Opening Reception
Sunday February 17, 2008
2:00-4:00 p.m.
California Indian Basketry
Generously Underwritten by the Rumsey Community Fund
Friday February 15, 2008 the book MABEL MCKAY: Weaving the Dream by Greg Sarris.
Greg Sarris (Chair in Native American Studies at Sonoma State University, author and screenwriter) will speak at Yolo County Museum, and read and sign his books. This year's program continues with weaving exhibits and demonstrations at the Yolo County Historical Museum in Woodland.
2pm Museum Talk at Yolo County Historical Museum (Gibson House) 512 Gibson Road.
The Book MABEL MCKAY: WEAVING THE DREAM. 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.
The Author GREG SARRIS was born in 1952 in Santa Rosa, California. Part American Indian, Filipino, and Jewish, Greg Sarris was adopted at birth and raised in both Indian and white families. He attended local schools through Santa Rosa Junior College, and received a B.A. in 1978 from UCLA. He worked in Hollywood as a model and actor before going to graduate school. He earned a Ph.D. in modern thought and literature at Stanford University in 1988. Also, he was a professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles; and a full professor at UCLA for ten years. Greg Sarris is presently a college professor, author, screenwriter, and the Endowed Chair in Native American Studies at Sonoma State University.
Greg Sarris writings:
Novel Watermelon Nights (1998)
Short story collections Grand Avenue (1994) This collection also became a Robert Redford-produced HBO teleplay.The Sound of Rattles and Clappers: a Collection of New California Indian Writing (1994) editor/contributor
Nonfiction Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (1993)Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream (1994) Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich (2004)
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