Before Ishi

The Tehama County Museum is offering the 3rd Lecture/Presentation in its 2025 season. Steve Schoonover, longtime Northern California newsman, Chico resident, and author, will be speaking about his book, "Before Ishi: The Life and Death of the Yahi." Steve describes the book as an effort to unravel the history of the Yahi from the myths that have been woven around Ishi. It is an attempt to reconstruct the history of the Yahi Indians of Northern California, a history the author feels was mangled by a common infatuation with the myths surrounding Ishi, the last survivor of the tribe. The focus on Ishi has allotted the Yahi's remarkable adaptation to a hostile environment to be ignored. And the facts of the destruction of the tribe have been replaced. According to Dan Barnett of the Chico Enterprise Record in an article published on May 21, 2024: Schoonover is a journalist who studied the ‘organized carnage’ of tribes in Butte, Tehama, Shasta and surrounding areas. For decades this longtime reporter has been in search of Ishi’s heritage and the fate of his people, the Yahi. A dogged investigation of the historical record challenges claims made in books about Ishi, and paints a nuanced picture of gruesome violence against native populations in the mid-1800s in Butte, Tehama and Shasta counties.