The Tehama County Museum is offering the 3rd Lecture/Presentation in its 2025 season. On May 10, Steve Schoonover, longtime Northern California newspaperman, CSU Chico graduate, Chico resident, and author, will be speaking on 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 and separate it 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 basically ignored the Yahi’s remarkable adaptation to a hostile environment with the facts of the destruction of the tribe being ignored.

The book focuses on the life of the Yahi and surrounding tribes, and the coming of white settlers. California, Schoonover writes, “wanted the natives out of the way and had the authority to use gunpowder.” By contrast, federal troops called in to “protect the settlers from Indian depredations” often “discovered it was the Indians who needed the protection more than the settlers.”

According to information in a Chico Enterprise Record article, Schoonover studied the ‘organized carnage’ of tribes in Butte, Tehama, Shasta and surrounding areas. He spent decades in search of Ishi’s heritage and the fate of his people. Schoonover’s 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. The “Ishi myth,” that he was starving, that he and the Yahi were part of the Mill Creek Indians is burst. “It’s important to understand,” Schoonover states, “what your predecessors and ours did to those who lived where you and I now live, in order to claim the land for ourselves.” His is the most piercing book you will ever read about the ghosts that haunt us still.