Ishi: The Last Yahi

This wonderful, award-winning, hour-long documentary is an absorbing, eye-opening look at the dichotomous American obsession with “savagery” and “civilization.” It recounts the history of the last four years in the life of a man known as Ishi, the last surviving member of his Yahi tribe of Native Americans. During the 1860s and '70s, the Yahi tribe was systematically exterminated by bounty hunters paid by the U.S. government to make California “safe” for westward expansion. As a child, Ishi fled into the hills with 40 surviving tribe members where he remained until 1911 when he became the last living Yahi. Cold and starving, the California Indian came down from the hills and spent the rest of his life as an exotic curiosity. Billed as “the last wild Indian in North America,” he was named Ishi and spent the final four years that remained of his life as a living museum exhibit and the darling of the newly birthed academic pursuit known as anthropology. This film documentary succeeds on many levels: as a compelling narrative of one individual's life story, as a study of America's exotic fascination with “otherness” and “primitive” behavior, as a case study of America's “cleansing” policy of manifest destiny, and as a primer of America's historic obliterate-and-assimilate response to cultural difference. Ishi's tale becomes a story of both personal tragedy and national reckoning.