Orin Starn
Ishi's Brain
In Search of Americas Last "Wild" Indian
A chronicle of the search for the truth about the life and death of a legendary Native American.
After the Yahi were massacred in the mid-nineteenth century, Ishi survived alone for decades in the mountains of northern California, wearing skins and hunting with bow and arrow. His capture in 1911 made him a national sensation; anthropologist Alfred Kroeber declared him the world's most "uncivilized" man and made Ishi a living exhibit in his museum. Thousands came to see the displaced Indian before his death, of tuberculosis.
Ishi's Brain follows Orin Starn's gripping quest for the remains of the last of the Yahi. From the mountains of California to a forgotten steel vat at the Smithsonian, this "eloquent and soul-searching book" (Lit) is "a compelling account of one of American anthropology's strangest, saddest chapters" (Archaeology). 16 pages of illustrations.
Orin Starn, author of Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes, is an associate professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
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