Ishi asked to be cremated by Yahi custom, and the university sent his brain to the Smithsonian, which returned it 84 years later

Ishi was born about 1860, a Yahi, a branch of the Yana people of northern California. On 29 August 1911, starving, he walked out of hiding near Oroville and was held in the local jail. The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber proposed that he live at the University of California museum in San Francisco rather than be sent to a reservation in Oklahoma. He lived there four and a half years as custodian and research assistant and was promoted as "the last wild Indian in California". The museum now says his position resembled indentured servitude. He was distressed to live among excavated human remains and asked that his body be cremated by Yahi custom. He died of tuberculosis on 25 March 1916. A university doctor performed an autopsy against his wishes. Kroeber, away at the time, had advised against it. On his return Kroeber sent Ishi's brain to the Smithsonian. The body was cremated and the ashes placed in a cemetery south of San Francisco. In 1997 and 1998 tribes publicised the Smithsonian's first denial that it held the brain. It was found in a Smithsonian warehouse in Maryland. In August 2000 the Smithsonian returned it to the Redding Rancheria and the Pit River Tribe, who buried it with his ashes at a secret place near Deer Creek.