Ishi: The Last of the Yahi: Stories as Greater than Life

In what follows L.C. reviews Ishi: The Last of the Yahi.

**Please note: My quotes of the play may not be entirely verbatim.

The great majority of the play, Ishi: The Last of the Yahi, is based upon Dr. Kroeber's obsession with wanting to make a display out of Ishi's stories. Ishi's stories takes on three prevalent themes throughout the play - stories as a cycle of life, the translation of stories, and the sacredness of the stories. Dr. Waterman begins to be able to predict Ishi's stories after awhile, because he realizes that "each of his stories balances out", much like cycles do - all points in the most Native American life is equally important, no point is more significant than the next. The translation of Ishi's stories were done both by Thaddeus - a half-Native American who was quickly disposed of once Ishi was found - and Dr. Waterman, but the entirety of the play seemed to play on the idea of translation - it was often ambiguous at times whether Ishi was speaking for himself or through another character. Lastly, the sacredness of stories seemed to be greater than life, as Ishi admitted that "once I knew my sister was dead, I came out of the forest to be killed, but instead, this", referring to the prying of Dr. Kroeber or Ishi's stories. Ishi once had a past of being told never to tell anything to anyone because "it is dangerous" to do so, but yet he is given virtually no choice by the power-hungry Dr. Kroeber.

The heaviest part of the play was during the killing of Ishi and his sister's incestuous child. I found myself thinking, "What in the world could possibly be so horrible as to trigger a killing of one's own child?" Yet, as it turns out, the disobedience of tribal tradition - the forbiddance of marrying one's own family member - overruled any rationality of love for one's own child. But the action of Ishi muffling a crying child wasn't the only action in the play - it didn't stand alone, but rather, recurred two other times. When Dr. Kroeber takes Ishi home to his house as way to "surprise" his guests at a house party, or rather, treating Ishi as this prized possession of his, another cycle appears - the recalling of Ishi's traumatic experience with white men's dogs helping to hunt down and destroy Ishi's own father. Ishi's experiences are his stories that Dr. Kroeber wishes to pry out of Ishi, regardless of whether or not it meant draining Ishi's life right out of him. The particular story of Ishi suffocating his and his sister's incestuous child was a literal draining of a physical life, but also had a powerful impact on Ishi's spiritual life - that one story "by the river" triggered a flood of other stories that inundated Dr. Kroeber with more information than he ever needed to or expected to know. Perhaps Dr. Kroeber never knew much about how Ishi treated Henrietta, but that, too was part of the cycle. Seeing Henrietta cry triggered a degree of compassion of in Ishi, who didn't know much else to do than to muffle her to keep others from thinking he was attempting any sexual or violent advances. His silencing of Henrietta parallels to his silencing of both his child's crying and later on, his sister's child's crying. After Ishi's physical silencing of him and his sister's child, his sister's leaves him in anger, filled with hatred. Later, she returns with a mixed child and asks Ishi to do the impossible - killing yet another child so she can continue her relations with a white man, who later on plots with others to kill her. Ishi is both distraught by his sister's betrayal and his sister's death, caught, trapped, without knowing what to do. He knew that white men did no

good - the cycle of gunfire and violence triggered continuously throughout the play by the witness of Native American skulls, the barking of dogs, and by recalling his sister's death - killing his father and destroying his family. Finally, after his sister's death, he feels no duty to live anymore, and comes to die, hoping to be freed from the stories of his past, only to be drained of it by the very source that destroyed his physical family. Ishi himself also triggers cycles throughout the play, by almost forcing other people to tell their own 'deep' life stories in order to press his stories out of him, complicating the plot further.

At the party Dr. Kroeber throws, Henrietta reveals her obsession with Dr. Waterman while Henrietta's friend (name I can't remember) reveals her affairs with the same man - all in front of both Dr. Kroeber and Dr. Waterman. The play essentially follows the stories of two family's - Ishi's and Dr. Kroeber's. The translation of Ishi's stories is assumed to be done through Dr. Waterman who clearly sees that the white's treatment of Native Americans was a genocide of its own, and warns Dr. Kroeber to be careful of prying anymore out of Ishi. Of course, Dr. Kroeber can't help himself and pries further, but each time Ishi tells his story, Ishi speaks for himself, rather than through another individual. Yet Dr. Kroeber, during common-day interaction with Ishi, reveals that he "can't understand what [Ishi]'s saying" while he seems

to be overwhelmed by the depth to Ishi's life told in common-day language. Thaddeus's presence in the beginning also suggests that the stories may not be accurate at all, depending on the mood or bias of the translator - in Thaddeus's case, he was bitter and resentful because he had just been replaced by this mysterious Ishi. Early on in the play, Thaddeus pried something loose from Ishi as a way to seek revenge upon Dr. Kroeber. In general, the fact that makes the play so ambiguous is whether or not Ishi was truly speaking for himself - we don't know, as audience members, whether or not Ishi's stories are to be taken as a whole-hearted fact. Because of history and the stereotype of Native Americans as brutal savages, Ishi's stories may actually depict the violence accurately. The audience, too, will have a tendency to sympathize with Ishi because of the brutalities forced against him - but may also experience a skepticism to completely sympathizing with Ishi, because of his lust for his sister and his contribution to the death of two babies. The translation of the story may also be ambiguous because of Ishi himself - after all, he may still suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, causing him to tell his stories as more violent and intense than they may actually be. Ishi may also be bitter at Dr. Kroeber and the team for forcing him to tell the stories in the first place, which may drive him to sugar-coat the stories, diminishing the intensity and pain, or may drive him to increase the intensity to purposefully inundate his listeners. And the other possibility of translation may just be the issue with translation itself - often times, translations will never truly be able to capture the essence of the real story, because languages don't always transfer cleaning to another. In general, this paragraph is meant to question the overall validity of the play through the lenses of translation of the stories - the other point that I wish to make

here is to ask whether or not the stories were ever meant to be translated in the first place. Can the American language ever do justice to the American Native American languages? Can the stories ever be rightfully translated and given the place they deserve in history? I personally thought that the play purposefully made it difficult to completely sympathize with one side or the other by making the translations ambiguous, but is that tactic ok? Or do the Native Americans like Ishi deserve a reckoning? And to complicate the matters further, if the stories of Native Americans like Ishi are to remain untold as to preserve a sanctity of tradition, how else is the general public supposed to know what things are like from the Native American perspective? Is there another tactic?

And finally, these questions resolve to the sacredness of stories itself in the Native American tradition. My first blog entry was commenting on the power of stories to create an individual and a community. [From my previous blog entry: The introduction of Reckonings (the book) reads, "Even if read in isolation, the stories create community", because that is often times how Native Americans were able to keep their traditions, heritage, and most importantly, their identities alive.] Ishi was in complete isolation when he emerged from the forest to be killed - but what he had was his stories that he perhaps wished to keep until his death. His stories were all that he had to hold onto, whether good or bad. Yet, rather than taking his physical life, Ishi was drained by Dr. Kroeber's hunger. By exposing all that Ishi had, Ishi himself had subjected himself to the judgment and power of whites, the very race that had taken away his physical family and community. And this robbing of stories only returns me back to the questions I posed in the previous paragraph: Is there another way?