Academic Detectives Find the Long-Lost Brain of Ishi

The preserved brain of Ishi, who was known to generations of schoolchildren as California’s most famous Native American, has been found in a Smithsonian Institution warehouse more than eight decades after it vanished.

It took a pair of academics two years of relentless detective work to solve a mystery that has long bedeviled anthropologists. The discovery, revealed Friday by UC San Francisco, has electrified Northern California tribes that have struggled for years to locate the remains of the last survivor of the Yahi Indian tribe and rebury them in his homeland.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” said Shirley Prusia, chairwoman of the Mooretown Rancheria Concow Maidu tribe in Butte County.

“It is another one of those steps that is necessary for California Indians to get better control of their lives,” said Larry Myer, director of the state’s Native American Heritage Commission in Sacramento. “To put Ishi back together, to get his remains back, will be something that people will feel good about. It will give us a sense of healing, a sense of control.”

Books, plays, movies and dozens of doctoral dissertations have been written about the life and death of the starving, dazed Indian in his 40s who wandered out of the wilderness into the town of Oroville in 1911--years after the last of the Yahi were thought to have died out.

Ishi lived at the Phoebe Hearst Anthropological Museum, then housed at UC San Francisco, until his death from tuberculosis in 1916. His body was cremated and his ashes were stored at a cemetery in Colma, south of San Francisco, which remains a tourist attraction today.

The anthropologists who had studied and befriended Ishi from his emergence in Oroville until his death in San Francisco left records saying his brain had been preserved, but no one knew what had become of it.

The story of how it was found reads like a detective novel. The search by a UC San Francisco historian and a Duke University anthropologist began after they read a 1997 Los Angeles Times story about Indians in Butte County trying to find the remains. The tribes wanted to rebury Ishi in the wilderness area named for him in Lassen Volcanic National Park. The rugged enclave, where Ishi was born, was the Yahis’ last holdout.

But the tribes believed that the burial would be useless unless all the remains were reunited.

“It is very important that he be returned here as a complete person, a complete spirit,” Arthur Angle, director of the Butte County Native American Cultural Committee, told The Times in 1997. Angle could not be reached Friday.

After the Times article appeared, a UC San Francisco vice chancellor asked Nancy Rockafellar, a historian in the history of health science department, to determine whether the brain was at the university.

Rockafellar interviewed elderly physicians and searched medical records. She also made pilgrimages to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, which houses the papers of anthropologist Arthur Kroeber, director of the Phoebe Hearst Museum when he brought Ishi there in 1911.

Even after she was satisfied that the brain was not at UC San Francisco, Rockafellar kept searching. Finally, she interviewed a retired Berkeley anthropologist who had known Kroeber and his wife, Theodora, who wrote “Ishi Between Two Worlds” in 1961.

The anthropologist, Frank Norick, told Rockafellar that a colleague at the Smithsonian Institution had told him years ago that the brain was there. But the Smithsonian dismissed the reports as gossip when Rockafellar called. “I just hit a brick wall,” she said.

Then, several months ago, Duke University anthropologist Orin Starn, who is writing a book about Ishi, told Rockafellar that he too had been searching for the brain. Rockafellar told Starn she believed it was at the Smithsonian.

“I went to the Bancroft, where I had searched Kroeber’s papers many times and found no mention of what had happened to the brain,” Starn said. “This time, I looked under Smithsonian.”

To his astonishment, Starn found correspondence between Kroeber and Ales Hrdlicka, who in 1916 was the Smithsonian’s curator of physical anthropology. Hrdlicka had collected about 300 human brains, including nine of Native Americans, studying whether there was a correlation between brain weight and body weight in humans.

On Oct. 27, 1916, Kroeber, who was said to be distraught when Ishi died and furious that the body was autopsied against Ishi’s wishes, wrote laconically to his fellow academic: “Dear Dr. Hrdlicka: I find that at Ishi’s death last spring, his brain was removed and preserved. There is none here who can put it to scientific use. If you wish it, I shall be glad to deposit it in the National Museum collection.”

Hrdlicka replied: “My Dear Dr. Kroeber: I hardly need to say that we shall be very glad to receive and to take care of Ishi’s brain, and if a suitable opportunity occurs to have it suitably worked up.” The brain was sent Jan. 15, 1917.

At some point, it was transferred to a warehouse in Suitland, Md., where it languished as the decades rolled by and remains today, bathed in preservatives in a tank.

Starn confirmed the brain’s whereabouts in January. A Smithsonian spokesman said Friday that the institution has been in touch with the Butte County tribes to discuss repatriation.

“I don’t think there was any bad intent on the part of the institution,” Starn said. “I grew up in California and, like every fourth-grader there, I learned of Ishi. But they didn’t know about him on the East Coast, and they didn’t know people were looking for his remains.”

Federal law requires institutions that accept federal funds to return the remains of Native Americans when tribes that are affiliated with the remains request them.

The fate of Ishi’s remains, however, is far from certain. The Yahi are gone, and the existing tribes can only claim the remains on his behalf out of a broader sense of solidarity. And the Colma ashes are in a private cemetery not bound by the federal law.

In a report this week to UC San Francisco, Rockafellar recommended that the university lobby on behalf of the tribes for repatriation. As the place where Ishi lived his final years, Rockafellar said, the university has an obligation to his memory.

“He captures your imagination,” she said. “His basic humanness is what shines through in these accounts of him left by the whites who knew him, his humanness and his resiliency.”

Kroeber and a fellow anthropologist, Thomas T. Waterman, brought Ishi to the Phoebe Hearst Museum days after his discovery in Oroville. He became a nationwide sensation as a living example of “the last wild man in America.”

Living and working at the museum, he made arrowheads for the throngs of visitors who came to gape at him. He also provided Kroeber and Waterman with priceless information on the vanished Yahis’ language, rituals and history, including pressed-wax recordings of Yahi songs.

For years, Rockafellar said, academics have felt ambivalent about Ishi’s time at the museum. Kroeber and Waterman befriended and protected him, but also exploited him for their research.

And it is chilling, she said, that Kroeber sent his friend’s brain to the Smithsonian, although he knew that is not what Ishi would have wished.

“Once again, Ishi is, as he has always been, an icon for all kinds of ruminations on place, time, science, history and what is the right behavior,” she said.