Mystery of Ishi Solved Story-Date: 03:54 a.m. PST Saturday , February 20, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------ Mystery of Ishi Solved Brain of famed American Indian found after eight-decade search By Mary Curtius Los Angeles Times SAN FRANCISCO -- The preserved brain of Ishi, known to generations of school children as California's most famous American Indian, has been found in a Smithsonian Institution warehouse in Maryland more than eight decades after it vanished. It took a pair of academics two years of relentless detective work to solve a mystery that has long bedeviled anthropologists. The discovery, revealed Friday by the University of California-San Francisco, has electrified Northern California tribes that have struggled for years to locate the remains of the last survivor of the Yahi Indian tribe and rebury them in his homeland. "Isn't it wonderful?" said Shirley Prusia, tribal chair of the Mooretown Rancheria Concow Maidu tribe in Butte County. "It is another one of those steps that is necessary for California Indians to get better control of their lives," said Larry Myer, director of the state's Native American Heritage Commission in Sacramento. "To put Ishi back together, to get his remains back will be something that people will feel good about. It will give us a sense of healing, a sense of control." Books, plays, movies and dozens of doctoral dissertations have been written about the life and death of the starving, dazed Indian who wandered out of the wilderness into the town of Oroville in August 1911 -- years after the last of the Yahi were thought to have been killed by European settlers or disease. Though he died of a white man's disease -- tuberculosis -- only five years later, during that time Ishi became the center of exhibits and sensational newspaper accounts, and taught academics about the Yahi. And he emerged, as anthropologist Arthur Kroeber put it, as someone who was "kindly, obliging, invariably even-tempered" who "thoroughly endeared himself to all with whom he came into contact." The hunt begins The story of how Ishi's brain was found reads like a detective novel. The search by a UCSF historian and a Duke University anthropologist began after they read a 1997 Los Angeles Times article about Butte County American Indians trying to find the remains. The tribes wanted to rebury Ishi in the wilderness area named for him in Lassen National Park. The rugged enclave was the Yahi's last holdout and Ishi's birthplace. Trouble was, the tribes believed that the burial would be useless unless all the remains were reunited. The anthropologists who had studied and befriended Ishi from the time of his emergence in Oroville until his 1916 death in San Francisco left records saying his brain had been preserved, but no one knew what had become of it. "It is very important that he be returned here as a complete person, a complete spirit," Arthur Angle, director of the Butte County Native American Cultural Committee, said in 1997. Angle could not be reached Friday. After his death, Ishi's body was cremated and his ashes were stored in a cemetery in Colma, where they remain a tourist attraction. After the article appeared, a UCSF vice chancellor asked Nancy Rockafellar, a historian in the History of Health Science Department, to determine whether the brain was at the university. Rockafellar interviewed elderly physicians and searched medical records. She also made pilgrimages to the Bancroft Library at the University of California-Berkeley, which houses the papers of anthropologist Kroeber, director of the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology when he brought Ishi there in 1911. Even after she was satisfied that the brain was not at UCSF, Rockafellar kept searching. Finally, she interviewed a retired Berkeley anthropologist who had known Kroeber and his wife, Theodora, who wrote "Ishi Between Two Worlds" in 1961. The anthropologist, Frank Norick, told Rockafellar that a colleague at the Smithsonian Institution had told him years ago that the brain was at the Smithsonian. But the Smithsonian dismissed the reports as gossip when Rockafellar called. "I just hit a brick wall," she said. Then, several months ago, Duke University anthropologist Orin Starn, who is writing a book about Ishi, told Rockafellar that he had been searching for the brain. Rockafellar told Starn she believed it was at the Smithsonian. "I went to the Bancroft, where I had searched Kroeber's papers many times and found no mention of what had happened to the brain," Starn said. "This time, I looked under Smithsonian." Paper trail To his astonishment, Starn found correspondence between Kroeber and Ales Hrdlicka, who in 1916 was the Smithsonian's curator of physical anthropology. Hrdlicka had collected about 300 human brains, including nine of American Indians, studying whether there was a correlation between brain weight and body weight in humans. "Apparently, no one had ever thought to check that cross-reference," Starn said. On Oct. 27, 1916, Kroeber, who was said to be distraught when Ishi died and furious that the body was autopsied against Ishi's wishes, wrote laconically to his fellow academic: "Dear Dr. Hrdlicka: I find that at Ishi's death last spring, his brain was removed and preserved. There is none here who can put it to scientific use. If you wish it, I shall be glad to deposit it in the National Museum collection." Final destination Hrdlicka replied: "My Dear Dr. Kroeber: I hardly need to say that we shall be very glad to receive and to take care of Ishi's brain, and if a suitable opportunity occurs to have it suitably worked up." The brain was sent Jan. 15, 1917. At some point, it was transferred to a warehouse in Sutland, Md., where it remains today, bathed in preservatives in a tank. Starn confirmed the brain's whereabouts in January. A Smithsonian spokesman said Friday that the institution has been in touch with the Butte County tribes to discuss repatriation. The fate of Ishi's remains, however, is far from certain. The Yahi are gone, and the existing tribes can only claim the remains on his behalf out of a broader sense of solidarity. And the Colma cremations are in a private cemetery not bound by the federal law. In a report this week to UCSF, Rockafellar recommended that the university lobby on behalf of the tribes for repatriation. Mercury News staff and wire services contributed to this report. ------------------------------------------------------------