Dying to Live-my paper....

Ishi the last “wild” and purely oral individual to inhabit this nation brought himself out of the woods and into a world of literacy almost one hundred years ago. He hid in the mountains that created him and his people, the mountains that kept the oral culture of the Yahi alive. The small band of natives lived hidden from the white settlers and print culture for many years out of sight in the mountains and the thick brush keeping their culture alive though words that only Ishi and his family members understood. He was clearly a man of many words when he walked out of the mountains and onto a domesticated farm in the foothills of Oroville, California in 1911.
Ishi was a portal into the past, a gateway into a culture that was lost by many other ancient Tribes after the European settlers took over the land and destroyed the oral traditions with their printed words and dictionaries filled with meanings that were non-existent to the Natives of America. But it is part of the continuation of evolution to die to recreate something more apt to survive. “We have to die o continue living” (Ong 15). Words are like any other creature on this planet, changing and adapting to survive. As he walked out of the woods his culture was dying in order to live on through print. This man survived snowstorms, floods, heat waves, animal encounters, and massacres but he could no longer survive in his oral culture. He was the last of his tribe the Yahi.

Sean Kane talks about the connection between the two worlds—our world that we live in now and the otherworld in his book Wisdom of the Mythtellers. “Each kind of power makes the other kind possible” (Kane 172). Ishi could no longer exist in his oral culture without anyone else. He needed to venture into the world that we all know—the print culture—to survive. Taking written notes, translating his oral culture onto permanent ink smudged paper was the last of ancient oral America. And even if one world cannot exist without the other and print would have never happened without the spoken word there comes problems translating a culture into something it was never meant to be.

Ishi was given his name by the anthropologist Dr. Alfred Korebel from the University of California Berkeley after he had spent a few days with the man. Ishi meaning “man” in the Yahi language was actual an epithet rather than his real name. “Oral fold have no sense of name as a tag, for they have no idea of a name as something that can be seen” (Ong 33). Yahi custom was to never speak of names or the past. Names are important to us in the print culture because they give meaning to the things surrounding us. Names give us order, and to completely understand this man names were necessary.

The death of this enduring man was the death of the past that modern day print cultures could/can only imagine and write about in our alphabetized world. We in the modern ages of print try to get back what Ishi knew, and what his tribe knew as the only way of life: a life of gestures, expression, experiences, and lessons taught by speech and not by textbooks.

Ishi’s rich history and his culture-helped anthropologist understand more about the ancient inhabitants of their new country, but for Ishi it was a challenge to share this information. The Yahi believed that talking about the past was bad luck and caused a disruption in the spirit world. He was afraid of what could happen when he shared the past with his new literate supervisors. Instead of giving into the semi-sympathetic scientist he chanted an ancient tribal myth of the wood duck lasting more than six hours putting some men to sleep as they listened to the ancient three-note song about the Wood Duck and his wives. What these anthropologist and reporters did not understand at the time was they were listening to the past and not the future. With that performance Ishi’s oral culture was being recorded and taken out of the other world and placed in the world we know. He was sealing the fate of the last ancient oral traditions in this country.

The similarities between the literate world and the oral world are strong, and suggest that it was inevitable that oral societies would become dominated by print sooner or later. Ishi was one of the last to know what it was like to live in a simpler world of words. Our complex system of spelling, punctuation, grammar, gestures, definitions, and names was completely foreign to Ishi. His culture was not less intelligent than the one he walked into, it was simply oral, and focused on the traditions of memory and experience. He knew how to hunt and fish, how to survive the elements, he knew what plants to eat and what plants to use for medicinal purposes, he knew how to live outside in harmony with the natural world. Walter Ong suggest, “human beings communicate in countless ways, making use of all their senses, touch, taste, smell and especially sight, as well as hearing” (Ong 7). In Ishi’s life he used all these senses but in a way that the modern culture had lost to print. We still communicate using all our senses, but perhaps literacy has numbed them by a certain degree because we do not have to use our memory theater the same as primary oral cultures. The complex system used by literate society draws from the oral but expands further than the oral will ever be able too.

When Ishi stepped out of his home and into a world entirely opposite of his own he was taking a step from primary orality into secondary orality. He would never become completely literate, but his language would never become completely lost in print. He kept the spirit of his ancestors alive in his mind and in his heart, sharing sacred stories and places of worship with the anthropologist that took him in and incorporated him into the literate culture of San Francisco and surrounding areas. He lived in the mountains behind farms and ranches for years, two separate world living simultaneously in sync with one another not knowing or understanding one another.