Ishi in Two Worlds
by Theodora Kroeber
The life story of Ishi, the Yahi Indian, lone survivor of a doomed tribe, is unique in the annals of North American anthropology. For more than forty years, Theodora Kroeber's biography has been sharing this tragic and absorbing drama with readers all over the world.
Ishi stumbled into the twentieth century on the morning of August 29, 1911, when, desperate with hunger and with terror of the white murderers of his family, he was found in the corral of a slaughterhouse near Oroville, California. Finally identified as an Indian by an anthropologist, Ishi was brought to San Francisco by Professor T. T. Waterman and lived there the rest of his life under the care and protection of Alfred Kroeber and the staff of the University of California's Museum of Anthropology. Karl Kroeber adds an informative tribute to the text, describing how the book came to be and how Theodora Kroeber's approach to the project was both a product of her era and of her insight and her empathy.
Photo of Theodora Kroeber
by G. Paul Bishop, Jr.
About the Author
Theodora Kroeber (1897-1979), wife of Alfred Louis Kroeber, is also the author of The Inland Whale (California). Karl Kroeber, son of Theodora Kroeber, is Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and coeditor, with Clifton Kroeber, of Ishi in Three Centuries (2003). Lewis Gannett, who wrote the forward for Ishi of Two Worlds was a critic for the New York Herald-Tribune.
Of Related Interest
Books
- Food in California Indian Culture
- Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California, 2004
- Handbook of the Indians of California
- Dover Publications, 1976.
- Ishi in Three Centuries
- University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
- Ishi the Last Yahi: A Documentary History
- University of California Press, 1979.
- Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last “Wild” Indian
- Norton, 2004.
- Native California Guide
- Trees Company Press, 2000.
- The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area.
- Heyday Books, 1981.
Video
- Ishi, the Last Yahi,
- Rattlesnake Productions, 1992
- For more information, call 415-557-4277.
