The last of the Yahi: how a man became a living museum exhibit

History · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: In 1911, a starving man emerged from the California wilderness, identified as the last survivor of the Yahi people. He was taken to a museum in San Francisco, where he spent his final years demonstrating his culture to crowds, unaware that his own life would become a tragic study in objectification.

Ishi, whose true name remained unspoken due to Yahi custom, was born around 1860. For decades, he and his family lived in hiding to escape the systematic genocide of Native Californians by white settler militias. By the time he was cornered by dogs outside Oroville, California, on August 29, 1911, his entire family had perished. Rather than being sent to a reservation in Oklahoma, he was brought to the University of California Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco at the invitation of director Alfred L. Kroeber.

At the museum, Ishi lived for four and a half years, serving as a live-in custodian and research assistant. He was publicized as the last wild Indian in California, spending his days demonstrating Yahi crafts like obsidian projectile point knapping for museum visitors. While Kroeber considered Ishi a friend, the relationship was deeply unequal; Ishi was effectively an indentured servant and a living exhibit, often distressed by the presence of excavated Native American ancestors curated within the museum walls.

Ishi died of tuberculosis in March 1916. Despite his explicit request for a traditional cremation, his doctors performed an autopsy against his wishes. Kroeber, who was away at the time, later sent Ishi’s brain to the Smithsonian for study. It was not until 2000, following decades of advocacy by Maidu, Redding, and Pitt River tribes, that Ishi’s remains were finally repatriated and buried in a secret location near his ancestral home in the Deer Creek valley.

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