Ishi: The last Yahi Indian

Ishi: The last Yahi Indian Tribe who taught and his skills of hunting have been wide spread throughout western worlds till now.

Ishi in 1914

Ishi (c. 1860 – March 25, 1916) was the name given to the last member of the Yahi, in turn the last surviving group of the Yana people ofBiography of Ishi

n August 1911, Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi Indian tribe, walked out of the foothills near Mount Lassen — leaving behind his Stone Age world — and entered twentieth-century California society. From 1911-1916, Ishi resided at the Anthropology Museum of the University of California Affiliated Colleges on Parnassus Heights in San Francisco (now the site of UCSF), sharing knowledge about his culture and beliefs with Anthropologists Alfred L. Kroeber and Theodore T. Waterman, as well as Surgeon Saxton T. Pope. Soon, Dr. Pope was joined by archery-enthusiast Arthur Young.

Graciously collaborating with the anthropologists, Ishi provided insight about his language, a dialect presumed lost until his emergence from the Mill Creek region of California. Free to return to his homelands, Ishi chose to remain at the museum as a living interpreter of his culture. Exposed to a society hosting diseases foreign to the Yahi, Ishi contracted tuberculosis and died on March 25, 1916, at the medical college on Parnassus. Ishi left behind a legacy of invaluable information about his people, and provided a shining example of a courageous human spirit bridging the divide between two worlds.

Ishi and archery

Ishi, like other California Indians of his time, was an excellent archer. Among his closest friends at the university was Saxton Pope, a physician called in to care for him. Pope was particularly fascinated by the bows and arrows Ishi made, and by the practice of archery. Ishi taught Pope how to make the equipment and the two hunted together in the mountains of California. After Ishi’s death, Pope continued with the archery that Ishi had taught him and went on to write the book Hunting with the Bow and Arrow, which became influential in the development of modern-day archery and archery hunting. Ishi’s arrow heads were made from obsidian, although when making arrowheads for the public he often used the bottoms of beer bottles.

Today, an annual archery tournament called the “Ishi Tournament” is held in the Yuba-Sutter community, about 40 minutes from Oroville. The tournament is open to both youth and adults, testing their skills in comparison to Ishi’s archery skills. Two awards can be earned during the tournament:

• The Ishi Certificate is awarded to any archer who can hit all 30 arrows to a 20 yrd. target, get a score of at least 99 to a 40 yrd. target, and have one arrow reach 100 yrds.
• The American Ishi Degree is awarded to any archer who can match Ishi’s 1914 archery scores or better. This award only goes to an average of 1-3 people a year, due to its complexity.