The early twentieth century was an age fascinated by classification.

Museums collected objects from cultures around the world.

Anthropologists organized languages, customs, bones, tools, and photographs into systems of comparison.

Many scholars believed Native cultures were disappearing and that their task was to document as much as possible before they vanished.

This intellectual movement later became known as “salvage anthropology.”

It produced valuable records.

It also carried a profound contradiction.

Anthropologists sometimes treated Indigenous people as though they belonged to the past even while those people were living in the present.

The very societies that pressured Native communities to assimilate then treated the surviving pieces of traditional culture as rare scientific treasures.

Ishi entered exactly this world.