Ishi: The Last of the Yahi: Rationalization and Dehumanization

Below Y.L. shares her thoughts on the play Ishi: The Last of the Yahi:

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After watching the play Ishi: The Last of the Yahi, I get deeply understand of how the media (newspaper) and the mainstreams treat and look at the Indian tribe, taking Yahi as an example. When Ishi stepped out from the Yahi tribe, which other memebers were massacred by white vigilantes and bounty hunters, he became the last of Yahi tribe as well as the only experimental subject for anthropologists. He was called "Ishi" taken the meaning of man. Ironically, he didn't get the equal amount of respect as a man from what the play shows me. The play does show the dehumanization towards Yahi people, as a typical instance that reflecting the miserable experience for some other Indian tribes, meanwhile, white people rationalizing their behavior by dehumanization both physically and mentally on the Yahi. The opening scene of the play is the revivification of a Native man in a loincloth who is chased by a White man wielding a gun. The white hunter is really starving and intends to eat the native people. This happens both on stage as well as off stage, which makes audience feel in an intense and real situation. What does this part reflect in terms of dehumanization? As I know, the white hunters are not cannibals since in the mainstream American society, cannibalism is not accepted. The white hunters would definitely not consider about eating people when they went back to their own society, from a psychological perspective, their cannibalism derives from their cognition that native people are inferior human kind and that the animalistic of Yahi people is obvious.

To a large extent, what the white hunters thought reveals the popular anthropological view towards Indian Americans. The Europcentrism was rooted deeply in most of whites,  and that's why white people in California called the three hunters brave heroes for hunting Indian tribes instead of the criticizing for their ruthless game. The false thought of the dehumanization on Natives results in the rationalization and universal recognition among white culture of annihilating Indian Americans.
When Ishi was brought into modern American society, he was arranged to live in the Anthropology Museum of the University of California as a living interpreter of his extinct culture. (I personally was shocked by the fact that people could be put into the museum expect for bodies, as an audience, I felt this is really offending for Ishi) Based on the Oxford dictionary, the definition of museum is a building in which objects of historical, scientific, artistic, or cultural interest are stored and exhibited. Here we get the point, they treated Ishi as an object, and never thought about how Ishi would think about his tribe suffering from genocide and his being put into museum. UC berkeley professor Krober tried hard to collect Ishi's story to just make sure his research works well. Does he think on the scope of Ishi and moral viability to put Ishi into museum? Obviously, the answer is no. Since we can see that he was persuading a rich lady to invest a museum for his own benefit, either popularity as a professor or money. In this sector, Ishi was dehumanized by the researcher as well. Although most of the visitor and media accept such behavior, there is no way to rationalize it.

The play doesn't model Ishi as a positive character in a sense. First, the play focuses on how Ishi violated the culture rule within the tribe to have sex with his sister and killed the baby in order to survive under the slaughter. Second, Ishi was intentionally brought into cabaret and was seduced to have sex with a singer. All of these show him as a murder as well as a rapist. This might give us a negative image of Ishi, who represents Yahi tribe in the play, and also drive our sympathy away from Ishi and his tribe. By the portray of Ishi, the aversions on white vigilantes and the guilt of whites are lessened to some extent.

The play also includes complicated relationship between teaching associate Waterman, Krober's wife, and Dr. Pope. Their relationships were revealed when Ishi asked everyone's secret experience. The difficulties of telling one's secret story as when Krober pushed and forced Ishi were shown by comparing to the other people. Even Krober couldn't believe that his wife fell in love with Waterman, also the fact that she was involved in a lesbian relationship with other girl.  The reality is always painful to be acceptted. For Ishi, it's harder to tell, since his world was filled with escaping, slaughter, survival, and betray. When we are facing death, confronting the problem of "to be or not to be", the fear for death has more impact than love triangle issue in Waterman's case. That's easy to understand why's hard for Ishi to provide any information of his life in Yahi. However, it seems that Krober didn't realize the difficulty and self-depreciating of Ishi, instead, he kept forcing Ishi to tell his story.　

"Ishi has become an icon of our guilt and regret about past mistreatment of Native Americans," says Nancy Rockafellar, a medical historian at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). But do people really feel bad about him? As we can see the human right of Ishi was deprived in the play, as he was suffering from physical abusing at the beginning by hunters and mental torment to recall his miserable experience by anthropologist. Ishi's sister is another impressive character in the play. She later fell in love with a white hunter (unbelievable to me), but got pregnant. In order to keep her relationship with the white guy, she chose to let Ishi kill her baby. She finally couldn't escape from the lover's betray and got killed cruelly. She sacrificed her baby in exchange for her relationship, but the hunter sacrificed her in exchange for his "white superior". Can "white superior" be a reason to rationalize the slaughter even though it was someone you love? Or maybe the hunter was just playing around with her? The conflict between whites and Native peoples is incompatible. It was unrealistic at that time to live in harmon with other groups on the same land, and Natives are voiceless as minority, making the aggressive whites hunters feel superior. In either case, the guilt of whites can't be excused and rationalized. The Euro-centrism is inhumane for Indian tribes.

The story of Ishi was told in the whites perspective, and the name of the play itself also tries to rationalize whites guilt because it sounds like the extinction of Yahi tribe has nothing related to slaughter and genocide. As the only Yahi people alive, Ishi's whole life was controlled by whites. Also, as I known, his body was dismembered and distributed to do anthropological research without his permission after his died.  Respecting death is crucial in Indian tribes as well as in most of the popular culture. The dehumanization was going through Ishi's entire lifetime. From him, people should really re-examine what they did to Native Americans as a whole notion.

Y.L.