I think about The Man of the Hole so often. 27 years alone. 27 years with no one to speak to but strangers to wave to. Survived a genocide, a massacre that killed everyone he had ever known and later, an assassination attempt. He still tried to warn researches about the traps he built. He was only about 60 when he died in 2022. The people who tormented him in life later desecrated his grave.
I do think it is important to share the stories of the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island and Ishi and the countless other indigenous people who experienced the profound trauma of being the last survivor but it is important to remember that the last Aboriginal families in Australia to be contacted by Europeans were resettled in the 1980s and the Indian government has proposed a plan that will mean total genocide for the Shompen people. The total eradication of indigenous peoples, their cultures, their languages, their ways of life, is not something which occurred in a distant ugly past but an ongoing process.
Oh there was just a radio/podcast special about Ishi last week and I invite you all to learn about the story. Itâs so shocking and tragic and heartbreaking.
His family was the last surviving population of the Yahi tribe and when they died he came into contact with US Americans for the first time looking for food and help. They held him in jail until they could figure out what to do with him because nobody spoke his language. Then they brought him to the UC anthropology museum because they at least had some documentation of his language. Alfred Kroeber (father of Ursula K LeGuin, so she would have grown up around Ishi and had family dinner with him) pretty much took care of him, had him living in the museum, and made his lifeâs work documenting everything about Ishi and his culture and knowledge as possible. They were able to record and document so much and had him doing public demonstrations of various traditional skills and crafts.
And he spent the rest of his life living in a museum. He wasnât held against his will or anything and he got paid for his work, but still so tragic to be the last of your people and solely responsible for making sure that knowledge and culture doesnât die with you. I think all this is at the anthropology museum at UC Berkeley now, but UCSF might still have some archives.
Get to know the man himself â not just as a victim of his circumstances â but for the remarkable human being he was.
