Status Updates From Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dr...

Ch.1”She was referring to her father's first wife, who had tried to poison her mother up in Nice. But how could she have known anything about that? She was an infant then.”

⭐️Ch.1”’That's funny. Tying up all the stories. Why somebody want to do that?’ ‘When you write a book there has to be a story or idea, a theme ..’ ‘Well, theme I don't know nothing about. That's somebody else's rule. You just do the best way you know how. What you know from me.’ Back to the facts. I drove on in silence.”

Ch.1 “‘…Your stories go all over the place. I can't write them like that. It's too hard for people to follow. I don't know where to start.’”

Ch.1”This small Indian woman, over eighty years old, with coifed black hair and modish glasses, this little Indian woman in a mauve-colored summer dress adorned on the shoulder with a corsage of imitation African violets, had turned a Stanford auditorium up-side down. No one cracked her.”

Ch.1 “‘What do you do for poison oak?’ ‘Calamine lotion,’ Mabel answered. She was matter of fact. The student sank into her chair.”

“My lavender, which feeds so many bees, looked dry; the mimosa tree that draws the hummingbirds, wilted. Mabel came then, clear as a bell. I heard her talking about her Dream. And more: ‘You got water in your well, don’t you? . . . Well then, water the lavender, water the mimosa.’”

Preface: “It has now been eighteen years since the first publication of this book. So much has happened. ‘The world, it happens,’ as Mabel would say.”

Preface: “…’the woman who loved a snake’?—not only challenge the confines of our thinking, but help us to understand ourselves as thinking, cultured beings in a world we share with other people and all forms of life. Consequently, we can begin to think of ourselves anew in place and time. We can open ourselves and, when necessary, change, heal, or as the old saying goes, find ourselves.”

Preface: “…Renaissance literature, asked Mabel
what the snake symbolized. ‘I don’t know nothing about symbols,’ Mabel answered.” Love how blunt she is and how she doesn’t entertain questions she doesn’t care about. Or leaves stories open to interpretation so that you can form your own ideas around them. But not when it comes to important things like calamine lotion for poison ivy.

Preface: “…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,…”

Preface: “Among the Pomo Indians of Northern Cali-
fornia—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.”

Preface: “‘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?’” So true so true🤔 much to think about

Another book for my seminar :/

Preface: “…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.”

Preface: “Among the Pomo Indians of Northern Cali-
fornia—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.”

⭐️“‘If the world’s going to dry up and burn, what do we do?…she answered plainly, ‘You live the best
way you know how, what else?’”

Preface: “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.”

Intro: “There, how's that? That's how I can tell my life for the white people's way. Is that what you want? It's more, my life. It's not only the one thing. It's many. You have to listen. You have to know me to know what I'm talking about.” —Mabel McKay