A great scandal erupted in 1998: The brain of the famous California Indian called Ishi had not been cremated with his body in 1916 but sent to the Smithsonian Institution to be pickled in formaldehyde and kept in its collection of human remains. Orin Starn, who grew up in Berkeley as a faculty member’s kid, had decided to write a book about the idealized Ishi, the Yahi man who had roamed around Mt. Lassen for decades with the remnants of his band—an older man and woman and a woman he considered a sister—until they (probably) died and he surrendered in 1911 to a sheriff in Oroville. Alfred Kroeber and his assistants, Thomas T. Waterman and Edward W. Gifford, arranged for the man to live in the new anthropology museum in San Francisco, where he could work as informant with them and, in 1915, with Edward Sapir. Ishi died of tuberculosis in March 1916, and the Berkeley anthropologists had his body, with a selection of his artifacts, cremated and the remains placed in a black Pueblo ceramic vessel in a San Francisco columbarium niche. Following up a claim made by a Maidu, Art Angle, Orin Starn found a letter in the Bancroft Library archives verifying receipt of Ishi’s brain by the Smithsonian’s Ales Hrdlicka. In accord with NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 1990), the Smithsonian then arranged to return the brain to the nearest living descendants of Ishi’s tribal group, who buried it with his cremated remains in his homeland.

Starn’s book is written in the form of a heroic quest. The young anthropologist (well, nearing 40 and coming up for tenure at Duke) wonders whom to trust, where to go next, and encounters gruff refusals and heartwarming acceptance by the Indians he befriends. At the end of the book, downplaying the fact that he had not been invited to Ishi’s burial, Starn describes an invitation he did get, after telephoning, to the hundredth birthday party of the oldest Maidu. Interwoven in the story of Starn’s quest are Ishi’s history, the tragic persecution of California’s Indians in the 19th century, and many critical notes on Theodora Kroeber’s classic 1961 biography Ishi in Two Worlds. A full set of notes with source citations follows the narrative, an anticlimax after its highly personal style.

The volume edited by the Kroeber brothers, both distinguished academics, understandably more kindly appreciates Theodora’s book; it can be read as its sequel to that book. When, in 1999, Karl Kroeber wrote to the chairman of Berkeley’s anthropology department offering to testify that his parents would have spoken in favor of repatriating Ishi’s remains, he was surprised to be told that the department was riven by agitation to publicly apologize for Alfred Koeber’s “indefensible” treatment of Ishi. With his mother Theodora also censured, Karl and his brother gathered a potpourri, encompassing memories of Ishi, papers on “primitives” as spectacle and specimen, the Berkeley controversy, analyses of Ishi’s knapping technology, language, and stories, and a 1906 summary of California Indians. Although choppy to read, this book has more in it for the anthropologist than Starn’s book.

Both books offer extended discussion of anthropological practices in Ishi’s day, 1911–16, contrasting them with current ethos honoring First Nations. Starn expresses outrage at insensitivity toward Ishi, the apparent exploitation of his capacity to give data, even to Saxton Pope (his medical doctor) photographing him as he was dying, autopsying the body, and preserving the brain for science. The Kroebers better appreciate the desperation Boasians felt for salvage ethnography and the wealth of information it produced, used by informants’ descendants for the last half century and into the present day. Their book documents the strong affection Ishi’s anthropologists felt for the man, the freedom he enjoyed to roam San Francisco (with wages he earned), his pleasure playing with neighbor children—he who had never been able to marry and raise children—and his willingness to demonstrate his skills before admiring audiences or for recording. In contrast to a young Pygmy man, Ota Benge, displayed in the Bronx Zoo’s Monkey House after being shown at the 1904 World’s Fair, and to the Inuit brought to the American Museum by Robert E. Peary—both books describe these examples—Ishi’s humanity was championed by Kroeber, Waterman, and their colleagues. Kroeber apparently never knowingly endangered informants as Elsie Clews Parsons and Leslie White did their Pueblo collaborators. His children remember his principal collaborators as friends visiting their home; Kroeber, like Clark Wissler, not only prepared Indians to collect ethnographic data for him but also gave one of them, Robert Spott, coauthor status. Kroeber’s sons, as editors, note that their father was an exemplary witness for Indian land claims in the 1950s.

Neither Starn nor the contributors to the Kroebers’ volume give readers a fair understanding of why Ishi’s brain was preserved for science. Remarkably, it was kept in the same Smithsonian vat as the brain of John Wesley Powell, founder and longtime director of the Bureau of American Ethnology. To me, this bespeaks signal honor to Ishi. As late as 1942, the brain of Egyptologist W. Flinders Petrie was put in formaldehyde and shipped to a museum, that of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Flinders Petrie, 89 when he died, had, like Major Powell, willed his brain for scientific study in the expectation that it might reveal the anatomy of his intelligence. Ishi himself did not talk about the disposal of his mortal remains nor about funeral customs; his people did not speak of the dead. (And Ishi’s English was surprisingly—or was it stubbornly?—limited.) Major Powell’s brain, incidentally, is still floating in that vat in the Suitland storage building. Demands to bury First Nations skeletons, and brains, if preserved, reflect Western ethos and a coded assertion of sovereignty as much as or, in instances, instead of particular indigenous customs. For example, Northern Plains nations placed corpses on scaffolds or in trees, or in the case of some leaders, in sealed tipis, letting the soul leave and the rest decay; elderly people who had grown up before reservations begged agents not to insist that their bodies be buried. Southeastern nations, as did the Inca and the Soviet Union with Lenin’s body, kept corpses of rulers on platforms in temples for, it would seem, centuries. Alfred Kroeber was distressed that, in his absence (he was in New York), Ishi’s brain was taken out of the body, but he felt that donating it to Hrdlicka’s important collection, alongside Major Powell’s, acknowledged Ishi’s intelligence. Had Hrdlicka not come to realize that his dissections revealed little, he might have found Ishi’s brain compared favorably with Powell’s.

One difference between Theodora Kroeber’s 1961 Ishi and the books here reviewed is their depictions of California Indians fighting against usurping colonists. Certainly the Indians were victims of genocide, unequivocably called for by local newspapers, but many colonists were murdered, too, as the later books make clear. Indians as well as colonists heartlessly massacred women and children. Indian resistance went on throughout the 19th century, and both Starn’s and the Kroeber brothers’ books attest to the complexities of that period. Ishi and other Indians in his region used some Spanish words, presumably gained when working for “Mexican” ranchers there before U. S. takeover. Ishi knew words in Maidu and Atsugewi, implying that he, or his relatives, had spent time with these neighboring foreign nations. Steven Shackley, a contributor to the Kroebers’ volume, states that Ishi’s lithics were more similar to those of Wintu than to Yana–Yahi and notes that Ishi himself physically resembled Wintu–Maidu somewhat more than northern Yana. In a lengthy section of the Kroebers’ volume on Ishi’s language and stories, belatedly translated and analyzed in the 1980s, Ishi’s version of a Coyote tale is contrasted with one recorded from a northern Yana, Sam Batwi, brought in to help Ishi adjust when he gave himself up in 1911. Pages here are spent pondering whether Ishi’s exacting detail reflects nostalgia or a style he had learned. Both Starn’s and the Kroebers’ books belabor the point that Ishi was not “the” Indian, or “the” California Indian, but a man who had lived for some fifty years on a volatile frontier.

The pathos of the last free Yahis comes out in an episode that Starn recounts (p. 240). In 1908, surveyors with a local cowboy guide happened on the Yahis’ tiny huts concealed by brush. Under ragged blankets sat a frail old lady, likely Ishi’s mother. The intruders kindly gave her a drink of water and assured her (in English) that they would not harm her. Then they picked up for souvenirs all of the Indians’ possessions: fur cloaks, mortars, quiver with arrows, baskets, fish nets—their necessities of life. Ishi has been said to be America’s Anne Frank. Perhaps he was more Anne’s father, living to grieve the cruel deaths of his loved ones. Theodora Kroeber’s biography of Ishi (who had died years before she met her husband) remains the most readable story of “the last Indian.” Orin Starn’s quest book adds historic detail and a great deal on contemporary repatriation politics. The Kroeber brothers’ volume combines direct accounts and data analyses with sections on the Berkeley controversy over their predecessors’ ethics. Ishi seems to have become a genre.