Yahi (Ishi)

Yahi was the southernmost dialect of Yana, a language spoken in the foothills east of the Sacramento Valley in northern California. The Yana people occupied the rugged country drained by streams such as Mill Creek and Deer Creek, between the valley floor and the volcanic highlands around Lassen Peak. Yahi and its sister dialects were distinct enough that linguists treat them as a small family of their own, with no securely demonstrated close relatives.

The destruction of the Yahi was not a gradual fading but a killing. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 brought an invasion of settlers and miners into Yana territory, and over the following two decades the Yahi were reduced from a community of some hundreds to a tiny remnant through a series of massacres and reprisal killings — part of the broader campaign of state-sanctioned and vigilante violence that historians now describe plainly as the California genocide. The Three Knolls massacre of 1865 was among the worst of these attacks.

The handful of survivors disappeared into the back country and hid for roughly four decades, a period sometimes called “the long concealment.” One by one they died, until in 1911 a single starving man walked out of the hills near Oroville. The newspapers, in the idiom of their time, called him the “last wild Indian” — a phrase that says more about the society that coined it than about the man it described.

Anthropologists at the University of California took him into their care, and over his final years he recorded a substantial body of Yahi vocabulary, narrative, and song, working with Alfred Kroeber, Thomas Waterman, and the linguist Edward Sapir. He would never speak his own name, and so he was called Ishi, the Yana word for “man.” When he died of tuberculosis on 25 March 1916, the Yahi language died with its last speaker.