Book dossier

Mabel McKay

by Greg Sarris

Mabel McKay's baskets cannot be separated from her Dreams, for it is through them that she learned to weave and to heal. A world-renowned Pomo basket weaver and medicine woman, Mabel spent her life teaching others about the culture she helped to keep alive and the Dream world in which she lived. But to understand Mabel's life, one must understand the way the spirit speaks through the Dream, the way the spirit heals, and the way the spirit demands to be heard. In this wise book, Greg Sarris weaves together stories from Mabel's life with an account of how he tried, and she resisted, telling her story straight - the white people's way. Greg finds his own story through his search for Mabel's, and in doing so shows how stories have lives of their own. To understand stories, one must learn about the culture in which they live. Weaving the Dream initiates the reader into Pomo culture and the ruptures it has faced during this century - the damage missionizing has done, the demise of native villages like Lolsel, and some of the last dances in the Roundhouses. Yet it bears witness to the continuation of the Acorn and Strawberry Festivals and the survival of Dreaming. It also offers an appreciation for the canning, fruit picking, clothes washing, and other work that sustains minority communities during the worst adversity, and an understanding of how a woman who worked most of her life in a cannery can also be a great healer and an artist whose baskets are collected by the Smithsonian. In Mabel's life as an Indian weaver and healer, the supernatural was in fact perfectly natural, and in Sarris's Weaving the Dream any distinction between material and spiritual, between mundane and magical, disappears. What remains is a timeless way of healing and of making art, and an ancient, yet still vital, way of being in the world.