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Mabel McKay
Mabel McKay
WEAVING THE DREAM
Greg Sarris
With a New Preface
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
BERKELEYLOS ANGELESLONDON
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 1994, 2013 by The Regents of the University of California
First Paperback Printing 1997
ISBN: 978-0-520-27588-1
eISBN: 9780520955226
The Library of Congress has catalogued an earlier edition as follows:
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sarris, Greg.
Mabel McKay: weaving the
dream/Greg Sarris.
p. cm.—(Portraits of American genius; 1)
ISBN 978-0-520-20968-8
1. McKay, Mabel, 1907–1993.2. Pomo women—Biography.3. Pomo Indians—Basket making.4. Pomo Indians—Religion and mythology.I. Title.II. Series.
E99.P65S29 1994
973’.04975—dc2093-38188
CIP
Manufactured in the United States of America
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13
10 9 8 7 6 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biopas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.
The strip design used throughout the book is drawn from Mabel’s mother’s last basket, which Mabel finished in 1971. (By permission of Pacific Western Traders)
I was born in Nice, Lake County, California. 1907, January 12. My mother, Daisy Hansen. My father, Yanta Boone. Grandma raised me. Her name, Sarah Taylor. I followed everywhere with her. I marry once in Sulphur Bank. Second time I marry Charlie McKay. We live in Lake County, then Ukiah, then Santa Rosa. I weave baskets, and show them different places. Have son, Marshall. Now grandkids, too. My tribe, Pomo.
There, how’s that? That’s how I can tell my life for the white people’s way. Is that what you want? It’s more, my life. It’s not only the one thing. It’s many. You have to listen. You have to know me to know what I’m talking about.
MABEL MCKAY
CONTENTS
Preface
Sarah Taylor’s Granddaughter
Carnivals, Madams, and Mixed-Up Indian Doctors
Medicine Woman
Prayer Basket
PREFACE
“Everything’s going to burn,” Mabel said. “That’s what I see now.”
She was looking at the very dry, late September hills near Highway 80, just east of Fairfield. We were on our way back to the Rumsey Wintun Reservation, where Mabel was living at the time, after she’d given a talk to several students and faculty at Stanford University about her doctoring and basket-weaving. It was late in the day, early evening, and the thick autumn light had turned the hills ocher red. The ocher red color no doubt called up her Dream. She’d talked a lot about her Dream lately, and I knew enough to know what she was referencing: her vision of what would happen near the end of the world as we know it.
“‘Everything’s going to go dry,’ Spirit said. ‘No water going to be anywhere.’”
“What can we do?” I asked. “How do we live?”
Mabel began laughing, chuckling to herself out loud. “That’s cute,” she said, then, mocking me, repeated, “What can we do? How do we live?”
I was used to her making fun of me, of my countless questions—as used as I was to her talk of Dreaming.
“No, seriously,” I countered. “If the world’s going to dry up and burn, what do we do?”
She turned to me, took a moment to make sure she had my attention, then she answered plainly, “You live the best way you know how, what else?”
As I write today, some twenty-five years after that autumn afternoon with Mabel, the signs of global warming are everywhere; daily we hear frightening prognostics from the scientific community regarding global warming worldwide. The United States is experiencing its worst drought since the 1930s. Lake County, where Mabel was born, is suffering two major fires, and smoke and ashes from those fires can be seen from my home on Sonoma Mountain, in Sonoma County fifty miles away. Among the Pomo Indians of Northern California—Mabel was the last surviving member of the Cache Creek Pomo Nation—there were many prophets, locally often referred to as Dreamers, and Mabel McKay was certainly one of them. According to many people, she was the last of them. Her great-uncle Richard Taylor saw “roads into the sky, people going to the moon.” Essie Parrish, the late Kashaya Pomo Dreamer, seeing pitch suddenly dripping from one of her baskets in the 1950s, predicted “a horrible sickness thirty years hence, first seen in young men then in multitudes.”
Like Mrs. Parrish, Mabel McKay was also a medicine woman, as it would turn out, the last of the sucking doctors among the Pomo, doctors who extract pain and disease through sucking. She was a world-renowned basketweaver—the Pomo are considered among the finest weavers anywhere, and Mabel was often thought of as the best among them. But what remains for me, and I think for many readers of this book over the years, isn’t only the remarkable enough attributes and accomplishments of Mabel’s life, but her uncanny, if not at times jarring, ability—in conversation, in stories, in responses to questions—to open up the world such that we come to see ourselves fully in the world with her, and
