“…First placed in a local jail where he was a spectacle for townspeople and later moved to Kroeber's anthropology museum where he lived, worked, and was studied by Kroeber (and his assistant, Thomas Waterman) as a museum specimen and curiosity, the nameless man known as Ishi was publicly labeled the “last wild indian in California” (Starn, 2004). The trope of the vanishing, dying, and last “Indian” is a colonial construct that situates Indigenous and Native American peoples as temporally stagnant, incapable of meeting the demands of European “civilization”, and “naturally” prone to extinction due to their supposed “inferior” status (White, 1978). When Ishi died a painful death of tuberculosis at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco, California, Kroeber had his brain autopsied and curated at the Smithsonian, the institution that kept the brain in their Wet Collections for decades without notifying the public (Scheper‐Hughes, 2001, p. 12; Starn, 2004, p. 23, 130, 158, 170).…”