I and My Brother Against My Cousin
I and My Brother Against My Cousin
The Yahi were fierce predatory raiders–as were hill tribesmen the world over with their remote sanctuaries and a lack of property to defend. Lowland Indians feared them, and the Yahi offered the stiffest resistance to the flood of settlers who entered California during the 1850s Gold Rush. In the end all but a few dozen of the several hundred Yahi were killed, and the survivors vanished into the remotest parts of their mountain territory, living a life of concealment, at bare subsistence level, for 40 years. The renowned anthropologist Alfred Kroeber dubbed this refugee group “the smallest free nation in the world.” Ethnologists of the day considered the Yahi way of life during the four-decade concealment “the most totally aboriginal and primitive of any on the continent.”
The amusing thing about this quote, of course, is that the Yahi were not living an aboriginal lifestyle. It was a new lifestyle to them, different than the lifestyle they had previously had. Aboriginal is just a fancy word for original, and this was obviously not the Yahi’s original lifestyle, since they were driven to it.
Unfortunately, this tells us almost everything we need to know about the presuppositions of anthropologists.
