American Indian Culture and Research Journal

”Do we tell them our stories?” I asked. I felt doubt again. Seated at Auntie Violet Chappell’s table with many of my aunties and uncles, I wondered whether our trip to Stanford University was a good idea after all. It was three A.M. We prayed, sang ceremonial songs for the trip. After the prayer ceremony, around midnight, we sat down to eat. We were still talking. In order to arrive at Stanford by ten in the morning we would have to leave the reservation at six, in just three hours. A former professor of mine had asked if I could get some members of my family to speak before a large audience about the popular and widely distributed ethnographic documentary film The Sucking Doctor. I said yes enthusiastically,even before consulting my family. The film covers the second night of a Kashaya Pomo healing ceremony in the Kashaya Roundhouse. Essie Parrish, Violet’s mother and the last Bole Maru leader, or Dreamer, of the Kashaya Pomo, sucks a pain out of her patient’s body. The audience hears many of her doctoring songs and witnesses her dancing and her work to locate and extract the disease. Cache Creek Porno medicine woman and Dreamer Mabel McKay claimed Essie’s death was due in part to her making of this film; not the making, perhaps, but the showing of our ceremonies to people unfamiliar with our rules. “She had to sacrifice,” Mabel said. ”I seen it in my Dream.”