By Louise Steinman

'INTO ALL LIVES some rain must fall, but Indians have been cursed above all other people. Indians have anthropologists," Lakota writer Vine Deloria Jr. complained, only half jesting, during the Red Power movement in the 1960s.

The relationship between anthropologists and indigenous peoples is the subject of Orin Starn's revelatory new book, Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian. Starn, a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University, updates the iconic story of Ishi, the last of the Yahi tribe, and the anthropologists who befriended and studied him.

It was Theodora Kroeber, wife of eminent anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who first told Ishi's story, in her 1961 book Ishi in Two Worlds. After decades as a refugee in his tribal homeland, the starving Indian staggered out of the steep canyons below Mount Lassen and into the town of Oroville in 1911. His appearance caused a sensation. "The Last Free Survivor of the Red Man," a local newspaper trumpeted. Though Starn critiques Kroeber for her inaccuracies about Yahi history as well as for her romanticism – sometimes to the point of condescension – about Ishi, he also lauds her for calling attention to the bloody dispossession of California's Indians at a time when few people were aware of or willing to talk about it.

Alfred Kroeber, intrigued with the idea of a "wild" Indian, brought the man (for whom he supplied the name Ishi, the Yahi word for "man") to the new anthropology museum in Parnassus Heights in San Francisco. Ishi lived out the rest of his life in the museum, surrounded by artifacts from obliterated Indian cultures. "Kroeber never reflected," Starn dryly notes, "on the ethics of having a survivor of genocide on exhibit." Ishi's public demonstrations of arrowhead-making and other Yahi arts were a Sunday staple at the museum.

Alfred Kroeber was one of three white people, including UC San Francisco surgeon Saxton Pope and anthropologist Thomas Waterman, who became Ishi's closest friends. Starn limns the contradictions and paradoxes of friendships in which Ishi was both "specimen and beloved friend." To the anthropologists of his time, Ishi was a trove of valuable information. He patiently recorded hours of Yahi songs and stories on wax cylinders. He worked with famous linguist Edward Sapir to decode the Yahi language, of which he was the last speaker.

The anthropologists saw Ishi as a "typical" Yahi, a man who could reveal the secrets of a vanished way of life. There's a faulty premise, however, in theorizing about a whole culture through the testimony of one person. "People have compared trying to understand Yahi culture through what Ishi told the anthropologists," Starns writes, "to imagining that one can understand Jewish culture in Germany in the 1930's as a whole by the testimony of one Holocaust survivor."

Ishi died of tuberculosis in 1916, the disease likely contracted as a result of his contact with the thousands of white visitors who streamed through the museum on Sundays. In Kroeber's absence, and against his wishes, Pope – Ishi's best friend – authorized an autopsy. "It was a time," Starn points out, "when the prerogatives of sciences were allowed to rule almost unchecked."

Ishi's brain was removed at the time of the autopsy, a fact Theodora Kroeber fleetingly mentioned in her book but didn't pursue. Where did it go? Was it cremated with Ishi's body? Nearly a century later, Starn tracks down a Wells Fargo and Co. Express receipt from Jan. 5, 1917, verifying the shipment of the preserved organ to the Smithsonian Museum. For years, Ishi's brain had been floating in Tank 6 of the museum's so-called Wet Collection side by side with the brain of explorer John Wesley Powell. After a protracted wrangling, Ishi's brain was reunited with his cremated remains; his Indian brethren buried him in a secret ceremony in the Mount Lassen foothills.

In the early 20th century, when the disciples of great anthropologist Franz Boas – Alfred Kroeber among them – did their fieldwork, it was a foregone conclusion that North American Indian culture was on the brink of disappearing entirely. "Salvage anthropology" was the operant strategy: find, record, and collect what was left of the cultural remnants.

Few Californians today know about the ethnic cleansing that took place in our state in the 19th century. It's not a well-known fact that the state of California once reimbursed Indian-hunters for their expenses. Schoolchildren study the missions, but few – if any – learn about the richness of Indian culture that flourished here before the gold rush.

In the stunning coda to his book, Starn reveals one more twist of the Ishi story. It turns out that four out of the more than 200 songs Ishi performed for the anthropologists were sung not in Yahi but in a dialect of another tribe – the mountain Maidu. The tapes had never been transcribed.

Starn located three older Maidu who speak this now private code, and he drove to a remote mountain valley high above the Feather River Gorge to play the tapes for them. They listened, their faces grim. "He shouldn't have sung those songs," one of them said.

They were doctoring songs, heavy medicine. Was Ishi a betrayer of secrets? Or was he perhaps himself a healer? What was his motivation for singing a song with potentially dangerous power?

"Maybe," another of the elders said, "he figured it didn't matter what he sang because everything was over, there wasn't anyone else left."

Starn doesn't pretend to know the answer. Ishi, he admits, will forever be an enigma. "Ishi Obscura," cultural critic Gerald Vizenor dubbed him.

On the subject of Ishi's intelligence and talents, however, Starn has no doubts: "In every society there are extraordinary people, and Ishi was extraordinary. He had genius for survival and for finding his way through hardship and new conditions. I could imagine that – had he been raised in Pasadena or Los Angeles and not the wilderness of Deer Creek – he'd have grown up to be a great artist, a world-class musician, or a Nobel Prize-winning scientist."

Starn's eloquent and soul-searching book provides Ishi with a memorial worthy of his humanity, his genius.

Louise Steinman is the author, most recently, of The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father's War (Penguin Plume). She lives in Los Angeles.

Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian