Ishi: Wowonupo to Parnassus Heights, 1908-1911 (Last Member of the Yahi ) (Biography‪)‬

The blackest page in all American history is the deliberately brutal destruction of our native peoples and their cultures. While American Indians have not, and will not, vanish--indeed their populations are expanding and pride in their cultural identity strengthening, particularly strikingly in the Southwest--the significance of this success is accurately measured only if we remember what they have had to survive. Such memory must include imagining an experience for most of us almost unimaginable, but one repeated too often among Indians: being the last survivor of a murdered family, a murdered people, a murdered culture. What can be the feelings of one who realizes himself as the last speaker of a language savored and refined over thousands of years, the last to know the ancient beliefs and customs, to hear only in his own mind the traditional stories whose telling aloud to a group sustained a unique and cherished way of life? This is surely a consciousness more terrible than that of the greatest tragic figures of European dramatic literature, but it is an inescapable heritage for every Native American from Maine and Massachusetts to New Mexico and Arizona. This is why the story of Ishi, the last Yahi, is becoming an increasing focus of interest and a source of inspiration for all American Indians, however different his culture from theirs, be it Hopi, Oneida, Navajo, or Cherokee. The scene of Ishi's life lay far from the Sonoran Desert, but the terrible experience of his people, and the remarkable resilience of a man whose cultural values enabled him to overcome unspeakable victimization by refusing to become a mere victim, today enters into the self-awareness of Pueblo and Tuscarora peoples, as it does with the Comanche and the Choctaw, as a means of defining fundamental and enduring qualities of Indianness. In the pages that follow we offer the documentary evidence of the public means that enabled Ishi to bring that self-consciousness into the modern world.