Yana/Yahi Grand Chief Ishi LaRue - Ishie Lives On In the Work of Writer Ursula Le Guin

From Nature 23 February 2018:

"[Ursula] Le Guin was born in 1929 to Alfred Kroeber, who worked with the Native Americans of California, and fellow anthropologist Theodora Kroeber. Theodora’s acclaimed 1961 study Ishi In Two Worlds had a huge influence on her daughter. It was derived largely from the work Alfred had done (aspects of which were controversial) in the 1910s with Ishi, whose people, the Yahi, had been wiped out by genocide.

...I believe that much of Le Guin’s astounding ability to think outside the Western cultural patriarchal box derives from her early exposure to Ishi’s story. That history informs the interplanetary cultural constructs in Le Guin’s great works of the 1960s and 1970s: Planet of Exile, City of Illusions, The Word for World Is Forest and The Dispossessed. And in the 1969 The Left Hand of Darkness, anthropologist-emissary Genly Ai experiences an alternative to gender difference so convincing that his observation “The King was pregnant” does not seem dissonant.

Ishi, as the last of his people, might have inspired Le Guin to write her 1973 short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, which describes a utopia pivoting on the misery of a single abused child. The Native Americans she knew in her youth, who revered nature and did not embrace Western technology, could also have inspired the “churten principle”, or “transilience” — spaceflight facilitated by storytelling — in Le Guin’s 1990 short work, ‘The Shobies’ Story’."