Their world became smaller.

The Yahi language could still be spoken, but fewer voices answered.

Skills could still be passed down, but fewer teachers remained.

Stories could still be told, but the audience shrank.

The process of cultural loss did not happen in one dramatic instant.

It happened person by person.

This is one reason Ishi’s later museum life would be so emotionally complicated.

Anthropologists recorded him because they believed they were preserving knowledge at the edge of disappearance.

Yet the disappearance they documented was not a natural process.

It was the consequence of violence, dispossession, and demographic collapse.