Last week, the German public radio station WDR aired a new segment of their feature series “Zeitzeichen,” titled “Lebensabend im Museum: Ishi, der Letzte seines Stammes.” Zeitzeichen is a “this day in …history” format. The feature aired on 25 March commemorated the death of Ishi in 1916. I was interviewed for the feature in December 2025.

Ishi had walked into the town of Oroville, California, in 1911 and been considered by academics and the American public to the “last wild Indian.” Ishi was a member of the Yahi tribe, a group believed to be extinct for several years. In 1911, roughly twenty years after the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890, the Frontier was considered closed and “pacified,” and the reservation era of US tribal policy was in full swing. Systematic government programs sought to force Indigenous communities into the American mainstream, with boarding schools, prohibition of traditional religions and customs, etc.

 Ishi was taken to the University of California in San Francisco, were he lived at the museum under the care of anthropologists such as Alfred Kroeber until his death in 1916. Anthropologists were eager to study Ishi, as his appearance seemed to offer an unexpected opportunity to witness the “pre-contact” Indigenous past.

The interviewers Markus Harmann and Joachim Heinz and I discussed Ishi’s life at the museum, the circumstances of his death, the preparation of parts of his body for scientific study, and the efforts of Indigenous activists and scientists during the 1990s to bring his body home and take it to rest. We discussed the issue of academic work ethic, in how far the anthropologists could have built a “friendship” with Ishi, as they protected him from the worst effects to the sudden culture clash he experienced, built rapport with him, but, at the same time, exploited him at the museum for public display and information gathering, and kept him in a state of dependency.

The interview didn’t have time to go into detail here, but we were especially taken by the moral conundrum around the treatment of Ishi’s body. Kroeber tried to prevent a dissection and preparation of the body, arguing that most of the vast collections of ancestral remains in US museums were never really studied closely anyway. He disagreed with many of the research questions used by physical anthropology at the time. Still, after his colleagues had dissected Ishi’s body against Kroeber’s wishes while he was traveling at the East Coast, Kroeber made the decision to donate Ishi’s brain to the Smithsonian. I find this last decision vexing. Did Kroeber reason that, after the damage had been done, the donation would at least  result in something “useful”? But how so, if he believed that most of the research done in physical anthropology way on the wrong track?   

In addition, the interview allowed me to dig deeper into the contexts of the story. I was aware that fantasy and science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin was Kroeber’s daughter. I read and reread many of her social science fiction novels in my twenties, and I had marveled over the anthropological references in many of her stories for years. Reading about Ishi in James Clifford’s Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century finally helped me connect a few more dots. It made me wonder what it was like for Le Guin to grow up in Kroeber’s family, imbued with her father’s interest in different cultures. It also made me wonder what Le Guin thought of Ishi’s story, and how she would have seen the moral issues around Ishi’s death.