There was No-one Left to Speak his Name

 

"The last Yana-speaker in the world died in 1916.  When Ishi was born, the Yana were still a small but healthy collection of tribes ranging the Sierra Mountains of California, where they lived off what they could hunt and the salmon they caught in the rivers.  But gold had been discovered in California and every year tens of thousands of settlers were arriving to stake out a claim.  When Ishi was four years old, there was a massacre of Yana people near what's now Mill Creek.  Ishi's father was one of the people killed.  The last few survivors disappeared into the hills.  The settlers never encountered them again, as far as they knew the Yana had been wiped out.

Forty-four years later Ishi wandered out of the mountains, starving and alone and into the town Oroville, where he was arrested and handed over to anthropologists at the University of California.  He spent the last five years of his life at the university, where he was displayed as a kind of living museum exhibit: the last wild Indian.  He also worked as a janitor; in his spare time he made flint arrowheads, piles of them, in the same way the Yana had been making them for hundreds of years.  He never hunted again.

Ishi was not Ishi's real name. It's a generic word that just means "man". In Yana society, it's forbidden to say your own name until another Yana introduces you.  But there was no other Yana left to speak his name."         

Last Words  Sam Kriss

The Spectator, 1 November 2025

So I cannot name the man I am trying to memorialise in this blogpost.  I wish I could.  However, Jehovah not only knew his name, but knew his every thought, and had every hair of his head numbered, so I do hope that he and his people will live again - will wake in the earthly paradise, when there is no-one and nothing to make any of us afraid.   

And then we will be able to know his name.   If we are there.  But we do need to seek for our Creator, Jehovah, now urgently. And if we do, he will let us find him.

I am a long time Spectator subscriber.  It is such an interesting magazine. 

I thought a sunset shot from Col's gallery would be appropriate - but always bearing in mind that we are now living in the darkest hour before the dawn, and when the dawn comes it will be such a wonderful one. And, during the Thousand Years, the dead will be woken from the dreamless sleep of death.  Daniel assures us that "many of those asleep in the dust of the ground" will wake up.

And then we will have sunrises and sunsets without number ahead of us.   And such is the diversity of Jehovah's creation that however many we see we will never see the same one twice.   

The News continues to reflect "the increasing of lawlessness" worldwide.  Nine people were attacked on a train travelling to London, by a man with a knife.  While nobody has been killed, he inflicted what are called "life-changing injuries".  And apparently on Bonfire Night, the 5th November, there was a lot of trouble in Birmingham, with masked men attacking Police with fireworks.  

I was remembering the bonfire nights of our childhood - a modest bonfire in the back garden, potatoes baking in the ashes, and daddy letting off a few fireworks, rockets in milk bottles and a catherine wheel on the fence.  And, to make the point it was not paradise back then either, fireworks were sold in all the corner shops, piled up in boxes with no thought of Health and Safety. And, horribly, we used to burn a "guy" on the bonfire.  Well, not in our home bonfires, but in the big civic ones.  Poor Guy Fawkes.  But of course we never thought about what it meant - it was just a bonfire night tradition.

What a world. 

We are constantly reminded in the worldwide congregation to keep the paradise earth firmly in mind, to remember all Jehovah has promised us will happen on the earth then.  So I will include a paragraph from one of the current letters I am sending out in the territory I am assigned as I can no longer go door to door.  

The Christian Greek Scriptures, or New Testament, tell us what Jesus did when he was on the earth. He fed the hungry, healed the sick, calmed the storm, and even raised the dead. Isaiah actually speaks of a time, here on the earth, when “No resident will say: ‘I am sick’” (Isaiah 33:24) Wasn’t Jesus showing us what he can and will do when he is ruling over the earth as the King of Jehovah’s Kingdom?  Under its loving rule all causes for suffering will be gone.