Moderator’s Note: This piece is in co-operation with The Nasty Women Writers Project, a site dedicated to highlighting and amplifying the voices and visions of powerful women. The site was founded by sisters Theresa and Maria Dintino. To quote Theresa, “by doing this work we are expanding our own writer’s web for nourishment and support.” This was originally posted on their site on July 23rd, 2024. You can see more of their posts here.
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).
To be continued tomorrow.
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