American anthropologist (1897–1979)
Theodora Kroeber ( ; née Theodora Covel Kracaw; March 24, 1897 – July 4, 1979) was an American writer and anthropologist, best known for her accounts of several Native Californian cultures. Born in Denver, Colorado, Kroeber grew up in the mining town of Telluride, and worked briefly as a nurse. She attended the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), for her undergraduate studies, graduating with a major in psychology in 1919, and received a master's degree from the same institution in 1920.
Married in 1920 and widowed in 1923, she began doctoral studies in anthropology at UC Berkeley. She met anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber during her studies, and married him in 1926. One of her two children with Kroeber was the writer Ursula K. Le Guin. The Kroebers traveled together to many of Alfred's field sites, including an archaeological dig in Peru, where Theodora worked cataloging specimens. On their return, Alfred encouraged Theodora to continue her graduate work, but she declined, feeling she had too many responsibilities.
Kroeber began writing professionally late in her life, after her children had grown up. She published "The Inland Whale", a collection of translated Native Californian narratives in 1959. Two years later she published "Ishi in Two Worlds", an account of Ishi, the last member of the Yahi people of Northern California, whom Alfred Kroeber had befriended and studied between 1911 and 1916. This volume sold widely and received high praise from contemporary reviewers. Retrospective reviews were more mixed, noting Kroeber's unflinching portrayal of Californian colonization but criticizing her perspective on Ishi's treatment.
Nine years after Alfred's death in 1960, Theodora Kroeber married artist John Quinn. Kroeber published several other works in her later years, including a collaboration with her daughter Ursula and a . She served as a regent of the University of California for a year before her death in 1979. She has been described as having influenced her husband's anthropological work, and as having inspired interest in indigenous culture through "Ishi in Two Worlds". A 1989 biography stated that her "great strength was as an interpreter of one culture to another".
Early life, education, and first marriage.
Theodora Covel Kracaw was born on March 24, 1897, in Denver, Colorado, and lived there for her first four years. She grew up in the mining town of Telluride, where her parents, Phebe Jane (née Johnston) and Charles Emmett Kracaw, owned a general store. Charles's family were recent Polish migrants and Phebe had grown up in Wyoming. Theodora was the youngest of three Kracaw children; she had two brothers, five and ten years older than she was. All the children attended schools in Telluride. Theodora's brothers became physicians. Theodora, who described herself as a shy and introverted person, said her childhood was happy. Her family name "Kracaw" led to her being nicknamed "Krakie" by her friends.
Kracaw graduated in 1915 as the valedictorian of her class at Telluride High School. After graduation, she worked as a volunteer nurse at Hadley Hospital in Colorado. In the same year, the family left Colorado and moved to Orland, California, since the lower altitude there was expected to benefit her father's health, although it failed to do so. Kracaw enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), in 1915. She considered majoring in economics or English literature before deciding on psychology. She made lifelong friends during her undergraduate years, including Jean Macfarlane, whose interest in psychology drove Kracaw to select that discipline for her major. She graduated "cum laude" in 1919 with a BA in psychology and began graduate study at UC Berkeley. Her master's thesis studied ten families in San Francisco whose children were involved with a juvenile court. She volunteered as a probation officer and was required to meet and report on the families she was studying. She later wrote that she struggled to be objective in writing about these families. Kracaw received her master's degree in clinical psychology in 1920.
In the summer of 1920, Kracaw married Clifton Spencer Brown, who was at UC Berkeley for graduate studies in law. Brown was contending with the effects of pneumonia he had contracted in France during World War I. They had two children, Clifton II and Theodore. The couple were visiting in Santa Fe when their home was lost in the 1923 Berkeley fire. Clifton left to return to Berkeley, but died en route in Denver in October 1923. Theodora and the children made their way back to Berkeley and the home of Brown's widowed mother, who encouraged her to return to graduate school. While in Santa Fe, she had developed an interest in Native American art and culture, and she decided to study anthropology at UC Berkeley.
Anthropological career and second marriage.
Theodora re-entered university in 1924. Having chosen to study anthropology, she consulted Alfred Kroeber, a leading American anthropologist of his generation and the head of the UC Berkeley anthropology department. Although she had previously taken classes from Alfred's assistant Thomas Waterman, this was the first time Theodora met Alfred. At the time, anthropology was a new field and although women were admitted to help bolster class sizes to legitimize course offerings, they were resented. Male colleagues worried that women would be competition for the limited employment posts or research grants and lower the prestige of the profession. Thus, it became typical for women to be recruited, but their training and employment opportunities thereafter were restricted. During a seminar class Theodora took with Alfred, she and Julian Steward were assigned to evaluate Native American sport activities. She also took a course on symbolism with Robert Lowie.
Theodora and Alfred married on March 26, 1926. Steward, then also a graduate student at UC Berkeley, wrote that the marriage surprised their colleagues. Alfred, 21 years older than Theodora, had also been previously married; his wife had died of tuberculosis in 1913. Alfred adopted Theodora's two sons, giving them his last name. The couple had two more children together: Karl and Ursula. Karl, Clifton, and Theodore later became professors, of English, history, and psychology, respectively, and Ursula became a well-known author under her married name Ursula K. Le Guin. In June 1926, the Kroebers left their children with Theodora's mother and went on an eight-month field trip to an archaeological dig in Peru's Nazca valley. It was Theodora's first visit to an archaeological site; she also had not previously lived on a campsite. While there, she worked on recognizing and cataloging specimens. Also in 1926, she published her first academic work, a paper examining ethnological data analysis, in the journal "The American Anthropologist". She accompanied Alfred on another trip to Peru in 1942 and other trips studying the Yurok and Mohave peoples, including to the Klamath River. She drew on these experiences in her 1968 book "Almost Ancestors".
On their return from Peru, Alfred encouraged Theodora to continue working on her doctorate, but she declined, as she felt she had too many responsibilities. When they were not traveling, the Kroebers spent most of the year in a large redwood house, facing San Francisco Bay, to which Alfred was particularly attached. They both lived in the same house until their deaths. The redwood house has been described as the cornerstone of the Kroebers' lengthy marriage. They spent the summers in an old farmhouse they had bought in the Napa valley on a 40-acre ranch named "Kishamish". Alfred's friends among the Native Americans were frequent visitors to this house. During the academic year, Theodora kept in contact with Alfred's academic acquaintances when the couple entertained them at their house in Berkeley.
Writing career.
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My tentative guess is that the budding, creating element in oral literature may well lie within the unique tale, invented by a single person, and tangential to the great, conventionalized, and channeled main stream of a people's literary "corpus" and tradition.
— Theodora Kroeber, discussing "The Inland Whale" (1959)
Kroeber began writing seriously once again after her husband had retired and her children were all grown, at approximately the same time that Ursula also began writing professionally. Between 1955 and 1956, a year the Kroebers spent at Stanford University, Theodora wrote a novel about Telluride. This work was never published, but helped her establish a habit of writing a little bit every day. In 1959, the year she turned 62, she published "The Inland Whale", a retelling of California Native American legends that she had selected in the belief that they exhibited a certain originality. The book collected nine pieces that shared a theme of heroines: a section of authorial commentary was also included. One of these was a Yurok legend narrated to her by the Yurok Robert Spott, who had been among the visitors to Kishamish. The book was well-received, with critics identifying it as a notable work of comparative literature. One reviewer said Kroeber had made the legends accessible to a general audience by "translating freely in her own sensitive, almost lyrical style".
Ishi.
Kroeber spent 1960 and 1961 exploring the literature about Ishi, the last known member of the Yahi people, who had been found starving in Oroville, California, in 1911. Ishi had been brought to UC Berkeley, where he was studied and befriended by Alfred Kroeber and his associates. Ishi never shared his Yahi name; Alfred suggested to reporters that he be called "Ishi", which meant "man" in the language of the Yana people, of which the Yahi were a subgroup. Ishi had died of tuberculosis in 1916. Theodora undertook to write an account of his life, believing that Alfred could not bring himself to do so. "Ishi in Two Worlds" was published in 1961, a year after Alfred's death. Kroeber found the book's challenging subject material to be difficult to write, as it recounted the extermination of the Yahi people as part of the California genocide and Ishi's many years spent largely in solitude. She released a version of the story for children in 1964 titled "Ishi: Last of His Tribe". She found this version even harder to write, as she struggled to present death to an audience largely shielded from it. This version was illustrated by Ruth Robbins: a review noted it was not another anthropological study, but discussed in simple language the cultural clashes which resulted from the Western expansion of the United States.
"Ishi in Two Worlds" became an immediate success and established Kroeber's reputation for anthropological writing. Described as a "modern classic", it was translated into nine languages and remained in print as of 2015. It sold half a million copies by 1976 and a million copies by 2001. The book generally received high praise upon publication: one reviewer said Kroeber had a talent for "making us part of a life we never took part in". A 1979 commentary described it as the most widely read book about a Native American subject, calling it a "beautifully written story" that was "evocative of Yahi culture". The story was adapted as a television film as "" in 1978, and as "The Last of His Tribe" in 1992.
Retrospective assessments of the book are more mixed. Thomas E. Simmons, a justice of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, wrote in 2019 that the book's perspective on Ishi was "empathetic yet deeply flawed", saying that it glossed over or did not take issue with the manner in which Ishi was presented as an exhibit. Writing in 1997, scholar Richard Pascal said the book, "to its credit", did not evade the "horrors inflicted upon the Yahi by the invading whites", an opinion echoed by historian James Clifford in 2013. Pascal nonetheless argued that the narrative's goal was one of assimilation, and said it was "colonizing 'Ishi' in the name of American culture", and Clifford criticized the implicit assumption that coming into the care of Alfred Kroeber was the best outcome for Ishi.
Kroeber's style continued to receive praise. Writing in 2010, historian Douglas Sackman compared "Ishi in Two Worlds" to "To Kill a Mockingbird", and stated that it spoke to the experiences of Native Americans in its exploration of "the dark side of American expansion and the legacy of genocidal policies" in the same way that Harper Lee's book, published the previous year, examined racial prejudice and the legacy of slavery in the experience of African Americans. Clifford wrote that the account of Ishi's life in San Francisco was written with "skill and compassion", and added that