devil in the details

burn down the mission, if we're gonna stay alive
~ elton john / bernie taupin

From Ranch and Mission Days in Alta California by Guadalupe Vallejo, The Century Magazine, December, 1890. The California Indians were full of rude superstitions of every sort when the Franciscan fathers first began to teach them. It is hard to collect old Indian stories in these days, because they have become mixed up with what the fathers taught them. But the wild Indians a hundred years ago told the priests what they believed, and it was difficult to persuade them to give it up. In fact, there was more or less of what the fathers told them was "devil-worship" going on all the time. And then there's this from Southern California: An Island on the Land by Carey McWilliams, 9th ed. 1980, originally published 1946 (p. 29). With the best theological intentions in the world, the Franciscan padres eliminated Indians with the effectiveness of Nazis operating concentration camps. That's Ishi on the right. The publisher (University of California Press) describes the book... Ishi stumbled into the twentieth century on the morning of August 29, 1911, when, desperate with hunger and with terror of the white murderers of his family, he was found in the corral of a slaughter house near Oroville, California. Finally identified as an Indian by an anthropologist, Ishi was brought to San Francisco by Professor T. T. Waterman and lived there the rest of his life under the care and protection of Alfred Kroeber and the staff of the University of California's Museum of Anthropology. The University of California, San Francisco, library (from whence also the photo) adds... Graciously collaborating with the anthropologists, Ishi provided insight about his language, a dialect presumed lost until his emergence from the Mill Creek region of California. Free to return to his homelands, Ishi chose to remain at the museum as a living interpreter of his culture. Exposed to a society hosting diseases foreign to the Yahi, Ishi contracted tuberculosis and died on March 25, 1916, at the medical college on Parnassus. Ishi left behind a legacy of invaluable information about his people, and provided a shining example of a courageous human spirit bridging the divide between two worlds.

A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America

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