• Introductory Note: As someone imbued in French theory, Vizenor is comfortable with (or notorious for!) coining his own words, and I should explain a few that are central to his theoretical writings, including the "Ishi" essay:

• Introductory Note #2: the title "Ishi Obscura" is an allusion to the old optical device called the "camera obscura," and also, by extension, Roland Barthes' famous postmodernist text, Camera Lucida (1980), in which Barthes claims the photograph to be a "flat death," an inevitable "this has been." . . . And so Ishi's photos = a dead finality that "is the absence of stories" (129) . . . Vizenor (as if to hide to Barthes influence?!) discusses Sontag on photography instead, as "simulation," predation, violation, reification, and "absence"—vs. the "heard" of "tribal stories" (129-130). . . . Then there are the old photos of chiefs—"captured as proud warriors . . . overhea[r]d as simulations too much," and "translated without [natural] reason*" (134-135). (More on Ishi & photography to follow.)

• 1st sentence: "Ishi was never his real name" (126). This pretty much sums up the essay?! Note that "Ishi" simply means "'one of the people'" (128); "'His [personal] name, if he knows it, he keeps to himself'" (132); and his identity, then, is (un-)revealed as a facade of false namings & representations & projections (& photos)

• 2nd sentence: "Ishi is a simulation, the absence of his tribal names" (126). While meaning practically the same thing as "Ishi was never his real name," Vizenor demonstrates his allegiance to French poststructuralism here: "simulation" is an obvious debt to Baudrillard's simulacra (signifers for which there are no real referents); and "absence" is indebted to Derrida, for whom "presence/absence" is a central binary, and who ultimately privileges absence as the better description of discourse in general—especially written discourse.

• To clarify what Ishi was not: "Ishi is not the last man of stone. He is not the obscure other, the mortal silence of savagism* and the vanishing race. . . . the silence of that tribal man is not the dead voice of racial photographs and the vanishing pose" (126). . . . A newspaper article of the day proclaims, "'The man is as aboriginal in his mode of life as though he inhabited the heart of an African jungle, all of his methods are those of primitive peoples" (128; oh, "heart of darkness"! Oh, Said!).

• Ishi & the Anthropologists: described as the "romantic heirs" of the white miners who captured Ishi, the anthropologists studying Ishi are perhaps as interesting to Vizenor as Ishi himself. They are "witnesses at the simulation of savagism"—i.e., Ishi—who "could become the last epiphanies of a chemical civilization" (127; this latter will become clearer!).

• Vizenor's Style is characterized by long, verbose (yet somehow still lyrical!?) sentences that "namedrop" two or three of his coined words, leaving the reader in a semi-impressed semi-daze. E.g.: "Ishi came out of the mountains and was invited to a cultural striptease at the centerfold of manifest manners and the histories of dominance; he crossed the scratch line of savagism and civilization with one name, and outlived the photographers. His survivance, that sense of mediation in tribal stories, is heard in a word that means 'one of the people,' and that word became his name. So much the better, and he never told the anthropologists, reporters, and curious practitioners his sacred tribal name, not even his nicknames" (127-128).

• Ishi (& Vizenor) as the Trickster: Ishi's "Trickster hermeneutics is the silence of his nicknames" (128). "Hermeneutics" can be read here, roughly, as "interpretation," as in a trickster approach to reality, and especially as a response to "manifest manners." (Later, Ishi's "poses" are described as revealing a "lonesome humor" [133].) Ishi's "survivance" includes this "trickster" play with his captors and dominant ideologies (e.g., 135). Vizenor likewise describes himself elsewhere as being a "crossblood [mixed-blood] trickster" in his writing—which explains in part his "perplexing" style (though his Euro-postmodern influences probably have as much to do with it!).

• (More on) Ishi & "Survivance": "survivance" is based on tribal orality; it is the "sense of mediation in tribal stories" (127-128); it is "the presence of imagination, oral stories, the humor in trickster stories, and the observation of actual behavior and experience [natural reason]" (128). Also: "To be heard was once a course of survivance in tribal imagination"; but with colonization, "the sounds of the stories, the human touch of humor and silence, and visions must be" replaced with photographs, and written textuality, etc. (129). Later, Ishi is "a winsome[!] warrior of survivance, not a religious leader or a warrior chief. . . . His personal power was more [trickster-]elusive than the political poses of a tribal leader. . . . His stories were his survivance" (134). Vizenor earnestly contrasts Ishi's behavior with the "simulated" tribal leaders: Ishi's "power is more communal than personal, and the power of the spoken word goes with the stories of the survivors, and becomes the literature of survivance" (135). But his "stories" were mostly silence, en'it?!—above all, Ishi "should be honored for more than his stories, his humor, and survivance; he should be honored because he never learned how to slow his stories down to be written and recorded" (136). . . . But at last (to end on a downer), silence has its drawbacks: in spite of the fame of his (simulated) name, "he has seldom been heard as a real person" (137).

• (More on) "Manifest Manners": Vizenor fills out the attributes of "manifest manners": it includes not only primitivism, but "racialism and postmodern speciesism[!], a linear consideration that was based on the absence of monotheism, material evidence of civilization, institutional violence, and written words" (128; i.e., these were used as evident for racism, and against Ishi's humanity); the result is an "absence," not a "presence" (128; in contrast, Vizenor considers Native "survivance" as a positive, and indeed phonocentric, presence.)

• Ishi & Photography (see also "Introductory Note #2," above): Vizenor's citations from Sontag feel like metonyms for the ideas of Barthes and Baudrillard as critiques of photography and simulation: "The absence of the tribes is sealed, not real, in a photograph; the absence is a simulation" (129); "The simulation [of the photograph] supercedes the real and remembrance" (130). Photos of Ishi, in particular, are "the simulations of a vanishing pose*" (133; w/ echoes of the "vanishing Indian"). Then there is that most uncanny anecdote about the the "simulated tattoo" on Ishi in one of the Wanamaker photos, which "enhances the image of a naked savage" (134)! (I'm still not sure what to make of this, including Vizenor's point.) . . . And finally, it is largely because they were photographed that the chiefs, "tribal leaders," became mere "simulated leaders": "Some tribal leaders were captured as proud warriors in photographs; they were heard . . . as simulations too much, and translated without reason, and out of season; their stories were lost to manifest manners, and lost at inaugurations and in wild west shows" (134-135).

• Coda: Karl Kroeber: you have to relish the famed anthropologist's final act of conscience(?), his "tribute" upon Ishi's death?: don't give up his body to anthropology!, he says—"If there is any talk about the interests of science, say for me that science can go to hell"! But his following words are sadder: "We have hundreds of Indian skeletons that nobody ever comes near to study[!!]. The prime interest in this case would be of a morbid romantic[!!] nature" (137). (Ooh.)

Vizenor, Gerald. "Ishi Obscura." Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, U of Nebraska P, 1994, pp. 126-137.

---. "Ishi Obscura." Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader, Wesleyan UP, 1994, pp. 184-193.