Welcome to my blog ! It's all about jewelry and sculptures Left the
jewelry ( you can click on the pics to enlarge them ) and just
below this text the sculptures. Hope you'll enjoy your visit and
feel free to add any comments . Thank you for stopping by :)
In August 1911 a Yahi man about fifty years old came down out of
the dense chaparral and rocky terrain of northeastern California's
Lassen foothills. He had been living in those hills, in hiding with
the last Yahi people, for some forty years. In the twenty-five-year
period following the beginning of the California Gold Rush in 1849,
most of the native people of northern California had been killed by
Euro-Americans or their diseases, and those who remained were
having a hard time surviving the miners' and settlers' impact on
the land. The small Yahi tribe, known even before the arrival of
whites for their fierce courage, was among the more effective
groups in resisting the takeover, and they had suffered greatly
In 1908 a group of men surveying for the Oro Light and Power
Company inadvertently walked right into the hidden camp of the
Yahis, whose population had by then been reduced to four. Three
fled, leaving behind an old woman who couldn't walk. The surveyors
left the woman unharmed, but took all the Yahis' possessions with
them—blankets, acorns, salmon, traps, arrows, even a fire-making
tool. Soon only one Yahi was still alive. Three years later he
decided to join other humans, even though, given the facts of
history, he probably expected to be killed. The people who found
the silent and acquiescent "wild man" called Sheriff J. B. Webber,
who took him to the Oroville jail for his own protection. No one
could communicate with him. Sam Batwi, one of the few remaining
Yana people, was brought to try to talk with him because they were
both Indians from the same general area. But although the Yahis
were a part of the same linguistic group as the Yanas, their
languages were not very similar, and the two men did not understand
each other well. Reporters and newspaper publishers took full
advantage of this mystery, and sensational stories soon reached San
Francisco. Alfred Kroeber and Thomas Waterman, anthropologists at
the University of California, had heard about the surveying party's
encounter with the Yahi people and had tried, without success, to
find them. Hearing the news, they correctly guessed that the man
was a Yahi. Kroeber, who had dedicated his considerable energy to
"salvage anthropology"—that is, finding and recording what remained
of native cultures before they disappeared completely—arranged to
bring the man to stay at the university's anthropology museum in
San Francisco. The man never told anyone his true name, and it was
at the museum that people began to call him "Ishi," the Yahi word
for "man." As anthropologists, Kroeber and Waterman were thrilled
with this opportunity to study a culture and language on the brink
of disappearance. Over the next four years and seven months, as
they learned to communicate with each other, Ishi gave them a vast
and detailed body of information about Yahi life, even accompanying
them in 1914 on a trip to his old home at Deer Creek. Meanwhile,
visiting Ishi at the museum became a popular Sunday outing for
families in the San Francisco Bay area. For his part, Ishi took up
his new life with curiosity, grace, and great generosity of spirit.
In 1914 Ishi developed a cough that soon proved to be a symptom of
active tuberculosis. In 1916, while staying with the Watermans in
Berkeley and working with the linguist Edward Sapir to record Yahi
words and phrases, he died. After his death Saxton Pope, a doctor
at the hospital next to the museum who had become a particular
friend of Ishi's, wrote: "His were the qualities that last forever.
He was kind; he had courage and self-restraint, and though all had
been taken from him, there was no bitterness in his heart." Nobody
with any imagination can help but feel the immensity of this
tragedy, so dense with irony, so loaded with universal symbols. And
the symbolism has indeed become loaded for Native American people.
Many non-Indians, cherishing the sterling qualities of Ishi's
personality that Saxton Pope and others noted, see him as a
romantic and nostalgic figure. Somehow, far too many people have
come to believe that the "last wild Indian in North America," as he
is called in the subtitle of Theodora Kroeber's Ishi in Two Worlds,
was the last of the California Indians; plenty of California
children from families that act Indian, feel Indian, are Indian,
and are treated by their communities as Indian have had the
puzzling experience of hearing in school that there are no more
California Indians. How can this be? Maybe it's easier to think the
excesses of history are all in the past and their victims extinct
than it is to deal with the events of the past and their impact on
the present. Despite this brutal history and subsequent efforts to
downplay their traditions and sovereignty, California Indians are
very much present, distinguished from the mainstream by the bits
and pieces of their heritage they have been able to hold on to or
salvage. In another twist of fate, the bits and pieces have often
come from scholars who worked with people like Ishi, scholars who
believed they were recording the last vestiges of cultures that
would not survive. Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A
Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967); Jed Riffe and
Pamela Roberts, Ishi, the Last Yahi (Berkeley, Calif.: Rattlesnake
Productions, 1992), videocassette. Jeannine Gendar News from Native
California
Commentaren
Suggestion Steph,
I noted the spirals on these earrings and couldn't resist to suggest you to make the set matching the yellow pendant.
Salut !
Ed
Gepost door: Ed | 22-10-05
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