Air Date: Week of April 13, 2001

Transcript

CURWOOD: Newton Ellison listens to us on KSTX in San Antonio, Texas. He heard Nathan Johnson's report on efforts to decipher the recordings of Ishi, the last member of the Yahi Indian tribe in California. He says there's much more to Ishi's story than speech patterns. "Couldn't you have done a little better?" he writes, "in the memory of this abused man's tortured life as the last of an entire race of people who were singly and by hundreds killed off by white adventurers?" Another KSTX, San Antonio, listener, Tom Gallaway, had a different take on the story. "I couldn't help thinking," writes Mr. Gallaway, "of the struggles Ishi described in his storytelling between the fictional Lizard and Wood Duck. Their competition for a bride and the death and resurrection of Wood Duck seemed to closely correspond with the basic Christian teachings of the struggle between Satan, a.k.a. the serpent, and Christ. Could Ishi's story actually be a legendary account of the creation of the Earth and the coming of Christ passed down from his ancestors?"

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CURWOOD: It's Living on Earth. I'm Steve Curwood. And this is NPR, National Public Radio. When we return: Egg-citement in the condor restoration effort. Stay tuned to Living on Earth.

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