LITMIR.BIZ

      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 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 Mabel’s unique ability as an interlocutor, I have often told to friends and written about Mabel’s 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

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