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