Karl & Clifton Kroeber: Ishi in Three Centuries (2003)
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Ishi (c.1861-1916)Ishi in Three Centuries (2003)
[Jason Books, Auckland CBD - 6/11/2020]:
Karl & Clifton Kroeber, ed. Ishi in Three Centuries. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
A more common "long-view" of history you hear when talking to Natives in rural Alaska is that the coming of the whites and all their technology was something long foretold by shamans ... Televisions and airplanes in particular were long foretold. This summer in Quinhagak I heard a new twist on this in that the little people ... used to appear to their ancestors wearing 20th century clothing and even sitting on tiny versions of 4-wheelers when confronting their 19th century ancestors, because little people have the ability to travel back and forth through time. But if prophesies exist, they don't seem to address what the end-game will be, or if this slow-motion train wreck of contact will continue forever. Or maybe people are just too polite to bring that up.
- Archaeologist Richard ('Rick') Knecht, quoted in Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century, by James Clifford (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2013): 318.
One of the guests in our writing cottage, anthropologist and indigenous rights activist Serena Cosgrove, was kind enough to send me a copy of James Clifford's book Returns, which includes what Clifford describes as a 'non-fiction novella' about Ishi, the so-called 'last wild Indian in America'. Serena and I had had some interesting conversations on the subject.
I used Theodora Kroeber's classic biography of Ishi as one of the texts in my Massey Travel Writing course, not so much because it's a typical piece of travel writing (it isn't), but because of a particular notion it embodies:
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this book is its attempt to recreate the stone-age California which co-existed with the modern American state until (at least) the early twentieth century. Ishi was (so far as is known) the last Native American to live in complete ignorance of and isolation from the “civilised world” – but the extraordinary thing is that he and his tribe managed to stay under the radar for so long. What did the world look like through their eyes? Kroeber’s anthropologist husband tried to find out the answer, whilst simultaneously attempting to watch over and mediate Ishi’s integration into his new world.
Whether he succeeded or not is a very controversial subject – as is his widow’s rather hagiographic account of his work – but it isn’t hard to see how this notion of seeing one’s own world through other people’s eyes is an attractive one. How does it feel to live on the North Shore of Auckland when you don’t speak any English, for instance? Is it easy or hard? Does it feel confined or free? We can speculate, or (better still) try asking those who actually know. It’s travel literature, then, only in the sense that it attempts to record a world through the looking-glass – the same place you already live in, only seen from a quite different perspective.
I still like that idea of a stone age and modern era California co-existing at the same time - even in the same place. Whether or not it's accurate is (again) something which has been questioned since, but in the context of the course that was less important than the usefulness of this trope for contemporary travel writers trying to find a way in to the many layers of habitation in their own home environment - let alone the ones that they encounter while travelling abroad.
Theodora Kroeber's husband, Alfred L. Kroeber (1876-1960), remains a very well known and influential American ethnologist. It was he who was largely responsible for Ishi's being housed as a kind of living exhibit in a Museum on the University of California campus at Parnassus Heights, San Francisco from 1911 until his death in 1916.
That was only one of his many claims to fame, however. he wrote an immense number of works on Native American culture and folklore, such as Indian Myths of South Central California (1907) or the posthumously published Yurok Myths (1976) - not to mention the one pictured above, his Handbook of the Indians of California.
And that too, unfortunately, forms part of the problem. A while ago, in a post on his and Theodora's daughter, SF and Fantasy writer Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, I mentioned the obvious influence of her father's work on her most ambitious single work, the Utopian novel Always Coming Home (1985). Again, I quote:
Interestingly enough, I didn't share the adverse reaction to Always Coming Home when it first came out - after, that is, I'd learned that it had to be read straight through: songs, folklore, ethnologies, etymologies and all, if one was to have any hope of understanding the narrative all those things frame. Do they exist for the story, or does the story exist for them? It's an interesting question, but one - by its very nature - which remains unanswerable.Much though I continue to admire the writings of all three of these Kroebers, it's no longer possible to elide over the figure of Ishi himself with such ease. It was presumably in recognition of this fact that Ursula's literary critic brother Karl (1926-2009) and historian half-brother Clifton (1921-2019) edited that series of essays, Ishi in Three Centuries (2003), pictured at the head of this post.
... Always Coming Home, for those of you who haven't read it, is a strange combination of a fantasy novel set in the near (or far) future, and an ethnography of a people called the Kesh, inhabitants of what is now Northern California. It includes accounts of their religious rituals, castes and guilds, stories and poems, their diet, and virtually the whole of their life-style from birth to death. It’s a hugely ambitious text, involving the creation of a whole imaginary future people, but – of course – also aspires to be a readable story.
It’s always seemed obvious to me that it was, at least in part, inspired by her father's work ... Her mother's influence is just as strong, though: perhaps a unique case of a novelist daughter influenced by her linguist and anthropologist father and her biographer mother - who followed up her first, more scholarly book Ishi in Two Worlds with a more popular, lightly fictionalized version, Ishi: Last of His Tribe - in creating a work which can really only be described as ethno-speculative-fiction.
Putting it bluntly, was Ishi (the word for 'man' in the Yana language), really 'the last of his tribe'? Was he materially benefitted by his association with Alfred Kroeber and his fellow anthropologists? And - above all - does he continue to be treated more as a symbolic object for sentimental reflections than a living, breathing human being?
If you're curious about any of these subjects, and the complex bibliography Ishi has given rise to, you should probably start off with James Clifford's essay on the subject, before moving on to the Theodora Kroeber biography and her sons' collection of essays.
In the other sections of his book Returns, subtitled Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century, Clifford puts into vivid perspective the problem of native tribes and people who have been declared officially 'extinct' by anthropological surveys such as the one recorded in Alfred Kroeber's Handbook of the Indians of California.
The people of that place may refuse to acknowledge the 'extinction' of their local language and culture, and - as Clifford illustrates with multiple examples - whose job, precisely, is it to contradict them? Government officials? Professors? Landowners? In the words of the old song, they're dead but they won't lie down.
Clifford mentions in passing that 'rather elaborate invocations of genealogy and place now routinely introduce indigenous events in Canada, the United States, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia.'
The approach suspends normative ideas of cultural wholeness or organic speech communities, weighing instead the importance of selectively rearticulated cultural and linguistic forms, performances adapted to changing interactive situations. [278]Quite so. What he doesn't mention, though, is the fact that it is not only indigenous events which are now introduced by 'elaborate invocations of genealogy and place' in Aotearoa/New Zealand, at any rate. Virtually any ceremonial occasion in our aspirationally bicultural and definitely post-colonial nation can now be prefaced by a Māori pepeha, or statement of identity.
As Tina Makereti points out in her recent novel The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke, set in Victorian London, whose eponymous protagonist is the "orphaned son of a chief; ardent student of English; wide-eyed survivor":
All the world’s a stage, especially when you’re a living exhibit.The museum exhibits have got out and are walking around. The indigenous peoples of the world are back with a vengeance, and 'Ishi' is no longer the comforting ghost we designed him to be.
- Kroeber, Theodora. Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961.
- Kroeber, Theodora. Ishi, Last of His Tribe. Drawings by Ruth Robbins. Oakland, California: Parnassus Press / Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964.
- Kroeber, Theodora. Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970.
- Kroeber, Karl, & Clifton Kroeber. Ishi in Three Centuries. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
- Clifford, James. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Secondary:
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- category - American Prose: Authors
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Appendix:
This is the abstract for a panel at the 16th International Conference on the Short Story in English, planned to take place in Calabria in June 2020, but unfortunately cancelled by the pandemic:
Anthropology and the Short Story:
Delineating the TribesWho do we write for, and who do we write about? Most fiction writers develop over time a sense of the community they write about, and the – generally overlapping – audience they write for. When it comes to delineating these communities, however, we believe that writers have a great deal to learn from anthropologists. Certainly this emphasis would match the conference's themes of 'migration' and 'diversity.’
In his 2013 book Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century, Anthropologist James Clifford mentions that 'rather elaborate invocations of genealogy and place now routinely introduce indigenous events in Canada, the United States, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia.' He says of this:The approach suspends normative ideas of cultural wholeness or organic speech communities, weighing instead the importance of selectively rearticulated cultural and linguistic forms, performances adapted to changing interactive situations. [278]I would take issue with one detail. It is not only indigenous events which are now prefaced by 'elaborate invocations of genealogy and place' in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Virtually any ceremonial occasion in our aspirationally bicultural and definitely post-colonial nation is now introduced by a Māori pepeha, or statement of identity.
As New Zealand writers, we have found it increasingly necessary to consider such questions of tribe or community – those we speak for – and audience – those we speak to – in our creative practice. James Clifford has given us a context for talking about new, less exclusive and 'pure' conceptions of indigeneity.
None of us is of Māori descent, but when welcomed onto a marae in our home country, we become tangata whenua, people of the land of that place. It can be harder to find equivalent points of entry to our own immigrant communities, which is why we hope that the situations created and delineated in our fiction might perform a similar role instead.
Proposed panellists:
[Convenor]: Dr Jack Ross is a New Zealand poet and fiction-writer. He completed a PhD in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Edinburgh in 1990, and works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. His latest book Ghost Stories appeared in 2019 from Lasavia Publishing. His other publications include five full-length poetry collections, four novels, and three volumes of short fiction.[9/10/19]
Dr Bronwyn Lloyd completed a PhD in English and Art History at the University of Auckland in 2010. Her first collection of short stories, The Second Location, was published by Titus Books in 2011. She has recently completed a second short story collection, A Slow Alphabet, and a novel, Inanimals United. Bronwyn works as a freelance art writer and curator.
Dr Tracey Slaughter has a PhD in English from the University of Auckland. She is the author of the short story collection deleted scenes for lovers (2016) and the poetry collection Conventional Weapons (2019). Her first collection of poems and short stories, her body rises, was published by Random House in 2005, and her novella The Longest Drink in Town by Pania Press in 2015. Her short fiction has received numerous awards, including the international Bridport Prize 2014, a 2007 NZ Book Month Award, and BNZ Katherine Mansfield Awards in 2004 and 2001. She teaches Creative Writing at Waikato University.
Michael Steven’s poems, essays and short fiction have appeared in Brief, IKA, Landfall, Phantom Billstickers Café Reader and Poetry New Zealand Yearbook. His first full-length poetry collection Walking to Jutland Street was longlisted for the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
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