Sarris - Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream

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, 19071993.2. Pomo womenBiography.3. Pomo IndiansBasket making.4. Pomo IndiansReligion and mythology.I. Title.II. Series.

E99.P65S29 1994

973.04975dc2093-38188

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 Mabels mothers 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, hows that? Thats how I can tell my life for the white peoples way. Is that what you want? Its more, my life. Its not only the one thing. Its many. You have to listen. You have to know me to know what Im talking about.

MABEL MCKAY

CONTENTS

PREFACE

Everythings going to burn, Mabel said. Thats 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 shed 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. Shed 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.

Everythings 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. Thats 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 questionsas used as I was to her talk of Dreaming.

No, seriously, I countered. If the worlds 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 CaliforniaMabel was the last surviving member of the Cache Creek Pomo Nationthere 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 basketweaverthe 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, isnt only the remarkable enough attributes and accomplishments of Mabels life, but her uncanny, if not at times jarring, abilityin conversation, in stories, in responses to questionsto open up the world such that we come to see ourselves fully in the world with her, and long after. We not only get glimpses into her worldview but, in do-ing so, become more conscious of our own. What is she then, in my experience of her, in the pages of this book, but the best of life teachers, whose stories and lessons become indelible in memory?

To illustrate Mabels unique ability as an interlocutor, I have often told to friends and written about Mabels telling a colleague from Stanford about the woman who loved a snake. I had taken this colleague, a fellow graduate student, to visit Mabel, whereupon Mabel began talking about a woman she once knew who lived with her husband in the hills above Nice, in Lake County. The husband worked nights, tending cows and young calves, and one night after he left the house, as the woman was finishing the dishes, she heard a knock on the door. The woman was alarmed; she sensed something peculiar, even wrong. Against better judgment, she opened the door and found, to her surprise, a handsome man, quite tall and dressed in black. She let him in.

As Mabel put it, I guess one thing led to another. When the husband returned in the morning, he found a small black snake coiled up at the bottom of the vase on the kitchen table. He took the snake outside and let it go in the brush. The next day, the same thing happenedthe husband came home in the morning and found the snake in the vase on the kitchen table. Two more times it happened this waythe husband found the snake. On the fifth morning, he said, Something is wrong here. Im going to kill this snake. Holding the snake in one hand, he reached with the other hand for a knife from the kitchen sink, and then he headed to the doorat which point the woman broke down in a flood of tears and confessed her infidelity with the tall handsome man dressed in black. Well then, the husband said, now Im really going to kill the snake, and he went outside and cut the snake into several pieces. But, as it turned out, the snake was there the next morning, and each morning after, again and again.