Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

Many, many people have asked me, eager and expectant, “Wasn’t it wonderful to know Ishi?”

And I’m floored every time. All I can do is disappoint them by explaining that Ishi died thirteen years before I was born. I can’t remember even hearing his name until the late fifties, when a biography of him became first a subject of family conversation and then the consuming object of my mother’s work and thought for several years.

But my father, in my recollection, didn’t talk about Ishi. He talked very little about the past; he didn’t reminisce. As a man twenty years older than his wife, a father of grandfather age, he may well have determined never to be a garrulous old bore bleating about the good old days. But also by temperament he didn’t live in the past, but in the present, in the moment, right up to his death at eighty-four. I wish he had reminisced more, because he had done so many interesting things in interesting places, and was a fine storyteller. But getting his own past out of him was like pulling hen’s teeth. Once he did describe to us what he did during the 1906 Fire in San Francisco (it’s in my mother’s biography of him), and while he was in the remembering vein I asked him what he felt during the earthquake and after. He worked on his pipe for a while, lighting matches and making neat little piles of them, and then he said, “Exhilaration.”

I don’t mean to suggest that he was one of those yup-nope men. He was a highly conversable person, but he was too interested in what was happening now to look back much. I longed to know something about his first wife, Henrietta Rothschild, of San Francisco, but I didn’t know how to ask and he didn’t know how to answer, or there was too much old grief buried there and he wasn’t going to dig it up and display it. There is a modesty of grief, and he was a modest man.

That may also be why he didn’t talk about Ishi. So much old grief, old pain, still sharp. Not the cheap guilt trips the psychodramatisers pull out of their cheap hats: emotionally stunted scientist exploiting noble savage—Dr. Treves and the Elephant Man, Dr. Kroeber and Ishi—that is not what happened. It has happened, as we all know, and as he knew. But not in this case. Perhaps just the opposite.

The idea that objective observation can be performed only by an observer totally free of subjectivity involves an ideal of inhuman purity which we now recognise as being, fortunately, unattainable. But the dilemma of the subjective practitioner of objectivity persists, and presents itself to anthropologists in its most acute and painful form: the relationship between observer and observed when both of them are human. Novelists, people who write about people, have the same moral problem, the problem of exploitation, but we rarely face it in so stark a form. I’m awed at the courage of any scientist who admits it in all its intractability.

Looking at it from my naive, outsider’s standpoint, it seems to me that most of the Boasians had a pretty strict take on it. I know my father distrusted whites—amateurs or professionals—who claimed emotional or spiritual identification with Indians. He saw such claims as sentimental and co-optative. To him the term going native was one of disapproval. His friendships with Indians were that: friendships. Beginning in collaborative work, based on personal liking and respect, they involved neither patronisation nor co-optation.

With Ishi, a man almost unimaginably vulnerable in his tragic solitude, dependent by necessity, yet strong, generous, clear-minded, and affectionate, an extraordinary person in every way, this relationship of friendship must have been unusually complex and intense.

My father was consciously, consistently loyal to the ideal of objective science, but it was the passions of personal grief and personal loyalty that dictated his message from New York trying to prevent the autopsy of Ishi’s body—“Tell them as far as I am concerned science can go to hell. We propose to stand by our friends.”

His message came too late. A contemporary anthropologist has said that if he felt so strongly about the matter, why didn’t he get on an airplane and come West and see about it? One would think that an anthropologist might be aware that in 1916 there was a certain lack of airplanes to get on. A telegram was the only means he had to try to prevent the desecration.

I know little of the circumstances of the subsequent grotesque division of the body, which reminds me of the way kings and emperors were buried in bits, the head in Vienna, the heart in Habsburg, other pieces in other parts of the empire. Saints the same—an arm here, a finger there, a toe in a reliquary…. It would appear that to the European, dismembering a body and keeping bits of it around is a sign of respect. This is definitely a strain on our American cultural relativism. I leave it to you anthropologists to work it out.

Kroeber accepted defeat and got on with the work to be done. I do not think his silence was indifference but the muteness of undesired complicity and the dumbness of the bereaved. He had lost his friend. He had lost a person whom he loved and was responsible for, and lost him to the same sickness that had killed his wife a few years earlier, tuberculosis, the “White Sickness.” Over and over he had worked with individuals who were among the last of their people. One way or another his people and their white sicknesses had destroyed them. He was silent because neither he nor his science had a vocabulary for his knowledge. And if he couldn’t find the right words, he wouldn’t use the wrong ones.

Not long after Ishi’s death, my father took leave from anthropology, was psychoanalyzed, and practiced analysis for some years. But I don’t think Freud had quite the words he needed, either. The scope of his work and writing widened with the years, but at the very end of his life he returned to Californian ethnology, using his long-accumulated expertise to support Californian tribes in their suit against the U.S. government for restoration and reparation of their lands, spending months of testimony and cross-examination in a federal courtroom. My brother Ted, who drove him to many of these sessions, recalls the judge’s attempts to give the old man a break now and then, and Alfred’s patient but urgent determination to get the job done.

He wrote as little about Ishi as possible. When asked about Ishi, he answered. When it was suggested he should write a biography of Ishi, he declined. Robert Heizer took the excellent expedient of offering the task to my mother, who had never known Ishi, never been his friend, was not an anthropologist, was not a man, and could be trusted to find the right words if anybody could.

I was in the Lowie Museum here with Alfred Kroeber’s little great-granddaughter, ten years ago, and she showed me the headphones at the Ishi exhibit, where you can hear Ishi telling a story. I put them on and heard his voice for the first time. I broke into tears. For a moment. It seems the only appropriate response.

Some of you may have hoped to hear more about the family or about my father’s colleagues and students, who were certainly a large element in our family life. I am afraid I share Alfred’s incapacity for reminiscence. I am much better at making things up than at remembering them. The two Indian friends of my father’s that I can say something about, because as a child I did really relate to them, are the Papago Juan Dolores and the Yurok Robert Spott. But here I run into the moral problem we storytellers share with you anthropologists: the exploitation of real people. People should not use other people. My memories of these two Native American friends are hedged with caution and thorned with fear. What, after all, did I or do I understand about them? When I knew them, what did I know about them, about their political or their individual situation? Nothing. Not their people’s history, not their personal history, not their contributions to anthropology—nothing.