Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream (Portraits of American Genius)

By Greg Sarris

Book Overview

A world-renowned Pomo basket weaver and medicine woman, Mabel McKay expressed her genius through her celebrated baskets, her Dreams, her cures, and the stories with which she kept her culture alive. She spent her life teaching others how the spirit speaks through the Dream, how the spirit heals, and how the spirit demands to be heard.

Greg Sarris weaves together stories from Mabel McKay's life with an account of how he tried, and she resisted, telling her story straight--the white people's way. Sarris, an Indian of mixed-blood heritage, finds his own story in his search for Mabel McKay's. Beautifully narrated, Weaving the Dream initiates the reader into Pomo culture and demonstrates how a woman who worked most of her life in a cannery could become a great healer and an artist whose baskets were collected by the Smithsonian.

Hearing Mabel McKay's life story, we see that distinctions between material and spiritual and between mundane and magical disappear. What remains is a timeless way of healing, of making art, and of being in the world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520209680
• ISBN13: 9780520209688
• Release Date: May 1997
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 178 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.8" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

Profound

Thank you Greg Sarris for writing about Mabel McKay. Words cannot describe the beauty of Mabel McKay's story. Her baskets and stories still live in the whispers of Cache Creek.

Quyanna Mabel

Quyanna Mabel, for your story. You found someone to share your life, and I so appreciate sitting there late at night drinking hot tea, after my husband and daughter are asleep, to spend some time with you. I will reread the book to feel closer to my elders and to feel closer to you. I am so thankful. What a blessing!

A fascinating and inspiring book

Mabel McKay, Weaving the Dream is a profound, poetic, and magical journey. I have read it aloud a number of times to savor its depths. If you have any desire to know Native Californians as human beings rather than museum pieces, you may want to start here. The book, which is steeped in the oral tradition inspired me to write the following poem which was published some years back through U.C. Davis. Mabel McKay (Weaving Poem) (by Norm Milstein, 7/97) Plumage of a Pomo basket Flame of feathers blue and black Strung with glistening abalone Rimmed with ivory disks of shell. Read her book slowly or not at all. She believed that stories should be heard many times To sink in and merge with the heart of the hearer To sink like pebbles in the soul of the listener To grow like seeds in the earth of our minds. Read her book slowly or not at all. Better still, read it aloud. Taste each word and savor the flavor Of willow and redbud and sedge. "I never knew nothing but the spirit," she said. "Only the spirit trained me. I only follow my Dream. That's how I learn." Plumage of a Pomo basket Flame of feathers blue and black Strung with glistening abalone Rimmed with ivory disks of shell. Read her book slowly or not at all. She believed that stories should be heard many times To sink in and merge with the heart of the hearer To sink like pebbles in the soul of the listener To grow like seeds in the earth of our minds. Read her book slowly or not at all. Better still, read it aloud. Taste each word and savor the flavor Of willow and redbud and sedge. "I never knew nothing but the spirit," she said. "Only the spirit trained me. I only follow my Dream. That's how I learn."

continues to resonate over time

This is just a wonderful piece of writing, one which keeps resonating with me, even several years after first reading it. This book should have more readers, and seeing so few reviews for it, I want to argue for it as a must read on anybody's list. We all know books or speakers, writers and lecturers who could take any subject and make it worthwhile, just to spend time in their company. Greg Sarris is one of those magical presences we can be lucky enough to get to know through the medium of the page. Saying this is not intended to undercut the amazing person of Mabel Mckay, by the way. The way the past present and future weave in and out of this book, her stories, Greg's life, the future of land use in California... all of this is here, an enticing mix of POV's, passed around like a sacred pipe. A great read....

Great book

I read this book for an anthropology class that i am taking, and i found it to be very good. We get a first hand account of what role Mable McKay played for the Pomo Indians as a medicine women and as a basket weaver. Everything that she did was for a purpose, even though at times she had to deal with not everyone accepting her. I would recommend this book for anyone interested in Native American ways of life