Mabel McKay (1907-1993): “Dreamer” and Master Basket Weaver of the Northern California Pomo Indians

It’s hard to know what might have happened to Mabel McKay if her grandmother Sarah had not made it a point to care for and protect her. Sarah recognized her as a Dreamer, one who is owned by spirit.

Mabel’s great-grandfather, Sarah’s father, had been a medicine man descended from those before him. Sarah’s brother, Richard, had started the Dream religion “after the white people had taken everything but their souls to Dream”(Sarris 8). Sarah recognized the signs in her granddaughter but worried there was no one left to teach her.

One of the signs Mabel was a Dreamer is how she talked in her sleep at night as a girl, out loud speaking her Dreams. Spirit talked to her in her waking hours as well. She was a strange child and there was a lot of worry around her.

“It was hard. The girl caused quite a stir. Still, Sarah found that going about her public life—washing clothes, harvesting apricots, then peaches, then apples, then pears, then prunes, then almonds—amid people’s curious stares and fast stories was not as difficult finally as the frustration and helplessness she felt at home alone when the girl wouldn’t eat or screamed at the top of her lungs in the middle of the nights. She knew what was happening, the girl was Dreaming, and she didn’t know where to turn for help.

At night, Sarah prayed, sang songs she thought might help Mabel. Each day seemed to bring another challenge. . . .   “If my father was alive you wouldn’t be this way . . . If my father was alive, you wouldn’t be this way. . . ”

Mabel heard Sarah say this, but she didn’t know what Sarah meant. She didn’t know Sarah was thinking of Old Taylor’s powerful medicine, the ways he might help and guide Mabel”(Sarris 21).

Mabel was the last Long Valley Cache Creek Pomo. She was the last speaker of her language. She grew up in Lolsel and moved around with her grandmother as she washed laundry in the creek for the white farmers and picked seasonal, ripe fruit. In her Dreams she received prophecy, saw her own future, and received teachings from spirit.

Mabel was the last Dreamer and sucking doctor among the Pomo peoples. Spirit began teaching her to make baskets at age six.

In 1810 there were 20,000 Pomo living in Northern California. They had been there for millennia. By 1907 when Mabel McKay was born, due to smallpox, malaria, scarlet fever, enslavement and genocide, their number had shrunk to 947. The Pomo were dispersed over farmland or on scattered reservations and rancherias.

Pomo Dreamers who were also sucking doctors performed extractions of illness, energy, germs or foreign entities from the bodies of their clients in a formal ceremony which involved purification of their own bodies before and after, ingesting of sacred herbs and medicines to assist them in their work, and rattling themselves into a trance state. In trance, spirit guided them to the location where the removal was needed. Once located and interacted with, they sucked the identified illness out with their mouths. The ritual required others to come and repeat the songs for and with them as they worked. The songs were a very important part of the healing process. There was dance and movement that often went with the singing and rattling. The song and dance were taught to the Dreamers directly by spirit.

When Mabel’s mother tried to marry her off at age 12, Sarah took her to a white woman, Mrs. Spencer, who made it her life’s work to help the Indians. Mrs. Spencer agreed to take Mabel in and protect her. Mabel lived there until Mrs. Spencer died when Mabel was nearly 16. At that point, like most teenagers, Mabel was most concerned with having a good time. She took off to have a wild time with another Indian friend at the carnivals in San Francisco and Seattle. They learned how to jump trains and traveled up and down the Pacific Northwest.

Eventually Mabel returned to Sarah and began to work with her again, doing  laundry for the white folks or seasonal picking of berries and apples.

When it was finally time for her to say yes to her gifts, she was visited by a hummingbird-being in her home. The hummingbird told her he had come to help her. That is when they came to get her, the other doctors, and initiated her in a private ceremony by a lake.

“Then, in the middle of a hot afternoon, Mabel heard the screen door slam. She opened her eyes and saw a hummingbird fly in. It hovered over her. She saw that it had the face of a man. “Hello Mabel,” he said. He introduced himself, telling her his name. “You’ve seen me before. I’ve been following you, hiding here and there. Spirit told me to watch until you were ready”(Sarris 69).

He asked her if she was ready. Mabel said, “Yes,” but before he returned to take her, her grandmother came home. Hearing what Mabel had to say, Sarah wanted to check in with others to see if this man could be trusted:

“Just as she opened the door to leave, there he was. He took off his hat. His dark face was wrinkled.

“Mother,” he said, honoring her, “I’ve come to help your daughter.”

She looked at him suspiciously.

“Listen,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder, “I have a new Ford there and it runs real good. And I haven’t been drinking. I swear it. I just got out of jail.” He waited for an answer, then said solemnly, “Your girl there needs help”(Sarris 71).

Mabel left with him, getting into a car with others she did not know. They drove for a long time, arriving at a place where they began walking on a dirt path.

“They went through a grove of scrub oaks and around clumps of chaparral. They were quiet, except for the sounds of their rustling dresses and footsteps on the gravelly trail. They walked awhile. Then Mabel saw the water, a large pond holding the entire nighttime sky, and when she looked where they were headed, she saw a fire by the water and four older men and a woman who were singing softly, their words like cottony dandelion seeds floating in the air and dropping on the pond. The man led her to the fire and right there next to the water, just in front of the singers, he pointed to a bed of blankets on the ground”(Sarris 72).

Mabel was then led through a four-day initiation after which she was ready to begin doctoring.

She received on the job training from the spirits who guided her through each healing.  She was visited by ancestors who taught her more songs.

“One is for your travels on the road, wherever you go. The other is to calm the earth when you’re cutting or digging things for your baskets. Now listen . . .

Mabel learned the songs and sang them. She sang them in the car as she drove here and there with Sarah. She sang them every time she dug sedge or cut redbud bark and willows. Sarah recognized the songs. She said she had heard her father sing them when she was a young girl, only he had sung the songs when he was going to walk to Clear Lake or pick Mountain Balm and soap plant in the hills”(Sarris 82).

The last sucking doctor of the Pomo

Mabel healed people with songs that spirit sang through her. Eventually, she was taught to suck. Into a sucking basket she had woven, she spat out what she had sucked out of her client. People came from all over for her healing and she traveled far to heal others. She needed singers and translators to help her when she worked. Many people came to witness.

When Mabel was raised, traditional healing was beginning to go out of fashion and even be suspect. But Mabel’s work was widely sought after by the local indigenous population from all the various tribes who worked on the farms and lived on the reservations in the area of Northern California.

Sarris describes her extracting a salamander-like creature from a woman’s eye, gallons and gallons of water from a man’s chest and an evil spirit from another.

Eventually Mabel met Essie Parrish (1902-1979), a traditional healer, Prophetess and roundhouse leader from the Kashaya Pomo whose reservation was on the coast. Mabel had dreamed Essie before she met her. She and Essie worked together for a long time, leading ceremonies and dances in the Roundhouse, performing healings together and collecting materials for baskets. Essie was also a sucking doctor and she and Mabel would assist each other in ceremonial healing. With their tall Medicine Poles bearing cocoon rattles, they invited spirit to the space. They were friends for the rest of Essie’s life.

Essie told Mabel that she would die before Mabel and when she did, she was to lock the Roundhouse. She said that there was no one qualified to take over. That person would come in the far future. After Essie died, Mabel held smaller seasonal ceremonies, including the Strawberry and Acorn, outside with Essie’s family and community and continued her Doctoring for as long as she could. She taught many people basket weaving and gave public talks about her work and her people.

Pomo Baskets

Mabel McKay was a master weaver. She collected people’s names who wanted a basket and then ran her fingers down the long list asking spirit to guide her to whom she would weave for next. Once decided, she offered her hands to spirit who wove the basket through her. Her baskets were highly valued, especially her feather and miniature baskets for which she was renowned.

The Pomo Indians of Northern California are known as being some of the most skilled basket weavers of all the indigenous tribes. They make twined and coiled baskets out of locally foraged materials which they gather and treat: sedge and bulrush roots, redbark, and willow branches and twigs. All of this is done in specific ritual context with gathering locations that are tended to and considered sacred.

It can take months to make one basket.

I live in Northern California. After I read the book about Mabel, I wanted to see some of her baskets. I wasn’t that lucky at finding any to look at. One of the local museums that has her baskets is closed for renovations. When I was in New York City I went the Met to see them but they were not out on display. I saw that there were some at the Santa Rosa Junior College Multicultural Museum. The museum displays a permanent Elsie Allen Pomo Basket Collection: Breaking Traditions, Saving Traditions: Elsie Allen and The Legacy of Pomo Basketry. I called them up and Rachel Minor, the Curator, informed me that none of Mabel’s baskets were on display. They only had two of her miniature baskets and the start of a feathered one, but they were all in storage. She would pull them out for me if I wished to come see them.

I was very grateful to Rachel for making the baskets available for me to see. Mabel’s miniatures had captivated my imagination when I read about them.

At the museum, Rachel brought out Mabel’s baskets and told me what she knew about Mabel’s work. She said that Mabel only made a basket when she was fasting. She wouldn’t think of touching one when she was not fasting. Even collecting the materials required fasting. That she was guided by spirit to make them. She also told me that miniatures only started after colonization. She thinks perhaps it was a way of showing off great skill as a weaver and that for Mabel, many of them were ceremonial, carried around with her Doctoring supplies. She wanted to be sure I knew that Mabel had been the last Sucking Doctor.

 

 

 

In the book Pomo Basketweaving: a supreme art of the weaver by Elsie Allen, Pomo weaver Allen writes:

“We fasted for many things, for example we would fast before starting work on a basket such as a red feather or woodpecker feather basket and would work as long as possible and then when we were too hungry we would eat but no longer work on the basket. The fasting was for purification so as to receive help from the Great Spirit in whatever we did”(8).

Mabel McKay never let anyone tell her who she was. She didn’t allow white people to define her and, when she gave public talks, resisted questions and comments that wanted to make her into a caricature of herself or her culture. If people didn’t understand how she talked to plants, that wasn’t her job to explain.

Mabel McKay was as common as she was extraordinary. This is a defining feature about her. She lived in Santa Rosa and Sebastopol, working at the Barlow apple processing plant for many years after her second husband died. There was nothing performative about her. And she wouldn’t allow herself or her work to be made into a performance. In a talk she gave, she explained that no one ever saw her make a basket. That was something to be done alone. She called it weaving by prayer.

Mabel McKay is a Nasty Woman Artist.

© Theresa C. Dintino 2024

Works Cited:

Allen, Elsie. Pomo Basketmaking: a supreme art for the weaver. Happy Camp, CA. Naturegraph Publishers, 2007.

Sarris, Greg. Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream. University of California Press, 1994, 2013.