The Last of the Yahis Is About to Come Home

They’ve gone to Washington this week, to bring Ishi home.

Ishi, presumed to be the last of the Yahi tribe and a man ballyhooed as “the last wild American Indian in North America,” was cremated when he died in 1916, five years after he had been found starving and terrified in Oroville.

His brain was sent to the Smithsonian Institution, to join the remains of 18,000 anonymous Native Americans, until scholars tracked it down.

Now, the Pit River tribe, descendants of the Yana, the parent tribe of the Yahi, have gone to the museum to claim the remains. They will return Ishi’s brain for burial rituals at a secret site in the foothills of Mt. Lassen.

Ishi means “man” in the Yahi language; he never revealed his name. In 1911 he was taken to UC Berkeley, to anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, and there he became a kind of living exhibition, a relic of the exterminated tribes of California.

Ironically, his years at Berkeley made him the internationally renowned symbol of the degradation of Native Americans. His plight has been studied by California schoolchildren learning of the virtual genocide of native Californians at the hands of the Spanish, the ‘49ers and later settlers.

Welcome home, Ishi, wherever you will be.

*

Party of the first part: The convention is coming! The tension is unbearable! Who will end up as his party’s nominee for president?

No, the other convention--the only one with any suspense. Reform Party delegates arrive in Long Beach on Thursday for the titanic struggle between former GOP bloviator Pat Buchanan and physicist John Hagelin, the favorite of Perot supporters.

All of this goes to show that California has indeed become the nation’s political belle, an irresistibly rich catch with its heaps of campaign cash and its 54 kingmaker electoral votes. It wasn’t always so. The first time California fielded a candidate for the White House, the GOP’s first presidential candidate, swashbuckler John C. Fremont, carried the state’s hefty four electoral votes.

For those with the drive time to spare, the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda is throwing open its doors free to Democratic delegates, alternates and the media mob. Among the treats in store for them: two new what-if Barbie dolls of Laura Bush and Tipper Gore, in scaled-down gowns each wore at her husband’s inaugural. As long as style is trumping substance in politics, the library should ask visitors to vote--for their preferred first lady.

*

Drive? Drink! In the nation’s less stylish cities, safe drivers are flagged down by cops and rewarded with certificates for holiday turkeys. In Berkeley, it’s different, natch.

The city’s Good Driver Recognition program has police pulling over courteous drivers to hand them coupons for free coffee--lattes, espressos, macchiatos, name your poison.

Police took up a collection to pay for the coffee coupons after roadside rage over parking tickets prompted a rebellion in which locals destroyed 3,000 parking meters. Negotiations resulted in an agreement that if a driver reaches the driver’s seat before the ticket gets under the windshield wiper, the parking cop will tear it up.

Some drivers say the fright of being pulled over isn’t worth a cuppa java, but others find it a pleasant gesture, even if it isn’t worth a hill of beans.

*

*

One-offs: Koko, the gorilla who communicates by sign language at her research home in Woodland, has a new kitten as a companion to replace Michael, another gorilla whose death in April left her in low spirits. . . . From an anonymous mailing of photos of three hunters posing with the bloody body of a protected California mountain lion, Fish and Game investigators tracked down the car in one picture and arrested three men for illegally possessing protected cougar parts as trophies.

EXIT LINE

“If you go in to win, solely to win, it takes the fun out of it.”

--Canadian landscaper Brett Stocker, whose team took part in Imperial Beach’s 20th Sandcastle Days sand-sculpture event.

*

California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

California Democrats

*

Close to 6.7 million Californians are registered Democrats. Here are the counties with the most and fewest, in percentage terms:

THE MOST

*

Registered % of

County Democrats Voters

San Francisco 267,875 57%

Alameda 366,550 57%

Merced 42,290 54%

Los Angeles 2,022,316 53%

Imperial 25,227 53%

*

THE FEWEST

Registered % of

County Democrats Voters

Alpine 263 35%

Placer 45,847 34%

Nevada 18,504 33%

Orange 391,454 32%

Mono 1,892 32%

*

Source: California secretary of state’s report of registration, February 2000

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times