crew while they worked. That evening,
the kid was out in the corral and then he
saw something.
Speaker 5 (05:47):
He was frightened and he yelled to me.
Speaker 6 (05:51):
Ad.
Speaker 5 (05:52):
He says, there's a man here.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Kessler grabbed a meat hook and ran outside in his
long John's and riding boots. He thought maybe there was
a thief. But when he got to the corral, he
saw a part clothed, barefoot man, weakend and tired, leaning
against the fence. He tried to speak to the man
but got no answer.
Speaker 5 (06:13):
At that time, I could talk pretty good Spanish, and
I talked a bit Spanish, but to no response. I
used a little profanity. He didn't understand that either.
Speaker 7 (06:24):
Kessler was puzzled, so he called the sheriff and I.
Speaker 5 (06:30):
Told him, I, John, I've got something out here the
slaughter house. I think you should come out and investigate.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
The sheriff came. They handcuffed the man and they headed
to the jail. They put him in a padded cell.
Speaker 5 (06:46):
There he was all alone. He didn't have at least
idea of what was going to happen to him. Closed
the door, turned the key in it, and he stood
right behind them bars and looked in the morning. The
jailer was out sweeping off the steps, and I asked
(07:08):
to be sayst what happened to my boy last night?
He says he never slept a wink.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
This tape is from a talk Ad Kessler gave to
a high school class in nineteen seventy three. Big guy
with a crew cut talking to a bunch of board teens,
telling his big story, the one that's been punching his
meal ticket for sixty two years, because that moment of
encounter set in motion a whole series of events that
forever changed California. It's a story that's been told in
(07:41):
a lot of ways by a lot of different people,
but Kessler is pretty ornery about his version, and his
story matches the newspaper record.
Speaker 8 (07:49):
There is a.
Speaker 5 (07:50):
Book wrote by a lady, but it's not correct. What
I've just told you is the facts.
Speaker 9 (07:59):
As it were.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Word got out quick about the stranger who didn't speak
any language anyone recognized. There were sinceational stories in newspapers
across the state. They'd figured out the man was probably
an American Indian. The most plausible theory was that he
was the only survivor of a people who had been
wiped out by white settlers during and after the gold Rush,
(08:24):
killed by a genocide, though the word didn't yet exist,
and if it had, they wouldn't have used it, But
there is no other word for it. There had been
hundreds of thousands of American Indians in the land we
now know as California before the gold Rush. There were
only about twenty thousand by the turn of the century.
And this man's people were gone, all of them gone,
(08:46):
save apparently for one him.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
People had been looking for his group, his community for
some time. People knew that there were some Indigenous people
in the woods in that general area who they've speculated
were Yahis.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Andrew Garrett is a professor of linguistics at the University
of californ Ornia, Berkeley and directs the California Language Archive.
There because California, before Spanish, Mexican and American settlement was
full of languages, about ninety different ones, vastly different from
each other. I met Garrett in his office on campus
one day. There was a mountain of fresh mid terms
(09:27):
on the table and bits and pieces of a language
on the whiteboard.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
So there was this sense that they were out there
somewhere those people.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Garrett works on how languages change over time, so he's
often in the archives using notes produced by the earliest
anthropologists in California, and he often refers back to one
in particular, Alfred Kroeber, who founded the anthropology department at
Berkeley in nineteen eleven. Kroeber was working with a colleague
(09:56):
to document the languages and cultures of indigenous people in California,
especially those cultures which they believed to be vanishing. The
community of people who spoke a language Kroeber called Yahe
after its word for person, had lived near Oroville, but
the townspeople hadn't seen them for years. If the stranger
in the jail was the last member of the Yahi people,
(10:17):
the anthropologists felt they needed to reach him, so Krober
telegrammed ahead and his colleague got on a train north
to the Oraville jail, where the man had been held
for two days. By the time he arrived, the jail
was a scene. This was the biggest thing that happened
to Oroville since the gold Rush. People had been sending
in food and clothes, crowding around trying to get a
(10:39):
look at the man. The anthropologist made his way through
the crowd and up to the cell. He sat down
opposite the man and pulled out a vocabulary book full
of Yana words, a related language to the one he
thought the yah he might speak. One by one, He
read the words off the list, nothing and more nothing,
(11:00):
until he reached the Yana word for yellow pine. He
set it and touched the pine bed frame in the cell.
The man's face lit up a match, then more matches.
The man asked the anthropologist if he was a Yahi.
It was the community Kroger had been looking for. In
(11:21):
nineteen eleven. American Indians weren't legally US citizens. They were
treated like wards of this state. So Kroger asked what
later became known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs for
permission to take the man into custody. It came within days.
The anthropologist, a Yana interpreter named Batwi, and the man
boarded a train to Oakland. From there, they took the
(11:43):
ferry to San Francisco and then the trolley to the
Museum of Anthropology. They got there just before midnight.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
This was September nineteen eleven. They were kind of preparing
to open the Anthropology Museum to the public. Indian people
who came to visit often stayed there for some period
of time. There were always staff members who lived there.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
There were apartments in the museum, and the Yahi man
slept there. The next morning, Alfred Krober came to meet him.
Krober was in his thirties, quiet, strong, chin, full beard.
People came to call him the Dean of American anthropology.
He was a cultural relativist who stood against the mainstream
of anthropology, which had this kind of racialized evolutionary theory
(12:27):
that thought cultures progressed from what they considered to be
more primitive states to something that, of course resembled European civilization.
Krober believed other cultures were valid in their own right,
but he was also trying to make a name for
his department in his new museum. In Krober's view, every
person was a product of their culture, like a codex.
So I think that meeting this man was to him
(12:49):
like finding the Rosetta stone, except for one sticky fact.
The man was a person, not an artifact. That's the
challenge of all anthropology, studying someone without betraying their humanity.
Krober needed a name to call the man by, but
the man wouldn't share his name with p people he
(13:10):
just met, so Kroeber called him by a Yahi word
that meant man Ishi.
Speaker 4 (13:16):
Kerber he was never actually seemingly interested in present day cultures,
but only in former cultures, because the form only the
former cultures were uncontaminated by Europeans. So there's a way
in which like having only one person as a representative
of a culture is not problematic, because your goal is
just to find the exemplar of the pure culture. And
(13:38):
so I think from that perspective, the fantasy of Ishi
is that he's this pure exemplar, when actually, of course
he's just a person.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Yeshi moved into the museum, and soon after the work
of studying and preserving Yahi culture began. We'll be right
back over time. The anthropologist Alfred Kroeger got to know
Ishi's story, even though she didn't like to talk about
his past. It depressed him, and for good reason. His
(14:09):
hair was still burned short in mourning for his mother
and sister, who died some years before. He'd lived alone
in the canyons ever since then, and now he was
living in a museum in San Francisco.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
But he was asked, supposedly multiple times by people, did
he want to go back or did he want to
go somewhere else, And supposedly he always said no. It's
a kind of complicated question because they were The people
who are reporting this are all people who benefit from
him being happy where he was, you know. And well
(14:42):
they were not neutral people. They were his white friends
who you know, I think the story is good if
he wasn't a prisoner from their point of view.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Reportedly, she told agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs
through his Yana interpreter, quote, I will grow old here
and die in this house. He worked part time as
a janitor at the museum when it opened about a
month after his arrival. He was at the opening night
gala in a small back room. When people rehashed this
history now in a critical light, they say that Ishi
(15:13):
was a living exhibit stuck in the museum. Because he
soon began to do demonstrations of Yahie culture on Sundays,
he was a major draw. The San Francisco Examiner called
him creepily its most interesting exhibit. He'd show crafts like
making arrowheads, weaving baskets, starting fires, the things he made
(15:33):
the museum kept in its collection. Tens of thousands of
people came to those demonstrations over the course of the
next year, and that was more people in one place
than she had ever seen. Then there were all the
ancestral remains the Museum of Anthropology kept. He'd locked his
door each night, but he had some agency within a
(15:56):
limited band. Gerald Visner, the writer, scholar, and member of
the Chippawa tribe, has written a lot about how Yishi
had an act of role in shaping his situation. Visner
calls it his survivanceval and resistance, because is she seems
to have taken most everything in stride. He made some money,
(16:16):
memorized the street cars, and began to make his way
around town. He liked to go to the movies and
made friends around the city. Later people would remember him fondly,
like a little boy who said Ishi had made him
a bow and arrow and taught him how to shoot lizards,
made him a net for catching minnows and rabbits skin moccasins.
The newspapers told Ishi's story as if he time traveled
(16:39):
from the Stone Age to the modern world, like Whenihi
walked barefoot into a vaudeville show at the Orpheum Theater
and supposedly called it Heaven for white people. Or the
day she saw a plane in the sky and asked
in a kind of amused way if a white man
were flying it. He is exactly forty thousand years behind
the times. One journalist wrote, some writers were disappointed to
(17:01):
see their romantic fantasy, the uncontaminated man who never told
a lie, smoking cigars and wearing shoes. It was absurd
to me. It seems like he had apted unbelievably quickly.
I mean, he had completely reinvented his life, and he
was probably in his fifties. He was curious to try
new things and willing to set limits. Once a reporter
(17:22):
asked him to put on animal skins for a photograph,
and he said he wouldn't because he didn't see anyone
else wearing them.
Speaker 6 (17:29):
He seems to land in this particular location with a
kind of intelligence and consciousness right of the situation that
people around him don't necessarily understand that he has. And
that makes him, you know, crafty and intelligent and wiy
(17:50):
and smart and in all in all kinds of ways.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
That's Philip Delauria, a professor of history at Harvard. He
specializes in Native American and American studies and is of
Dakota descent. He wrote a book I love called Playing Indian,
which is about how white Americans navigated national identity and
their feelings about modernity through a kind of Indian cosplay.
It's why the country was so fascinated by Isshi.
Speaker 6 (18:17):
It's why he's such an astonishing figure. He's not an
astonishing figure because he survives and comes out of the
woods and ends up in a museum. I think he's
an astonishing figure because of the ways in which he
sees his situation and acts within it.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
To most people, Ishi was just a symbol, a tragic fantasy,
not just the last Yahi, but the last wild Indian.
To white Americans, it represented the triumph of European civilization
over Indigenous America. Inevitable, the kind of thing you wept
over only once victory was assured. Anthropology was a kind
(18:53):
of rearguard action, salvaging what could be salvage, to use
their term in a sort of apologetic way. But some
of what's complicated here is that the things they preserved
were kept in institutions like Berkeley, which is on land
that was taken from the alone people. Anthropologists worked within
that paradox, but they weren't given to ask questions about
(19:15):
why these cultures were disappearing or what might be done
to stop it. The idea that it was already too late,
it was baked into the work. The field was a
puzzle box, just like Krober. He thought Eugenix was ridiculous,
but he was also the head of a department that
collected human remains from tribal grave sites. In one article,
(19:36):
he calls you Shet a man in every sense, and
then he compares him to a puppy Krober.
Speaker 6 (19:42):
And all the generations that surround him and that came
after him, you know, they're all the errors of this
kind of you know, this kind of doubled consciousness of
the anthropologist of the time. You know, it feels like
you're making a very you know, progressive kind of move
while at the same time you're looking at them as
objects of study. You've got a whole kind of primitivist
(20:04):
veneer that's hard to get away from, you know. So
they couldn't help. These folks couldn't help but be contradictory,
you know, in their consciousness about how they were viewing
Native people as vestiges and remnants of these cultures the past,
and yet as opportunities for them to think in progressive
and you know, theoretically enlightened kinds of ways.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Is She was on stage during those demonstrations at the museum,
but so was Krober. They were both performing something is
She was playing Indian, Krober was playing anthropologists. Yes, she
was making the most of a bad situation. But he
barely spoke English, and the anthropologists barely spoke Yahi. So
(20:46):
this story, the way I at least can tell it,
it's as much about the people around Yishi as it
is about the man himself. And in the style of
my own family, it's about the meaning behind the story
they told about him, the ethics of their relationships, the
choices they made, and the ones they were about to make.
(21:09):
Krober and his crew were working with Ishi on setting
down what they could of the Ahi culture. They recorded
him telling stories on wax cylinders over fifty hours of
Is she telling Yahi tales?
Speaker 10 (21:22):
Oh the work?
Speaker 2 (21:26):
That's his voice, telling the story of the wood ducks,
about a man who'd been turned into a wood duck
looking for a wife. So wax cylinder recordings were hard
to make, but Ishi spent seven hours telling this story
(21:46):
across over one hundred different cylinders. It was one of
the first stories he told, and according to the anthropologist
Orin Starn, who wrote a great book about this history,
wood Ducks was at that point the longest recorded performance
of all time. It took a huge amount of stamina.
At one point, one of Krober's colleagues went to take
a phone call. When he got back, she told him
(22:09):
it would be better they kept working without breaks. He
was preserving a body of knowledge he knew would be
lost otherwise. But he also had things he wouldn't reveal,
just as he never revealed his name.
Speaker 6 (22:22):
I think when you dig down into it, it's exactly
these kinds of things, of like, I know what you're doing, right,
the sort of sense where the indigenous person you know says, no,
I know exactly what you're doing, and I'm going to
act according to my own best rights and interests in
relation to what we're doing, so that what you're doing
becomes what we are doing together. Right. So there's an
(22:43):
insistence upon sort of active agency. It seems to me
like there's there's a fair bit of evidence for the
strategic use of anthropologists.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
The anthropologists met with Esch often. They worked hours and
hours together. By this point they figured out how to
communicate to a degree, and they were, by all accounts,
friendly and easy.
Speaker 7 (23:02):
With each other.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Is She would come over for dinner at Krover's, and
from everything I've read, it seems that he and Kroger
crew clothes. Ishi had a community of Berkeley acquaintances who
claimed to think of him as a friend, including a
man named Saxton Pope, a star surgeon at the University
of California. He and Ishi hung out a lot. They'd
go hunting with bows and arrows together, kind of like
(23:26):
a grown up version for Pope of playing Indian. Ishi
would visit Pope in the hospital. People thought he might
have been a healer in his past life because he'd
sit with sick patients and help the nurses clean their tools,
but he disapproved of how the hospital handled its dead,
cutting people open for autopsies. Ishi had a life in
San Francisco, but in the summer of nineteen fourteen, Crober,
(23:50):
his anthropologist colleague, and Saxton Pope proposed a trip back
to the land Ischi was from. Ishi was worried about
going back to that haunted place, but either he changed
his mind or they wore him down. They took the
train back up to the Yahi country where he'd hidden
alone for years, and they made camp.
Speaker 8 (24:12):
It was on the left bank of rapid down hill Spree,
which I assume.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Was Dear Queen Saxton, Pope's son Saxton Jr. He went
on the trip. Years later, someone came to record his memories.
I think he must be reading a recollection.
Speaker 7 (24:28):
He wrote.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
It's a little stiff, but sometimes he laughs and sounds
to me like a kid again.
Speaker 8 (24:34):
I was so, I thought. Chef with the group. It's
true that is She was in high good spirits on
the trip.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
They hunted and cooked together, and they took a lot
of photos, many of them posed with is She once
again playing Indian. They wanted him to recreate an ancient
life that really he himself had never experienced, like this
one photo of Vish hunting the deer.
Speaker 8 (25:00):
It will be noted that the deer from which he
is retrieving an arrow is propped up from behind with
a stick. And I did that.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
It's all a bit of a mess, cringey in the
un self conscious way. They were asking Ishi to reenact
his past. They were idealizing the time before white people
had made contact with the Yahi. It was one of
the worst impulses of this type of anthropology, but of
course it was more complicated than that too. In some
of the other photos, there's a real affection. They lie
(25:36):
out at night in sleeping bags, swim in the river,
hunt together. The real historical value of the trip wasn't
the photos, but rather the maps of the land where
she had grown up, the place names for the places
where he'd lived and watched his family die.
Speaker 8 (25:50):
What did not strike me at the time, and unexpected
certainly does now, how after such a life and such
early experiences he could ever have crusted a white man again.
His adjustment, however, was not without its complexities. On his
(26:11):
explosions into the Yanna cut feat on several occasions he
heard his mother and sister calling where no other member
of the party could hear, and presumably they weren't there.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
They got back from the trip a little under a
month later, and life in San Francisco resumed its regular
rhythms for them all Kerber left on sabbatical, eventually landing
in New York, but somewhere in that time she became
visibly ill. It was tuberculosis, a disease to which American
(26:44):
Indians had no resistance. Five years after his arrest, is
she was dying. Kerber knew that when he did there
would be talk of an autopsy. That's what often happened
when someone died at the hospital. But in Hi's case,
there would be people who are especially interested, who thought
the final act of studying Yahia culture would be to
(27:06):
look inside his body.
Speaker 7 (27:08):
Saxton Pope thought it much so.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Kroeber wrote a letter to the director of the museum
on March twenty fourth, nineteen sixteen, a furious and now
famous message. He wrote, as to the disposal of the body,
I must ask you, as my personal representative, to yield
nothing at all under any circumstances. If there is any
talk of the interests of science, then say for me
that science can go to hell. We propose to stand
(27:33):
by our friends. Besides, I cannot believe that any scientific
value is materially involved. We have hundreds of Indian skeletons
that nobody ever comes to study. The day after Kroger
sent that letter y she died, and then Pope had
an autopsy performed. They cremated is She's body afterwards, but
(27:56):
before they did, they removed his brain and they preserved it.
When Krober returned from a sabbatical, it was waiting for
him like a sick taunt, the physical container of all
that he'd been trying to prize FISHI. But it represented
something else too. Krober knew that she hated the way
(28:17):
anthropologists kept human remains in the museum. He now had
the chance to cremate the last part of Ishi's body
and reunite it with the rest of him, to do
the last right thing in a bad situation, but he didn't.
He sent Ishi's brain to the Smithsonian.
Speaker 6 (28:39):
This is the thing about this story, right is you
know this kind of this kind of final betrayal you
know from Krober, really changes the story up. You don't
have to do what Kroeber did. You see the pictures
of them and they're you know, doing these things, and
it looks like a kind of partnership. It looks like
a potential friendship, It looks like this kind of relationship,
(29:01):
and you have to think, well, Okay, it probably was
at some level. But if at the end of the day,
you know, Kroeber is able to continue this kind of
prectice of dehumanization, you know, how does that? How can
you look back at all of these sort of images
of them together, sort of accounted them together, you know,
and see it in the same light. I just don't
think you you know, I just don't think you can.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
What's hard about this history is there is no reliable narrator.
It's always more myth than fact. All the people setting
down the accounts. We have a Vish in San Francisco.
We're trying to see him as a record of his culture,
to practice pure anthropology, even if they thought of him
as a friend. That was how they told the story.
A man and a culture preserved. But that story left
(29:48):
a whole lot out. That's why I think Krober's daughter
retold it. She'd been born a Krober, but when she
got married, she took her husband's last name and added
it to the end of her own ursula croeber Legwin.
We'll be right back.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Well, I want to start out with a serious question
to you all, is what on earth are we all
doing here?
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Ursula Kerber was born thirteen years after she died. She
was the fourth child, the youngest, and the only girl
in the bunch. She grew up spunky in a loud,
boisterous house of academics and academics to be. She was
very close to her mother, a lip smart woman named
Theodora who seemed like she could see into her kid's souls.
Her father, Alfred, looked outwards. Ursula thought of him as
(30:46):
a kind of wizard. He'd tell her creation myths and legends,
stories about other worlds. Every story could be told, except one,
a family one, the one about e she and her father.
Speaker 10 (31:00):
She always said that it wasn't brought up when she
was a kid.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Julie Phillips is a writer, specifically the writer Ursula Lagwyn
handpicked to be her biographer.
Speaker 10 (31:11):
She grew up understanding the value of cultural relativism, of
the notion that the culture that you're immersed in is
not the only culture, and that there are always other
ways of doing things, And she talks about how liberating
that was for her to know.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
That anthropology was the backdrop to Legwin's life. But as
a kid, she wasn't reading textbooks. She was reading science fiction.
In the nineteen thirties and forties, sci fi was not
exactly held in high regard to her, though it probably
read like the best part of her dad's stories, exotic, exciting,
(31:50):
especially to a kid who never quite fit in.
Speaker 10 (31:54):
She said, you know, in high school, I was in
exile in this Siberia of adolescent social mores. In the library,
I was home free.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Legwin always wanted to be a writer. After college, she
was writing poems and realist novels, and it was around
that time, in the late nineteen fifties, that she first
heard the story Avishi. Her dad kept getting asked to
write about it all, but he wouldn't. Instead, her mom,
Theodora did. Her book was published in nineteen sixty one,
(32:26):
and it was called Ishi in Two Worlds, A Biography
of the Last Wild Indian in North America. Ursula Legwin
always hated that subtitle because she said she wasn't wild.
He came out of a more deeply rooted culture than
the one he went into. But the book became a
big bestseller. It's been in print since the sixties. It
sold over a million copies and been translated into a
(32:49):
slew of languages, and it added a whole new dimension
to Ischi's story, the fact of genocide. It was, for
its time and author revolutionary, but it was also an
attempt to transform that pain into a healing narrative, a
salve for white liberal guilt. Legwinn talked about learning that
story late in her life in a documentaryalled The Worlds
(33:10):
of Versula Legwin.
Speaker 11 (33:12):
My mother's book opened many people's eyes, including my own,
to the appalling history of the white conquest of California.
It's kind of hard to admit that your people did
something awful when I absorbed something like that. The way
I handle it is probably too put it into a novel.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
Legwin was famously evasive about where her ideas came from
author's privilege. But I think that the revelation of Eshi's
story is at the foundation of her career because right
before her mother's book on Yeshi came out, her father died,
and at that exact moment she ditched her realist novels
and she started to write sci fi. Her mother began
(33:59):
working on a young person's version of the Eshi story,
a lightly fictionalized account which a lot of fourth graders
in California have probably had to read over the last
half century. Legwin read drafts and gave notes, and meanwhile,
she'd begun to work on her own first published novel,
a book called Rocanan's World.
Speaker 10 (34:17):
She's just had a baby, her first child, and she
has really bad cabin fever, and I think that she
just needed to get out of the house. Imaginatively. So
Rocannon is her first anthropologist here, and she sends him
to explore a planet.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
The anthropologist narrator was one of Legwin's first major innovations
in science fiction. It allowed her to smuggle a whole
set of big ideas from academic anthropology into science fiction,
because science fiction has always been sort of anthropological in
the worst way. Manifest destiny in outer space, like Flash
Gordon encountering aliens on the planet Mango, I can.
Speaker 9 (34:59):
Only account for them as being a seller from the
original race thousands of years ago and having a numerous
planets on the Solar system.
Speaker 8 (35:08):
Primitive, all right.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
It was the exact same kind of story the white
settlers in California told themselves in Oraville in eighteen forty nine,
the same story white American kids were learning from their
favorite science fiction difference as threat until people began to
notice a changing guard in science fiction, including Legwin's writing
and her work as a public figure speaking at events
(35:30):
all over the world like Ossicon.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
Do you people realize by the way that, to my
three children, science fiction is not a low form of
literature written by little contemptible hacks. It's the kind of
thing your own mother does.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
She was raising three kids, living in Oregon. When the
kids were at school, she'd write. She'd start out in
September with a premise and finish a first draft by
March to polish off before summer vacation began. She'd found
a set of ideas, and in nineteen sixty six, five
years after her mom's book on he she came out
the floodgates opened. A Wizard of Earth, See the Left
(36:09):
Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and
The Word for World as Forest are some of the
most famous science fiction books of all time, and they
were all written in the ten year period that began
in nineteen sixty six, and I think all of them
are dealing with those themes from anthropology, the things that
were left out of the first telling of the Issy story.
(36:29):
I don't think it's a coincidence that during that same stretch,
an American Indian civil rights movement was gaining steam. They
were responding to a new federal Indian policy in the
nineteen fifties known as Termination. After World War Two, the
government had wanted to end its recognition of tribes, move
them off reservations, and stop honoring its treaties to assimilate
(36:50):
American Indians into the mainstream. Alfred Kober had worked with
tribes on court cases early in those years. American Indians
responded with what came to be known as the Red
Power movement. One of their most famous actions came in
nineteen sixty nine, when a group of American Indians occupied Alcatraz,
the island prison in the Bay Area.
Speaker 9 (37:10):
We will approach a set at Alcatraz Island for twenty four
dollars in glass beads and red cloth. We know that
twenty four dollars of trade goods is more than was
paid when Manhattan Island was sold, but we know that
land values have risen over the years.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
The occupation lasted until nineteen seventy one. LeGuin was watching
as the script flipped on an entire history. Her family
had borne direct witness to, and she was writing her
most influential books at that exact moment.
Speaker 10 (37:37):
She said that a lot of my protagonists are alone
of their kind among people of another kind. This is
Ishi's situation, also the situation of a field anthropologist, also
the situation, or so it seems to me, of most adolescents,
most intellectuals, most artists. I a stranger and afraid in
a world I never.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
Need once you start looking for it. The traces of
Ishi's story are everywhere in le Guin's work, but the
really clear one about her father ANII. As the anthropologist
James Clifford is noted, is the word for world is forest.
People think of it as a novel written in protests
of the Vietnam War, also part of the basis for
(38:18):
the film Avatar. But it mirrors the concerns of the
American Indian movement. And it's profoundly about one of the
central tensions in anthropology, between being an objective observer or
an active activist participant.
Speaker 11 (38:32):
And I suppose it's not too surprising in the anthropologist's
door to talk about two cultures bumping up against each
other that don't understand.
Speaker 7 (38:42):
He said.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
In the book, Earth has run out of lumber, so
they colonize a forest planet called Eths, She populated by
an alien race of gentle tree people descended from humans.
An anthropologist embeds with the colonizing force. He makes friends
with one of the aliens, and together they make a
careful record of Ethschian culture and spend hours working on
(39:05):
a dictionary of the native language together. But while the
anthropologist working on recording the culture, the colonizing force rapes,
pillages and burns the people in the planet. It would
be better if I had never known you, the alien
tells the anthropologist. LeGuin writes quote, he was not in
the anthropologist's nature to think what can I do? Character
(39:28):
and training disposed him not to interfere in other men's business.
He preferred to be enlightened rather than to enlighten, to
seek facts rather than the truth. But even the most
unmissionary soul, unless he pretends he has no emotions, is
sometimes faced with a choice between commission and omission. What
are they doing abruptly becomes what are we doing? And
(39:51):
then what must I do?
Speaker 10 (39:55):
It seems to me that she was commenting on her
father's situation, and it seems to me that she would
not have admitted even to herself that she was commenting
on that situations.
Speaker 7 (40:06):
And so clear though it feels so direct.
Speaker 10 (40:10):
Yeah, I think it is.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
In the end of the Word for worlds Forest, the
anthropologist dies in an alien raid, but his work saves
the planet. It leads to the end of the colony
and freedom for its indigenous people. But in reality, Legwynton
must have known that the situation is never that easily resolved,
and so I think it left the more interesting work
for the year after the Word for World is Forest.
(40:35):
That year began with a group of American Indian Movement
and Iglala Lakota activists occupying Wounded Knee in a high
profile protest, and it was the year La Gwynn published
one of her most famous stories, another story about the
dynamic between yes she and her father, The.
Speaker 10 (40:51):
Really obvious story where she asks questions about her father's legacy.
Is the ones who walk away from Omlas.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
Omlas, the story my dad loves about the utopia that
depends on that kid in the basement, the one that's
about what you think it's about, except.
Speaker 10 (41:12):
It's not Omolas is us omilas is. You know, every
culture everywhere in a lot of ways, but it is
you know, it maps quite well onto European cultures in California,
which exist and thrive. You know, in the aftermath of genosime.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
In Amalas, le Guinn tells you to imagine your own utopia,
but she's also describing hers, and I think she's describing
the Bay area. Here she is again reading from it.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls,
between old moss grown gardens and under avenues of trees,
past great parks and public buildings. Processions moved far off
to the north and west. The mountain stood up half
encircling Omlas on her bay. The air of morning was
so clear that the snow still crowned the eighteen peaks
(42:11):
burned with white gold fire across the miles of sunlit
air under the dark blue of the sky.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
The person in the room in the public buildings of
Omolas is she in the room in the San Francisco
Museum of Anthropology. He was crafty and creative. He made
a new life for himself, but he never should have
had to. And the tens of thousands of people who
saw him in the museum, they knew what his presence
there meant, why he was there, what had been lost,
(42:37):
the costs that had been paid for, all the remains
of the cultures filling that building in the city by
the bay.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
Sometimes also a man or woman much older, falls silent
for a day or two and then leaves home. These
people go out into the street and walk down the
street alone. They keep walking, and they walk straight out
of the city of Omilas through the beautiful gates they
go on. They leave Omolas, walk ahead into the darkness,
(43:04):
and they do not come back. The place they go to, Howards,
is a place even less imaginable to most of us
than the city of Happiness. I cannot describe it at all.
It's possible that it doesn't exist, but they seem to
know where they're going. The ones who walk away from Omanas.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
The two choices in the story are stay or walk away.
But Legwin didn't neither. She kept coming back to the
same place and talking about it as if it were
another planet, talking about what was really going on there.
I think in the hopes that if she made it
strange enough, people would be able to see finally the
(43:49):
world around them.
Speaker 6 (43:50):
It feels like every generation is trying to escape the
generation before and the generation before that, and you know,
always unsuccessfully, right, I mean always with partial success.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Philip Deloria, again historian of Native American and American history,
but also the son of one of the leading figures
in the Red Past movement, Vindaloria Junior, the intellectual lawyer
and member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe who came
up with the term Red Power and famously thought very
little of anthropologists. Here he is in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 3 (44:24):
They continued to act as if the only valid Indians
were the first Indians that one of the anthropologists ran acrossed.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Leguinn was trying to escape her past without disowning it,
to keep working it over and reworking it. She did
not do it perfectly, but she tried. Her fiction was
one of the pathways the ideas of the Red Power
movement traveled to reach the mainstream. She helped pave the
way for reimagining the future, and she created new stories
(44:54):
to hold in the back of your mind if you
should ever find yourself in the corral at some slaughterhouse
in the future, looking at a person you don't understand,
trying to bridge the gap between two worlds. Ursula Crober
Legwin's writing changed science fiction, expanded the boundaries of what
could be imagined with huge moral imagination and empathy. But
(45:18):
there have been new futures hidden inside her father's work
that he didn't imagine either, because she was, of course
not the last. American Indian and tribal identity was more
complex and overlapped and long lasting than the turn of
the century anthropologists realized, and so a new generation of
American Indians in California are pulling the work their ancestors
(45:39):
did with the anthropologists at Berkeley out from the archives
and reclaiming that knowledge. Ishi's story had an unexpected future too.
In the late nineteen nineties, a mad man named Art Angle,
the anthropologist or In Starn and historian Nancy Rockefeller went
looking for Hi's brain, even when it was said to
(46:00):
be lost destroyed. But they kept looking for years until
they found it in a tank in an archive at
the Smithsonian. They got is She's brained back and buried
it with the rest of his remains on his ancestral
land in an undisclosed place. It was a big story
once again, and it became a rallying cry for a
movement to repatriate native remains from collections around the world.
(46:24):
In twenty twenty one, in response to activism on campus,
Berkeley took Crober's name off the building that houses the
department he founded, but they have been slow to repatriate
the many ancestral remains still in their collection. Meanwhile, one
hundred and twelve years after she turned up at that slaughterhouse,
no one's any closer to some essential truth about his story.
(46:46):
I asked Lauria about Legwin's work telling and retelling, excavating
that story's meaning.
Speaker 6 (46:52):
And you can see yourself trying to escape some of
those things, which are negative possibilities, always unsuccessfully, you know,
And yet because you're conscious and you're aware of them,
you're dealing with them, perhaps writing five page short stories, right,
you know. I mean, so you're trying to come to terms,
never fully adequately, but you know the fact that you're
(47:12):
trying is actually probably worth something.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
You have to try, even if you can never escape
the past, kind of like how you never quite escape
your parents, Which is why I guess I've just told
you a story that seems like it's about one thing,
when really it's about something else.
Speaker 7 (47:32):
Entirely.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
The Last Archive is written and hosted by Me Ben Nataphaffrey.
It's produced by me and Lucy Sullivan and edited by
Sophie Crane. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking on
this episode by Arthur Gomberts. Sound design by Jake Gorsky
and Lucy Sullivan. Our executive producers are Sophie Crane and
(48:05):
Jill Lapourt. Thanks also to Julia Barton, Pushkin's executive editor.
Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of stell
Wagon Symphonet. Many of our sound effects are from Harry
Jannette Junior in the Star Ganette Foundation Special Thanks to
Andrew Garrett and his upcoming book, The Unnaming of Croper
Hal Thanks also to Laura n Ader and the University
(48:27):
of Oregon Special Collections and University Archives. The Ones Who
Walk Away from Omolas by Ursula k Legwin is used
by permission of Curtis Brown Limited, Copyright nineteen seventy three.
All rights reserved. For a bibliography, further reading, and a
transcript and teaching guide to this episode, head to the
Last Archive dot com. The Last Archive is a production
(48:50):
of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show. Consider subscribing
to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content and ad free listening
across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look
for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at
pushkin dot fm, and please sign up for our newsletter
at pushkin dot fm Slash Newsletter. Find more Pushkin podcasts,
(49:11):
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Speaker 7 (49:16):
I'm Ben Mattahaffrey.
Pushkin, The Last Archive, A History of Truth.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
When I was a kid, there were a few books
and movies that we watched all the time because my
dad taught them every year. He's a professor of business ethics,
just not the way you'd think. Instead of case studies
about business, he teaches stories about everything. In our house,
a story was never just about what she thought it
was about. It was about something else entirely. For instance,
(00:56):
if you ask most people to describe the film Blade Runner,
nine times out of ten they're going to tell you
it's a movie about Harrison Ford hunting robots. They might
mention he's struggling with the possibility that he is also
a robot. But if you ask my dad, he'd say, no,
what we have here is a film about the unethical
Tyrrell Corporation, the company that makes the robots. Same goes
(01:17):
for writing giants, a film some might say is about
surfing without realizing it's actually about leadership. And don't get
me started about the Country Bunny and the Little gold Shoes.
You thought that was a children's book. Oh No. The
problem with my dad, though, is he's usually right even
when he sounds totally wrong. This is particularly annoying to
my mom, but eventually you get used to it. One
(01:41):
of the big stories in the Dad canon for as
long as I can remember, is a science fiction story
called The Ones Who Walk Away from Omlas. It's by
Ursula k Legwinn, the science fiction writer with.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
A clamor of bills that set the swallows soaring. The
festival of Summer came to the city Omlas, right towered
by the sea.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
This story always struck me as a rare one for
my dad, because it seems pretty straightforward about what you think.
It's about a utopia.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
How can I tell you about the people of Omolas?
They were not naive and happy children, though their children
were in fact happy. But I wish I could describe
it better. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined
it as your own fancy bids.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
In the story, Legwen asks you to imagine the best
place you can this beautiful city by the sea, golden
in the light on a feast day in summer. Whatever
sounds best to you. There it is, But of course
things aren't what they seem.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Let me describe one more thing in a basement under
one of the beautiful public buildings of Omlass, or perhaps
in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes.
There's a room. It has one locked door and no window.
A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the
board's secondhand from a cobweb window somewhere across the cellar.
(03:05):
In the room, a child is sitting. It shuts its eyes,
but it knows the door. Door is locked, and nobody
will come. The door is always locked, and nobody ever comes,
except that sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and
a person or several people are there. One of them
(03:26):
may come in and kick the child to make it
stand up. The others never come close, but peer in
at it with frightened, disgusted eyes.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
This is the dark secret of Omilas. The child in
the basement. All the happiness in Omilas rests on that
kid's suffering. It's a thought experiment. Would it be worth it?
Speaker 4 (03:48):
They all know.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
It's there, all the people of Omolas, they all know
that it has to be there. They would like to
do something for the child. But if it were done
in that day and hour, all the prosperity and beauty
and delight of Omilas would wither and be destroyed. Those
are the terms.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
It's a very famous story taught in classrooms around the
world half a century after its publication, including my dad's,
which again was weird to me because, if ever there
was a story that's just about what you think, it's
about the ones who walk away from omelas, is it
now there's a story that's just about ethics right and wrong.
Your basic meat and potato stuff A pure thought experiment,
(04:37):
or that's what I thought, until I realized it wasn't
the thought experiment at all. Welcome to the Last Archive,
the show about how we know what we know, how
we used to know things, and why it seems sometimes
lately like we don't know anything at all anymore. I'm
Ben Mattapaffrey. This episode is about the story behind that
(05:02):
thought experiment, and that story starts a little over a
century ago in a small gold rush town in California.
On August twenty eighth, nineteen eleven, at sundown that night,
at dusk, at a slaughterhouse on the outskirts of town,
(05:25):
a man named Ad Kessler was changing out of his
work clothes.
Speaker 5 (05:29):
Now, I'll try to tell you as I remember it.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
It's pretty clear in my mind there was a young
boy who hung around Kessler's crew while they worked. That evening,
the kid was out in the corral and then he
saw something.
Speaker 5 (05:47):
He was frightened and he yelled to me.
Speaker 6 (05:51):
Ad.
Speaker 5 (05:52):
He says, there's a man here.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Kessler grabbed a meat hook and ran outside in his
long John's and riding boots. He thought maybe there was
a thief. But when he got to the corral, he
saw a part clothed, barefoot man, weakend and tired, leaning
against the fence. He tried to speak to the man
but got no answer.
Speaker 5 (06:13):
At that time, I could talk pretty good Spanish, and
I talked a bit Spanish, but to no response. I
used a little profanity. He didn't understand that either.
Speaker 7 (06:24):
Kessler was puzzled, so he called the sheriff and I.
Speaker 5 (06:30):
Told him, I, John, I've got something out here the
slaughter house. I think you should come out and investigate.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
The sheriff came. They handcuffed the man and they headed
to the jail. They put him in a padded cell.
Speaker 5 (06:46):
There he was all alone. He didn't have at least
idea of what was going to happen to him. Closed
the door, turned the key in it, and he stood
right behind them bars and looked in the morning. The
jailer was out sweeping off the steps, and I asked
(07:08):
to be sayst what happened to my boy last night?
He says he never slept a wink.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
This tape is from a talk Ad Kessler gave to
a high school class in nineteen seventy three. Big guy
with a crew cut talking to a bunch of board teens,
telling his big story, the one that's been punching his
meal ticket for sixty two years, because that moment of
encounter set in motion a whole series of events that
forever changed California. It's a story that's been told in
(07:41):
a lot of ways by a lot of different people,
but Kessler is pretty ornery about his version, and his
story matches the newspaper record.
Speaker 8 (07:49):
There is a.
Speaker 5 (07:50):
Book wrote by a lady, but it's not correct. What
I've just told you is the facts.
Speaker 9 (07:59):
As it were.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Word got out quick about the stranger who didn't speak
any language anyone recognized. There were sinceational stories in newspapers
across the state. They'd figured out the man was probably
an American Indian. The most plausible theory was that he
was the only survivor of a people who had been
wiped out by white settlers during and after the gold Rush,
(08:24):
killed by a genocide, though the word didn't yet exist,
and if it had, they wouldn't have used it, But
there is no other word for it. There had been
hundreds of thousands of American Indians in the land we
now know as California before the gold Rush. There were
only about twenty thousand by the turn of the century.
And this man's people were gone, all of them gone,
(08:46):
save apparently for one him.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
People had been looking for his group, his community for
some time. People knew that there were some Indigenous people
in the woods in that general area who they've speculated
were Yahis.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Andrew Garrett is a professor of linguistics at the University
of californ Ornia, Berkeley and directs the California Language Archive.
There because California, before Spanish, Mexican and American settlement was
full of languages, about ninety different ones, vastly different from
each other. I met Garrett in his office on campus
one day. There was a mountain of fresh mid terms
(09:27):
on the table and bits and pieces of a language
on the whiteboard.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
So there was this sense that they were out there
somewhere those people.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Garrett works on how languages change over time, so he's
often in the archives using notes produced by the earliest
anthropologists in California, and he often refers back to one
in particular, Alfred Kroeber, who founded the anthropology department at
Berkeley in nineteen eleven. Kroeber was working with a colleague
(09:56):
to document the languages and cultures of indigenous people in California,
especially those cultures which they believed to be vanishing. The
community of people who spoke a language Kroeber called Yahe
after its word for person, had lived near Oroville, but
the townspeople hadn't seen them for years. If the stranger
in the jail was the last member of the Yahi people,
(10:17):
the anthropologists felt they needed to reach him, so Krober
telegrammed ahead and his colleague got on a train north
to the Oraville jail, where the man had been held
for two days. By the time he arrived, the jail
was a scene. This was the biggest thing that happened
to Oroville since the gold Rush. People had been sending
in food and clothes, crowding around trying to get a
(10:39):
look at the man. The anthropologist made his way through
the crowd and up to the cell. He sat down
opposite the man and pulled out a vocabulary book full
of Yana words, a related language to the one he
thought the yah he might speak. One by one, He
read the words off the list, nothing and more nothing,
(11:00):
until he reached the Yana word for yellow pine. He
set it and touched the pine bed frame in the cell.
The man's face lit up a match, then more matches.
The man asked the anthropologist if he was a Yahi.
It was the community Kroger had been looking for. In
(11:21):
nineteen eleven. American Indians weren't legally US citizens. They were
treated like wards of this state. So Kroger asked what
later became known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs for
permission to take the man into custody. It came within days.
The anthropologist, a Yana interpreter named Batwi, and the man
boarded a train to Oakland. From there, they took the
(11:43):
ferry to San Francisco and then the trolley to the
Museum of Anthropology. They got there just before midnight.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
This was September nineteen eleven. They were kind of preparing
to open the Anthropology Museum to the public. Indian people
who came to visit often stayed there for some period
of time. There were always staff members who lived there.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
There were apartments in the museum, and the Yahi man
slept there. The next morning, Alfred Krober came to meet him.
Krober was in his thirties, quiet, strong, chin, full beard.
People came to call him the Dean of American anthropology.
He was a cultural relativist who stood against the mainstream
of anthropology, which had this kind of racialized evolutionary theory
(12:27):
that thought cultures progressed from what they considered to be
more primitive states to something that, of course resembled European civilization.
Krober believed other cultures were valid in their own right,
but he was also trying to make a name for
his department in his new museum. In Krober's view, every
person was a product of their culture, like a codex.
So I think that meeting this man was to him
(12:49):
like finding the Rosetta stone, except for one sticky fact.
The man was a person, not an artifact. That's the
challenge of all anthropology, studying someone without betraying their humanity.
Krober needed a name to call the man by, but
the man wouldn't share his name with p people he
(13:10):
just met, so Kroeber called him by a Yahi word
that meant man Ishi.
Speaker 4 (13:16):
Kerber he was never actually seemingly interested in present day cultures,
but only in former cultures, because the form only the
former cultures were uncontaminated by Europeans. So there's a way
in which like having only one person as a representative
of a culture is not problematic, because your goal is
just to find the exemplar of the pure culture. And
(13:38):
so I think from that perspective, the fantasy of Ishi
is that he's this pure exemplar, when actually, of course
he's just a person.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Yeshi moved into the museum, and soon after the work
of studying and preserving Yahi culture began. We'll be right
back over time. The anthropologist Alfred Kroeger got to know
Ishi's story, even though she didn't like to talk about
his past. It depressed him, and for good reason. His
(14:09):
hair was still burned short in mourning for his mother
and sister, who died some years before. He'd lived alone
in the canyons ever since then, and now he was
living in a museum in San Francisco.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
But he was asked, supposedly multiple times by people, did
he want to go back or did he want to
go somewhere else, And supposedly he always said no. It's
a kind of complicated question because they were The people
who are reporting this are all people who benefit from
him being happy where he was, you know. And well
(14:42):
they were not neutral people. They were his white friends
who you know, I think the story is good if
he wasn't a prisoner from their point of view.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Reportedly, she told agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs
through his Yana interpreter, quote, I will grow old here
and die in this house. He worked part time as
a janitor at the museum when it opened about a
month after his arrival. He was at the opening night
gala in a small back room. When people rehashed this
history now in a critical light, they say that Ishi
(15:13):
was a living exhibit stuck in the museum. Because he
soon began to do demonstrations of Yahie culture on Sundays,
he was a major draw. The San Francisco Examiner called
him creepily its most interesting exhibit. He'd show crafts like
making arrowheads, weaving baskets, starting fires, the things he made
(15:33):
the museum kept in its collection. Tens of thousands of
people came to those demonstrations over the course of the
next year, and that was more people in one place
than she had ever seen. Then there were all the
ancestral remains the Museum of Anthropology kept. He'd locked his
door each night, but he had some agency within a
(15:56):
limited band. Gerald Visner, the writer, scholar, and member of
the Chippawa tribe, has written a lot about how Yishi
had an act of role in shaping his situation. Visner
calls it his survivanceval and resistance, because is she seems
to have taken most everything in stride. He made some money,
(16:16):
memorized the street cars, and began to make his way
around town. He liked to go to the movies and
made friends around the city. Later people would remember him fondly,
like a little boy who said Ishi had made him
a bow and arrow and taught him how to shoot lizards,
made him a net for catching minnows and rabbits skin moccasins.
The newspapers told Ishi's story as if he time traveled
(16:39):
from the Stone Age to the modern world, like Whenihi
walked barefoot into a vaudeville show at the Orpheum Theater
and supposedly called it Heaven for white people. Or the
day she saw a plane in the sky and asked
in a kind of amused way if a white man
were flying it. He is exactly forty thousand years behind
the times. One journalist wrote, some writers were disappointed to
(17:01):
see their romantic fantasy, the uncontaminated man who never told
a lie, smoking cigars and wearing shoes. It was absurd
to me. It seems like he had apted unbelievably quickly.
I mean, he had completely reinvented his life, and he
was probably in his fifties. He was curious to try
new things and willing to set limits. Once a reporter
(17:22):
asked him to put on animal skins for a photograph,
and he said he wouldn't because he didn't see anyone
else wearing them.
Speaker 6 (17:29):
He seems to land in this particular location with a
kind of intelligence and consciousness right of the situation that
people around him don't necessarily understand that he has. And
that makes him, you know, crafty and intelligent and wiy
(17:50):
and smart and in all in all kinds of ways.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
That's Philip Delauria, a professor of history at Harvard. He
specializes in Native American and American studies and is of
Dakota descent. He wrote a book I love called Playing Indian,
which is about how white Americans navigated national identity and
their feelings about modernity through a kind of Indian cosplay.
It's why the country was so fascinated by Isshi.
Speaker 6 (18:17):
It's why he's such an astonishing figure. He's not an
astonishing figure because he survives and comes out of the
woods and ends up in a museum. I think he's
an astonishing figure because of the ways in which he
sees his situation and acts within it.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
To most people, Ishi was just a symbol, a tragic fantasy,
not just the last Yahi, but the last wild Indian.
To white Americans, it represented the triumph of European civilization
over Indigenous America. Inevitable, the kind of thing you wept
over only once victory was assured. Anthropology was a kind
(18:53):
of rearguard action, salvaging what could be salvage, to use
their term in a sort of apologetic way. But some
of what's complicated here is that the things they preserved
were kept in institutions like Berkeley, which is on land
that was taken from the alone people. Anthropologists worked within
that paradox, but they weren't given to ask questions about
(19:15):
why these cultures were disappearing or what might be done
to stop it. The idea that it was already too late,
it was baked into the work. The field was a
puzzle box, just like Krober. He thought Eugenix was ridiculous,
but he was also the head of a department that
collected human remains from tribal grave sites. In one article,
(19:36):
he calls you Shet a man in every sense, and
then he compares him to a puppy Krober.
Speaker 6 (19:42):
And all the generations that surround him and that came
after him, you know, they're all the errors of this
kind of you know, this kind of doubled consciousness of
the anthropologist of the time. You know, it feels like
you're making a very you know, progressive kind of move
while at the same time you're looking at them as
objects of study. You've got a whole kind of primitivist
(20:04):
veneer that's hard to get away from, you know. So
they couldn't help. These folks couldn't help but be contradictory,
you know, in their consciousness about how they were viewing
Native people as vestiges and remnants of these cultures the past,
and yet as opportunities for them to think in progressive
and you know, theoretically enlightened kinds of ways.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Is She was on stage during those demonstrations at the museum,
but so was Krober. They were both performing something is
She was playing Indian, Krober was playing anthropologists. Yes, she
was making the most of a bad situation. But he
barely spoke English, and the anthropologists barely spoke Yahi. So
(20:46):
this story, the way I at least can tell it,
it's as much about the people around Yishi as it
is about the man himself. And in the style of
my own family, it's about the meaning behind the story
they told about him, the ethics of their relationships, the
choices they made, and the ones they were about to make.
(21:09):
Krober and his crew were working with Ishi on setting
down what they could of the Ahi culture. They recorded
him telling stories on wax cylinders over fifty hours of
Is she telling Yahi tales?
Speaker 10 (21:22):
Oh the work?
Speaker 2 (21:26):
That's his voice, telling the story of the wood ducks,
about a man who'd been turned into a wood duck
looking for a wife. So wax cylinder recordings were hard
to make, but Ishi spent seven hours telling this story
(21:46):
across over one hundred different cylinders. It was one of
the first stories he told, and according to the anthropologist
Orin Starn, who wrote a great book about this history,
wood Ducks was at that point the longest recorded performance
of all time. It took a huge amount of stamina.
At one point, one of Krober's colleagues went to take
a phone call. When he got back, she told him
(22:09):
it would be better they kept working without breaks. He
was preserving a body of knowledge he knew would be
lost otherwise. But he also had things he wouldn't reveal,
just as he never revealed his name.
Speaker 6 (22:22):
I think when you dig down into it, it's exactly
these kinds of things, of like, I know what you're doing, right,
the sort of sense where the indigenous person you know says, no,
I know exactly what you're doing, and I'm going to
act according to my own best rights and interests in
relation to what we're doing, so that what you're doing
becomes what we are doing together. Right. So there's an
(22:43):
insistence upon sort of active agency. It seems to me
like there's there's a fair bit of evidence for the
strategic use of anthropologists.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
The anthropologists met with Esch often. They worked hours and
hours together. By this point they figured out how to
communicate to a degree, and they were, by all accounts,
friendly and easy.
Speaker 7 (23:02):
With each other.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Is She would come over for dinner at Krover's, and
from everything I've read, it seems that he and Kroger
crew clothes. Ishi had a community of Berkeley acquaintances who
claimed to think of him as a friend, including a
man named Saxton Pope, a star surgeon at the University
of California. He and Ishi hung out a lot. They'd
go hunting with bows and arrows together, kind of like
(23:26):
a grown up version for Pope of playing Indian. Ishi
would visit Pope in the hospital. People thought he might
have been a healer in his past life because he'd
sit with sick patients and help the nurses clean their tools,
but he disapproved of how the hospital handled its dead,
cutting people open for autopsies. Ishi had a life in
San Francisco, but in the summer of nineteen fourteen, Crober,
(23:50):
his anthropologist colleague, and Saxton Pope proposed a trip back
to the land Ischi was from. Ishi was worried about
going back to that haunted place, but either he changed
his mind or they wore him down. They took the
train back up to the Yahi country where he'd hidden
alone for years, and they made camp.
Speaker 8 (24:12):
It was on the left bank of rapid down hill Spree,
which I assume.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Was Dear Queen Saxton, Pope's son Saxton Jr. He went
on the trip. Years later, someone came to record his memories.
I think he must be reading a recollection.
Speaker 7 (24:28):
He wrote.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
It's a little stiff, but sometimes he laughs and sounds
to me like a kid again.
Speaker 8 (24:34):
I was so, I thought. Chef with the group. It's
true that is She was in high good spirits on
the trip.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
They hunted and cooked together, and they took a lot
of photos, many of them posed with is She once
again playing Indian. They wanted him to recreate an ancient
life that really he himself had never experienced, like this
one photo of Vish hunting the deer.
Speaker 8 (25:00):
It will be noted that the deer from which he
is retrieving an arrow is propped up from behind with
a stick. And I did that.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
It's all a bit of a mess, cringey in the
un self conscious way. They were asking Ishi to reenact
his past. They were idealizing the time before white people
had made contact with the Yahi. It was one of
the worst impulses of this type of anthropology, but of
course it was more complicated than that too. In some
of the other photos, there's a real affection. They lie
(25:36):
out at night in sleeping bags, swim in the river,
hunt together. The real historical value of the trip wasn't
the photos, but rather the maps of the land where
she had grown up, the place names for the places
where he'd lived and watched his family die.
Speaker 8 (25:50):
What did not strike me at the time, and unexpected
certainly does now, how after such a life and such
early experiences he could ever have crusted a white man again.
His adjustment, however, was not without its complexities. On his
(26:11):
explosions into the Yanna cut feat on several occasions he
heard his mother and sister calling where no other member
of the party could hear, and presumably they weren't there.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
They got back from the trip a little under a
month later, and life in San Francisco resumed its regular
rhythms for them all Kerber left on sabbatical, eventually landing
in New York, but somewhere in that time she became
visibly ill. It was tuberculosis, a disease to which American
(26:44):
Indians had no resistance. Five years after his arrest, is
she was dying. Kerber knew that when he did there
would be talk of an autopsy. That's what often happened
when someone died at the hospital. But in Hi's case,
there would be people who are especially interested, who thought
the final act of studying Yahia culture would be to
(27:06):
look inside his body.
Speaker 7 (27:08):
Saxton Pope thought it much so.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Kroeber wrote a letter to the director of the museum
on March twenty fourth, nineteen sixteen, a furious and now
famous message. He wrote, as to the disposal of the body,
I must ask you, as my personal representative, to yield
nothing at all under any circumstances. If there is any
talk of the interests of science, then say for me
that science can go to hell. We propose to stand
(27:33):
by our friends. Besides, I cannot believe that any scientific
value is materially involved. We have hundreds of Indian skeletons
that nobody ever comes to study. The day after Kroger
sent that letter y she died, and then Pope had
an autopsy performed. They cremated is She's body afterwards, but
(27:56):
before they did, they removed his brain and they preserved it.
When Krober returned from a sabbatical, it was waiting for
him like a sick taunt, the physical container of all
that he'd been trying to prize FISHI. But it represented
something else too. Krober knew that she hated the way
(28:17):
anthropologists kept human remains in the museum. He now had
the chance to cremate the last part of Ishi's body
and reunite it with the rest of him, to do
the last right thing in a bad situation, but he didn't.
He sent Ishi's brain to the Smithsonian.
Speaker 6 (28:39):
This is the thing about this story, right is you
know this kind of this kind of final betrayal you
know from Krober, really changes the story up. You don't
have to do what Kroeber did. You see the pictures
of them and they're you know, doing these things, and
it looks like a kind of partnership. It looks like
a potential friendship, It looks like this kind of relationship,
(29:01):
and you have to think, well, Okay, it probably was
at some level. But if at the end of the day,
you know, Kroeber is able to continue this kind of
prectice of dehumanization, you know, how does that? How can
you look back at all of these sort of images
of them together, sort of accounted them together, you know,
and see it in the same light. I just don't
think you you know, I just don't think you can.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
What's hard about this history is there is no reliable narrator.
It's always more myth than fact. All the people setting
down the accounts. We have a Vish in San Francisco.
We're trying to see him as a record of his culture,
to practice pure anthropology, even if they thought of him
as a friend. That was how they told the story.
A man and a culture preserved. But that story left
(29:48):
a whole lot out. That's why I think Krober's daughter
retold it. She'd been born a Krober, but when she
got married, she took her husband's last name and added
it to the end of her own ursula croeber Legwin.
We'll be right back.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Well, I want to start out with a serious question
to you all, is what on earth are we all
doing here?
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Ursula Kerber was born thirteen years after she died. She
was the fourth child, the youngest, and the only girl
in the bunch. She grew up spunky in a loud,
boisterous house of academics and academics to be. She was
very close to her mother, a lip smart woman named
Theodora who seemed like she could see into her kid's souls.
Her father, Alfred, looked outwards. Ursula thought of him as
(30:46):
a kind of wizard. He'd tell her creation myths and legends,
stories about other worlds. Every story could be told, except one,
a family one, the one about e she and her father.
Speaker 10 (31:00):
She always said that it wasn't brought up when she
was a kid.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Julie Phillips is a writer, specifically the writer Ursula Lagwyn
handpicked to be her biographer.
Speaker 10 (31:11):
She grew up understanding the value of cultural relativism, of
the notion that the culture that you're immersed in is
not the only culture, and that there are always other
ways of doing things, And she talks about how liberating
that was for her to know.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
That anthropology was the backdrop to Legwin's life. But as
a kid, she wasn't reading textbooks. She was reading science fiction.
In the nineteen thirties and forties, sci fi was not
exactly held in high regard to her, though it probably
read like the best part of her dad's stories, exotic, exciting,
(31:50):
especially to a kid who never quite fit in.
Speaker 10 (31:54):
She said, you know, in high school, I was in
exile in this Siberia of adolescent social mores. In the library,
I was home free.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Legwin always wanted to be a writer. After college, she
was writing poems and realist novels, and it was around
that time, in the late nineteen fifties, that she first
heard the story Avishi. Her dad kept getting asked to
write about it all, but he wouldn't. Instead, her mom,
Theodora did. Her book was published in nineteen sixty one,
(32:26):
and it was called Ishi in Two Worlds, A Biography
of the Last Wild Indian in North America. Ursula Legwin
always hated that subtitle because she said she wasn't wild.
He came out of a more deeply rooted culture than
the one he went into. But the book became a
big bestseller. It's been in print since the sixties. It
sold over a million copies and been translated into a
(32:49):
slew of languages, and it added a whole new dimension
to Ischi's story, the fact of genocide. It was, for
its time and author revolutionary, but it was also an
attempt to transform that pain into a healing narrative, a
salve for white liberal guilt. Legwinn talked about learning that
story late in her life in a documentaryalled The Worlds
(33:10):
of Versula Legwin.
Speaker 11 (33:12):
My mother's book opened many people's eyes, including my own,
to the appalling history of the white conquest of California.
It's kind of hard to admit that your people did
something awful when I absorbed something like that. The way
I handle it is probably too put it into a novel.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
Legwin was famously evasive about where her ideas came from
author's privilege. But I think that the revelation of Eshi's
story is at the foundation of her career because right
before her mother's book on Yeshi came out, her father died,
and at that exact moment she ditched her realist novels
and she started to write sci fi. Her mother began
(33:59):
working on a young person's version of the Eshi story,
a lightly fictionalized account which a lot of fourth graders
in California have probably had to read over the last
half century. Legwin read drafts and gave notes, and meanwhile,
she'd begun to work on her own first published novel,
a book called Rocanan's World.
Speaker 10 (34:17):
She's just had a baby, her first child, and she
has really bad cabin fever, and I think that she
just needed to get out of the house. Imaginatively. So
Rocannon is her first anthropologist here, and she sends him
to explore a planet.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
The anthropologist narrator was one of Legwin's first major innovations
in science fiction. It allowed her to smuggle a whole
set of big ideas from academic anthropology into science fiction,
because science fiction has always been sort of anthropological in
the worst way. Manifest destiny in outer space, like Flash
Gordon encountering aliens on the planet Mango, I can.
Speaker 9 (34:59):
Only account for them as being a seller from the
original race thousands of years ago and having a numerous
planets on the Solar system.
Speaker 8 (35:08):
Primitive, all right.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
It was the exact same kind of story the white
settlers in California told themselves in Oraville in eighteen forty nine,
the same story white American kids were learning from their
favorite science fiction difference as threat until people began to
notice a changing guard in science fiction, including Legwin's writing
and her work as a public figure speaking at events
(35:30):
all over the world like Ossicon.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
Do you people realize by the way that, to my
three children, science fiction is not a low form of
literature written by little contemptible hacks. It's the kind of
thing your own mother does.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
She was raising three kids, living in Oregon. When the
kids were at school, she'd write. She'd start out in
September with a premise and finish a first draft by
March to polish off before summer vacation began. She'd found
a set of ideas, and in nineteen sixty six, five
years after her mom's book on he she came out
the floodgates opened. A Wizard of Earth, See the Left
(36:09):
Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and
The Word for World as Forest are some of the
most famous science fiction books of all time, and they
were all written in the ten year period that began
in nineteen sixty six, and I think all of them
are dealing with those themes from anthropology, the things that
were left out of the first telling of the Issy story.
(36:29):
I don't think it's a coincidence that during that same stretch,
an American Indian civil rights movement was gaining steam. They
were responding to a new federal Indian policy in the
nineteen fifties known as Termination. After World War Two, the
government had wanted to end its recognition of tribes, move
them off reservations, and stop honoring its treaties to assimilate
(36:50):
American Indians into the mainstream. Alfred Kober had worked with
tribes on court cases early in those years. American Indians
responded with what came to be known as the Red
Power movement. One of their most famous actions came in
nineteen sixty nine, when a group of American Indians occupied Alcatraz,
the island prison in the Bay Area.
Speaker 9 (37:10):
We will approach a set at Alcatraz Island for twenty four
dollars in glass beads and red cloth. We know that
twenty four dollars of trade goods is more than was
paid when Manhattan Island was sold, but we know that
land values have risen over the years.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
The occupation lasted until nineteen seventy one. LeGuin was watching
as the script flipped on an entire history. Her family
had borne direct witness to, and she was writing her
most influential books at that exact moment.
Speaker 10 (37:37):
She said that a lot of my protagonists are alone
of their kind among people of another kind. This is
Ishi's situation, also the situation of a field anthropologist, also
the situation, or so it seems to me, of most adolescents,
most intellectuals, most artists. I a stranger and afraid in
a world I never.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
Need once you start looking for it. The traces of
Ishi's story are everywhere in le Guin's work, but the
really clear one about her father ANII. As the anthropologist
James Clifford is noted, is the word for world is forest.
People think of it as a novel written in protests
of the Vietnam War, also part of the basis for
(38:18):
the film Avatar. But it mirrors the concerns of the
American Indian movement. And it's profoundly about one of the
central tensions in anthropology, between being an objective observer or
an active activist participant.
Speaker 11 (38:32):
And I suppose it's not too surprising in the anthropologist's
door to talk about two cultures bumping up against each
other that don't understand.
Speaker 7 (38:42):
He said.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
In the book, Earth has run out of lumber, so
they colonize a forest planet called Eths, She populated by
an alien race of gentle tree people descended from humans.
An anthropologist embeds with the colonizing force. He makes friends
with one of the aliens, and together they make a
careful record of Ethschian culture and spend hours working on
(39:05):
a dictionary of the native language together. But while the
anthropologist working on recording the culture, the colonizing force rapes,
pillages and burns the people in the planet. It would
be better if I had never known you, the alien
tells the anthropologist. LeGuin writes quote, he was not in
the anthropologist's nature to think what can I do? Character
(39:28):
and training disposed him not to interfere in other men's business.
He preferred to be enlightened rather than to enlighten, to
seek facts rather than the truth. But even the most
unmissionary soul, unless he pretends he has no emotions, is
sometimes faced with a choice between commission and omission. What
are they doing abruptly becomes what are we doing? And
(39:51):
then what must I do?
Speaker 10 (39:55):
It seems to me that she was commenting on her
father's situation, and it seems to me that she would
not have admitted even to herself that she was commenting
on that situations.
Speaker 7 (40:06):
And so clear though it feels so direct.
Speaker 10 (40:10):
Yeah, I think it is.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
In the end of the Word for worlds Forest, the
anthropologist dies in an alien raid, but his work saves
the planet. It leads to the end of the colony
and freedom for its indigenous people. But in reality, Legwynton
must have known that the situation is never that easily resolved,
and so I think it left the more interesting work
for the year after the Word for World is Forest.
(40:35):
That year began with a group of American Indian Movement
and Iglala Lakota activists occupying Wounded Knee in a high
profile protest, and it was the year La Gwynn published
one of her most famous stories, another story about the
dynamic between yes she and her father, The.
Speaker 10 (40:51):
Really obvious story where she asks questions about her father's legacy.
Is the ones who walk away from Omlas.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
Omlas, the story my dad loves about the utopia that
depends on that kid in the basement, the one that's
about what you think it's about, except.
Speaker 10 (41:12):
It's not Omolas is us omilas is. You know, every
culture everywhere in a lot of ways, but it is
you know, it maps quite well onto European cultures in California,
which exist and thrive. You know, in the aftermath of genosime.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
In Amalas, le Guinn tells you to imagine your own utopia,
but she's also describing hers, and I think she's describing
the Bay area. Here she is again reading from it.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls,
between old moss grown gardens and under avenues of trees,
past great parks and public buildings. Processions moved far off
to the north and west. The mountain stood up half
encircling Omlas on her bay. The air of morning was
so clear that the snow still crowned the eighteen peaks
(42:11):
burned with white gold fire across the miles of sunlit
air under the dark blue of the sky.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
The person in the room in the public buildings of
Omolas is she in the room in the San Francisco
Museum of Anthropology. He was crafty and creative. He made
a new life for himself, but he never should have
had to. And the tens of thousands of people who
saw him in the museum, they knew what his presence
there meant, why he was there, what had been lost,
(42:37):
the costs that had been paid for, all the remains
of the cultures filling that building in the city by
the bay.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
Sometimes also a man or woman much older, falls silent
for a day or two and then leaves home. These
people go out into the street and walk down the
street alone. They keep walking, and they walk straight out
of the city of Omilas through the beautiful gates they
go on. They leave Omolas, walk ahead into the darkness,
(43:04):
and they do not come back. The place they go to, Howards,
is a place even less imaginable to most of us
than the city of Happiness. I cannot describe it at all.
It's possible that it doesn't exist, but they seem to
know where they're going. The ones who walk away from Omanas.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
The two choices in the story are stay or walk away.
But Legwin didn't neither. She kept coming back to the
same place and talking about it as if it were
another planet, talking about what was really going on there.
I think in the hopes that if she made it
strange enough, people would be able to see finally the
(43:49):
world around them.
Speaker 6 (43:50):
It feels like every generation is trying to escape the
generation before and the generation before that, and you know,
always unsuccessfully, right, I mean always with partial success.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Philip Deloria, again historian of Native American and American history,
but also the son of one of the leading figures
in the Red Past movement, Vindaloria Junior, the intellectual lawyer
and member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe who came
up with the term Red Power and famously thought very
little of anthropologists. Here he is in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 3 (44:24):
They continued to act as if the only valid Indians
were the first Indians that one of the anthropologists ran acrossed.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Leguinn was trying to escape her past without disowning it,
to keep working it over and reworking it. She did
not do it perfectly, but she tried. Her fiction was
one of the pathways the ideas of the Red Power
movement traveled to reach the mainstream. She helped pave the
way for reimagining the future, and she created new stories
(44:54):
to hold in the back of your mind if you
should ever find yourself in the corral at some slaughterhouse
in the future, looking at a person you don't understand,
trying to bridge the gap between two worlds. Ursula Crober
Legwin's writing changed science fiction, expanded the boundaries of what
could be imagined with huge moral imagination and empathy. But
(45:18):
there have been new futures hidden inside her father's work
that he didn't imagine either, because she was, of course
not the last. American Indian and tribal identity was more
complex and overlapped and long lasting than the turn of
the century anthropologists realized, and so a new generation of
American Indians in California are pulling the work their ancestors
(45:39):
did with the anthropologists at Berkeley out from the archives
and reclaiming that knowledge. Ishi's story had an unexpected future too.
In the late nineteen nineties, a mad man named Art Angle,
the anthropologist or In Starn and historian Nancy Rockefeller went
looking for Hi's brain, even when it was said to
(46:00):
be lost destroyed. But they kept looking for years until
they found it in a tank in an archive at
the Smithsonian. They got is She's brained back and buried
it with the rest of his remains on his ancestral
land in an undisclosed place. It was a big story
once again, and it became a rallying cry for a
movement to repatriate native remains from collections around the world.
(46:24):
In twenty twenty one, in response to activism on campus,
Berkeley took Crober's name off the building that houses the
department he founded, but they have been slow to repatriate
the many ancestral remains still in their collection. Meanwhile, one
hundred and twelve years after she turned up at that slaughterhouse,
no one's any closer to some essential truth about his story.
(46:46):
I asked Lauria about Legwin's work telling and retelling, excavating
that story's meaning.
Speaker 6 (46:52):
And you can see yourself trying to escape some of
those things, which are negative possibilities, always unsuccessfully, you know,
And yet because you're conscious and you're aware of them,
you're dealing with them, perhaps writing five page short stories, right,
you know. I mean, so you're trying to come to terms,
never fully adequately, but you know the fact that you're
(47:12):
trying is actually probably worth something.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
You have to try, even if you can never escape
the past, kind of like how you never quite escape
your parents, Which is why I guess I've just told
you a story that seems like it's about one thing,
when really it's about something else.
Speaker 7 (47:32):
Entirely.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
The Last Archive is written and hosted by Me Ben Nataphaffrey.
It's produced by me and Lucy Sullivan and edited by
Sophie Crane. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking on
this episode by Arthur Gomberts. Sound design by Jake Gorsky
and Lucy Sullivan. Our executive producers are Sophie Crane and
(48:05):
Jill Lapourt. Thanks also to Julia Barton, Pushkin's executive editor.
Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of stell
Wagon Symphonet. Many of our sound effects are from Harry
Jannette Junior in the Star Ganette Foundation Special Thanks to
Andrew Garrett and his upcoming book, The Unnaming of Croper
Hal Thanks also to Laura n Ader and the University
(48:27):
of Oregon Special Collections and University Archives. The Ones Who
Walk Away from Omolas by Ursula k Legwin is used
by permission of Curtis Brown Limited, Copyright nineteen seventy three.
All rights reserved. For a bibliography, further reading, and a
transcript and teaching guide to this episode, head to the
Last Archive dot com. The Last Archive is a production
(48:50):
of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show. Consider subscribing
to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content and ad free listening
across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look
for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at
pushkin dot fm, and please sign up for our newsletter
at pushkin dot fm Slash Newsletter. Find more Pushkin podcasts,
(49:11):
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Speaker 7 (49:16):
I'm Ben Mattahaffrey.
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