Foreword

I’ve told this story a hundred times. Maybe there is no other story worth telling these days. I am driving renowned Pomo basket maker and medicine woman Mabel McKay back to the Yocha Dehe reservation in Yolo County after a talk she gave to a classroom of undergraduates at Stanford University. It is 1988, early autumn. On Highway 80, somewhere near Vacaville, Mabel gazed out the car window to the dry hills. Then she turned back to me. “Everything’s going to burn,” she said. “Everything’s going to go dry. There will be no escaping it. Going to burn, top to