His name was Ishi. He is described as the ‘last of the Yahi Indians’. He worked his arrowheads from glass medicine bottles, 1912-1916. He died in 1916.

Today I discovered in my backpack the brochure from the Menil Collection in Houston. There mentioned was the sculptor of the glass arrowheads I have described here. I see the man bent over, intent on his last work, on the last statement of his tribe.

But there is this sense of him still working. That he died and did not die and will not die.

Long ago I dreamed of such a man, a sacred man bent over and working with metal, teaching me, welcoming my trespass. I expected that he was working on a ring of precious metal, and was disappointed to see instead a piece of flattened tin with holes. I didn't understand: tin to be used for a lantern that would shed patterned light.

I dreamed of him again in hand-to-hand combat. He and his opponent both bleeding and exhausted, but never dead. Love between him and his opponent.

Ishi’s poignant statement in glass is 90 years old: Love between him and us now living on the land where his people once thrived.