Yesteryears Book Club discusses the California history you didn’t learn in school.

Imagine being the only person alive who speaks your native language—the only one who remembers the place you were born and everyone you knew.

Imagine being Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi, a tribe of indigenous northern Californians.

Ishi in Two Worlds, by Theodora Kroeber, tells the story of the Yahi people, including the genocide that ultimately led to Ishi being “discovered,” half dead of hunger, in Oroville in 1911.

But neither Ishi’s story nor the book ends there. Kroeber follows Ishi’s tumultuous entry into the modern world, where—in the custody of anthropologists including her own husband, Berkeley professor Alfred Kroeber—Ishi was lodged inside the Museum of Anthropology. The ethics of what happened next remain controverisal a century later.

Please join Dr. Barbara Lass, professor of anthropology, at 2pm on Saturday, October 25th, for a discussion of Ishi in Two Worlds.