They did not see the decades he had spent hiding because members of his community had been killed.

They saw a demonstration of fire making.

They did not necessarily understand that the homeland in which those skills had meaning had been invaded and transformed.

They saw what newspapers called a living link to the past.

Ishi was living in the present.

Modern museum scholarship has become far more critical of this arrangement than many earlier biographies were.

The Phoebe A.

Hearst Museum of Anthropology, the institutional descendant of the museum where he lived, now explicitly acknowledges that Ishi was objectified as a living exhibit and that his employment resembled a form of indentured servitude.

That language is striking because it comes from the museum itself.

It does not mean that every personal relationship Ishi formed there was false.