Yahi (Yana) — Ishi

• People / language: Yahi, the southernmost group of the Yana people; Yahi dialect of the Yana language
• Region: Foothills of Lassen Peak / Deer Creek and Mill Creek country, northern California, USA

Why this entry stands in the register: the brief's Australian case (Kaurna) is outside the Americas and was set aside as instructed. Yahi is the strongest documented Americas substitute: a named last speaker, a dated massacre record, and an unusually complete audio documentation made with the speaker himself.

STATUS

Extinct. Ishi, the last known Yahi, died on 25 March 1916. Note the correction the record itself carries: at the 2000 repatriation of his remains, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History director Robert Fri stated that "Ishi was not the last of his kind" — as a Yahi–Yana man his closest living relatives and descendants are among the Yana people of northern California, who survive. What ended in 1916 was the Yahi group and its dialect as a living community, not Yana descent.

THE COUNT

• Yana population before European contact: approximately 3,000 (standard estimate carried in the Ishi literature).
• 1865, Three Knolls Massacre: approximately 30 Yahi survived the attack on Ishi's family group; cattlemen then killed about half of those survivors, and the remnant hid for some 40 years.
• 1911: one. Ishi emerged alone near Oroville on 29 August 1911, the last of the hiding band after his mother's and companions' deaths.
• 1916: zero Yahi speakers after Ishi's death of tuberculosis on 25 March 1916.

WHAT HAPPENED

• Massacre and bounty-era violence following the 1849 California Gold Rush: the Three Knolls Massacre (1865) and repeated killings by settlers and cattlemen reduced the Yahi from a people to a hiding band of a few dozen, then to a handful.
• Concealment as survival: from about 1870 to 1911 a band of roughly 5 to 20 Yahi (the range given in contemporary summaries) hid in the foothills country; a 1908 survey party's raid on their camp scattered the last family group, after which Ishi lived alone for three years.
• Disease after emergence: living at the University of California's Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco from September 1911, Ishi, who lacked immunity to common diseases, was often ill and died of tuberculosis in 1916.

WHAT SURVIVES

• 148 wax-cylinder recordings (5 hours 41 minutes) of Ishi speaking, singing, and telling stories in Yahi, made by Thomas Talbot Waterman and Alfred L. Kroeber — selected by the Library of Congress as a 2010 addition to the National Recording Registry; the cylinders' sound has since been recovered with optical (IRENE) technology.
• Edward Sapir's work on Yahi (summer 1915): Ishi was interviewed on his language by Sapir, who had previously worked on the northern Yana dialects; Sapir's Yahi material anchors the linguistic record.
• Ethnographic documentation by Waterman and Kroeber of Yahi material culture, family structure, and naming — made with Ishi at the museum, 1911–1916.
• Repatriation: Ishi's brain, sent to the Smithsonian in 1917, was returned on 10 August 2000 to the Redding Rancheria and Pit River tribes under the National Museum of the American Indian Act; his cremated remains were also returned for burial in a place kept undisclosed.

SOURCES

• "Ishi," biographical record (Wikipedia synthesis of the Kroeber/Waterman literature), accessed Oct 2026 — Yana c. 3,000; Three Knolls c. 30 survivors; emergence 29 Aug 1911; death 25 Mar 1916.
• Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds (University of California Press, 1961) — the standard narrative source.
• Library of Congress, National Recording Registry (2010 selections) — 148 cylinders, 5 hrs 41 mins.
• Smithsonian Institution repatriation reporting (2000) — Robert Fri statement; return of brain and remains, 10 Aug 2000.