Insulators

 Found on FB

Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals both made arrowheads and spearheads out of Insulators. The telegraph companies got fed up with the knappers stealing their glass insulators that they would leave free ones piled up by the poles so they wouldn't have to repair the section taken down by the knappers.

Bird points made from them likewise exist but are fewer in number.

This style insulator, nicknamed "signal", is one of the most diversely colored styles produced by Hemingray from the 1880s to the 1940s . Colors exist in practically the entire spectrum! The example shown here is blue/green and you can see the point made by Ishi, at the museum is the same color Ishi, the last of the Yahi would Knapp anything he would find, often scavenging glass bottles from the University he worked at.

 

So invaluable was his lessons that his knapping style bore his name to the tool that’s used by Flint nappers today, the Ishi stick .

 

You can see here is one of the few photos of Ishi knapping and this one might be when he led a university expedition back to his native Yahi homeland in Northern California.

 

He would create points and give them away to children and anyone who visited him from 1911 until his death in 1916. The last authentic Ishi point sold at auction for a cool $27,000.00.

The First Nations Oneida born actor Graham Greene played him in the TV movie “the last of his tribe “