Essie Parrish
Bole Maru dreamer and yomta, Kashaya Pomo

Max Dashu

She was born Essie Pinola (traditional name Piwoya) in 1903 on the Kashaya Reservation near Stewarts Point, California. The picture in the poster [and below, with permission from the Hearst Museum at UC-Berkeley] was taken in the ceremonial Roundhouse. The Dreamer is holding doctoring staffs with pendants of cocoons and shells. Her ceremonial dress is adorned with abalone pendants, in the patterns that she Dreamed.

Her title of yomta is variously translated as “prophet” and “song.” In “My First Song Vision,” Essie Parrish told of her first dreaming at the age of eleven: “I heard singing up in the sky.... it was as if it entered deep into my chest, as if the song itself were singing in my voice box. ... After I awoke from sleep, that song was singing inside to me all day long.” [Kashaya Texts, 219] And she remembered the song all her life.

One day while playing at the beach, she heard the song “always singing deep inside of me.” And this caused her to sing out loud. Her sister heard and thought the song was very beautiful. She made her sing it again. She asked her not to tell anyone about the song, because “They might make me sing.” But she did, and her maternal great uncle made her sing it for him too.

There came a time when her little sister fell ill, with sores in her mouth, and she was so bad that the family was afraid she would die. There were no medical doctors there. Her great uncle called Essie in from playing outdoors, and asked her to try to doctor the girl. “Couldn’t you do something for your little sister? I say to you that you possess a prophet’s body [using the word yomta]. You with your prophet’s body could perhaps cure her.” [Kashaya Texts, 223. Here, and again on p. 321, Oswalt translates yomta as “prophet.”]

And she agreed, because she had Dreamed that this would be her calling; but at the same time she was wondering to herself what to do:

That had been said to me. My power had told me, ‘If anyone ever asks anything of you, you should not say, “No”; you are not for that purpose. You are one who fixes people. You are one who cures people.’... After I had agreed, I prayed to heaven. My right hand I put on her head. When I had done so, a song that I didn’t know came down into me. Amazingly that song came up out of me. But I didn’t sing it out loud; it was singing down inside of me. ... To my amazement she got well a few days afterward. That was the first person I cured. [Kashaya Texts, 223]

Her next treatment was for a man dying of double pneumonia. His sister came to Essie Parrish begging her to save him: “Even though I see that he is dying, I want you to look at him.” [Kashaya Texts, 225] So she went with the sister, and laid hands on the man, on different parts of his body, and sucked the illness out of him. After that, she learned, little by little, and her ability to heal increased.

I have been a doctor and will be one for all my life on this earth—that’s what I was created for. I was put here on earth to cure people. When I was young I didn’t know about it—when I dreamed things—because that was the only way that I dreamed. I thought everyone was like that. [Kashaya Texts, 223]

The teacher of Essie Parrish was Annie Jarvis, who was the head Dreamer for the Kashaya from 1912-1943.  During those pivotal years, she tried to preserve spiritual culture and language under hard conditions. She succeeded to a great degree; Pomo tradition still thrived at Kashaya up to the mid-20th century. The Roundhouse was filled with dancers, and people still spoke the Pomo language.

But in the 1950s, Mormon missionaries tore the Kashaya community apart. Initially they said that their religion did not conflict with Pomo ways. But once the Mormons had converted a lot of people, they started demanding that they give up "Indian religion" which they labeled "devil-worship." They turned families against each other, and even got some people who had been Roundhouse singers and dancers to denounce the old ways.

This was a painful time for Essie Parrish. Converts saw her and yelled, "Devil!" She had Dreamed it, was warned in advance what would happen. As she had foretold to her sister-friend Dreamer Mabel McKay, people turned away from the Roundhouse and the ancestral ways that she kept. It got harder to gather people to carry out the ceremonies. But a small core of supporters, including her friend Mabel McKay, kept them going. Her sister Julie Pinola Marrufo and niece Merline Marrufo James were among her assistants.

This was the first account that I read. But Greg Sarris adds another piece of information, writing that “it was Essie Parrish who converted and led the tribe into the Mormon church.” He counters the “pure,” traditional idea of Bole Maru among the ethnographers, and asks: What could be the cultural, political and personal terms of Essie Parrish’s acceptance and eventual rejection of Mormonism? [Sarris 1993: 178-79] He also speaks of the cultural shift from "Coyote stories" to "God."

Maybe Essie Parrish hoped to negotiate a path to preservation of the precious ceremonies with the Mormon church, and found that they were not as tolerant as they led her to believe. What is clear is that the yomta was trying to navigate the cultural pressures her people were under. Her daughter Vana Parrish Lawson explained, “Essie Parrish, in her role as Bole Maru leader, taught her people to maintain their sacred life and cultural traditions. But she also emphasized that they must go to school and integrate into the white world to survive.” The yomta had to adapt to rapidly changing conditions, but she did her best to keep her teacher’s protocols to stave off cultural assimilation, and to forestall “the chaos it might bring into their way of life.” [Parrish Lawson, 9]

Essie Parrish made sure that Kashaya traditions were written down and in 1953 she had a film made of her doctoring in the Roundhouse. The anthropologists edited the footage down and published it as Pomo Shaman. Her intention was to preserve the doctoring songs, the teachings, the ceremonies, to leave a record when people were falling away and cultural transmission was increasingly impeded.

The Water Prophecy of Piwoya, Essie Parrish, in 1953

In the Roundhouse healing ceremony that Parrish allowed the anthropologists to film, she transmitted important teachings that she wanted to be preserved. She spoke about her philosophy of creation, the life power in water, and how it figured in healing:

I believe in creation. From the beginning, in my dream and in my vision, it was showing to me how the world was created. My way of doctoring is about creation.

This water is creation. Without the water, we could not live. Without the water, the things of the world would fail. Everything fails without the water. Water is the most important [unintelligible] created upon the earth. We couldn’t walk without the water. Our blood couldn’t circulate without the water.

You are not talking to me only – you are talking to the spirits also. The doubters say, I wonder what they do with the thing that she took out; what’d she do with it, where does it go? When I take out disease, after I put it in the water, it disappears there in so many minutes. It doesn’t stay, it doesn’t lay in the ground, it doesn’t stay in the basket – it disappears.

Wherever I go, in stranger-places, I have to call on the Spirit. Do not doubt this work, because it is spiritual.

This is prophecy — not prediction, but the direct revelation of truth. Essie Parrish is a healer — even now, as an ancestor, she is healing. Her doctoring songs are sacred, powerful, and beautiful, her dance wise and reverent and real. She is accompanied by singers with elderwood clappers, who know the songs and are skilled in picking up the meIodies the yomta sings and sustaining them as she begins to huff or moan or speak prayers. Her long drawn-out cries give the signal for silence and the end of each chant.

I recently discovered a fuller version of this film, apparently unedited and in its original order. It gives a taste of her teaching and profoundity of her legacy, full of wisdom and spirit. She dances with the doctoring staffs, with their cloth covers in black and white, the colors and symbols as she Dreamed them, the cocoon and abalone pendants. After dancing for a while, she lays the poles down and moves to sit on the ground near the patient. She rocks from side to side, chanting, swinging her torso and her outstretched hands, rubbing her hands together, gathering energy, her hands trembling with the power. Sometimes she is blowing a rhythm on a whistle suspended from her neck.

She turns to touch the sick person, directly on his body, or shaking over certain places on it. At some point the healer leans down to suck then illness out, and then slowly leans way back, her face raised to the heavens. Her upper body shakes and rolls, and her trembling right hand comes out, now over her own body. She drinks from two bowls and again leans over the sick man. She rubs his shoulders, infuses his head, rubbing her hands together and making a hissing sound, then a long moan that signals the chanters to top. She continues to pray, rubbing her hands, in a resonant voice, in the Kashaya language.

She speaks in English, too, explaining her way of healing in this filmed session. (And here is where the filmmakers of Pomo Shaman made major cuts, not understanding the importance of this full transmission by the yomta. The full recording is nearly 3 times longer than the edited version.) I haven’t transcribed this section yet, but she talks about the power she has in her finger, comparing it to electricity. She explains how that finger searches the body for the disease (as she passes her shaking hand over) and how it is drawn to the illness, is pulled toward it. She says “it works like a magnet, and it pulls like a magnet.”

(There is much more to be said about the healing power of Essie Parrish, but since this essay is about prophecy, I will save that for another article, even though they overlap.)

In 1958 Parrish told people assembled for a Flower Dance about her tape recorder (“word holder” in Kashaya) and her desire to preserve the traditions: “Sometime, after something has happened to me, after I vanish, the things that I say —my songs— will remain here on earth, will remain with my children. That is so that it will be with you. Whenever you forget something, you can search it out on it. This thing lying behind me is mine.”

She told her hearers: “the white people are picking up the scattered bits of my language that you are discarding. The round house standing here is just like scraps that you threw away.” She urges them that “these things are to be handed down.” She asks what will happen when the older generation has passed away? “Let us train our little children — start training right now. See that we hand [our traditions] down to them [so that] they’ll never forget them.”

She remonstrates with those who have assimilated into settler culture: “Having become white people, you feel ashamed of the Indian way of dancing. Nevertheless, what I hand down is yours — what I hand down is yours.” [Kashaya Texts, 323] Later she adds, “Some day, at the end of the world, we will be recognized by these things that we are doing.” [Kashaya Texts, 327]

Before her death in 1980, Parrish prophesied that on the day of her burial, there would be rain and thunder, and that later on they would see red lightning. Rain and thunder did come as she said, and a month later, there was red lightning over the reservation like no one had ever seen.

 

Historical context of the Dream Dance movements in California

Everywhere the European invasions and land seizures threw Indigenous societies into turmoil. They disrupted their economies, cut off their food supply, forced people to flee their country as refugees, often triggering internecine wars in the process. While all these stressors were going on, European diseases were wreaking unprecendented mortality, made worse by hunger, loss of shelter, and forced marches to reservations. The severity of the genocide in California was especially dramatic and swift.

New spiritual movements arose in responses to these historic traumas and losses, in many parts of what is now the United States. The best known is the Ghost Dance, which originated among the Paiute in Nevada and spread across the Great Plains. But many other spiritual movements happened. Decades before Wovoka preached the Ghost Dance, the female visionary Wananikwe originated the Dream Dance or Drum Dance religion in Minnesota. It spread across the Midwest and eastern Plains, and was so successful that it persisted into the 20th century.

In California, there was the Earth Lodge religion and, somewhat later, the Roundhouses of the Bole Maru Dreamers. [DuBois 1939: 11] According to Maria Meyers of Kashaya, two women, Juana Loretto and Josefa, brought the Bole Maru dance to Lake County from Napa, further inland. This would have been before 1874. [Dubois, 100] The Wintu had their Dream Dance (yetcewestconos). Its first dreamer was a woman named Lus, from Ydalpom, who hosted the first dance and inspired others. [Dubois, 56]

Among the River Patwin, Rosie Wylie was remembered: “She came from around Colusa, and was one of the first dream dancers they had.” [74] Another dreamer was Emma Phillips, who dreamed songs and dance regalia in yellow and green. She had a flag in those colors, raised on a pole in front of the dance house, and made cloth balls for the dance, to be tossed back and forth across the fire in the center of the lodge. As her daughter recalled, “Two women dancers could keep three or four balls moving.” [Dubois, 73]

The ball dance began among the River Patwin and spread to other peoples who followed the Bole Maru way. [76] It was known to the Wappo, who did it with eight dancers, four men and four women, throwing cloth balls — black and white, red and green — back and forth across the fire. “This was the most sacred dance of all. The balls were put in a bag and kept in the house when they weren’t being used. No one but the dancers were allowed to touch them.”

A Wappo dreamer named Rosie gave a dance every year in springtime, inside a brush fence. She picked the dancers and paid for the dresses, as well as feeding everyone who came. The dancers went without water throughout the dance, just as the man who set up the ceremonial flagpole had done. He brought it in on the night of the dance. As the sacred pole approached, Rosie blew on her whistle. Once it was raised, the dance began. [All Dubois, 111]

The records gathered by Clare Dubois show a Lizzi Polissi among the Maidu dancers at Chico. [Dubois, 75] Susie Campbell of Ft. Bragg (1907-08) dreamed songs for the Big Head dance and the Dress Dance, which lasted four days and four nights. She had a split-stick clapper that no one could touch. [Dubois, 92]

Women made elaborate dance dresses with symbols and colors dreamed by by the Bole Maru seers. [Dubois, 73] Sometimes the dreamers themselves made the regalia, like Carrie Smith of the Coast Miwok in Middletown. Around 1900 she became a huni dreamer. “She went on giving dances for ten years until she died. She said that if she didn’t give dances she would die, so all her relatives helped her out. ... She made costumes for everyone in the ranchería. She had a flag and pole...” which was 25 or 30 feet tall, and treated as sacred and powerful. “It was kept in the dance house when a dance wasn’t going on. You have to be careful of it.” [112]

This Coast Miwok dance house was large, 40-50 feet wide. Its door faced south; In the back, on the north side, was the foot drum, made of planks laid over a pit. “Carrie was the first [among the Coast Miwok] to bring in the Big Head dance [uditsana]. They danced it three nights and on the fourth used the Ball Dance. Carrie called the Big head ‘shaltu.’ That means spirit. Either two men or two women danced it, but never a man and a woman.” [Dubois, 112]

Carrie directed the four nights of dancing. She preached, gave singers the songs, and told the people what to do. She stood in the rear of the house near the singers and the drum.” Her title of huni woman derives from a word meaning “to show something”: showing what she has seen in a dream. [Dubois,112]

The idea that dreamers had to give dances or they would become ill and die (as for Carrie Smith, above) was a common theme. It relates to international patterns around initiatory illness and accepting a calling, with whatever mandates and taboos that entailed. Dreaming and then giving dances, which included feasting people, was a spiritual obligation and a gift, an offering. Among the northern Pomo. Tilly Lockhart of Sherwood gave dances in the period 1900-1910. “She got sick, that is how she became a dreamer. She used a brush house for her dances.” [Dubois, 92]

In her call to healing, too, Essie Parrish was told that she should make a staff with designs on it: “With that you will cure people. If, however, you don’t do that, you will die. If you don’t make that, your eyes will become blind and your ears will grow deaf, and that’s how you will be lying. This is your job on earth.” [Kashaya Texts, 225]

Among the coast Pomo at Pt Arena, Susanna Frank was the daughter of dreamer John Boston. She began to dream in her own right around 1931. [92?] In one description, she “doctors with dream songs.” Her sister Annie Bijola, (elsewhere named as Nancy) [Dubois, 99] also did healing that was guided by her seership: “She has been going about six years. She sings dream songs to cure. She never calls a dance. She preaches about what is wrong with a person; she looks through them and sees what is wrong with them just like an x-ray.” [Dubois, 104].”

Bole Maru regalia of a woman dancer at Point Arenas, CA

In the hintil dance of the Pomo, men dance with an arrow held in front of the body with both hands, and women hold bandanas in each hand, waving them “back and forth alternately with arms bent upward at elbows. 82] Another description of the Maru dance among the northern Pomo says that only women danced it, with feathers in their hair and dance dresses. They entered and circled the fire while the singers slowly sang ye ho tana, then divided in two lines facing east and west across the fire. “Then the same song was repeated at a faster tempo while the women danced in place, elbows flexed, hands at shoulder length and moved in and out from the body. The whole body quivered. They repeated the formation four times.” [89, quoting John Smith] This dance was dreamed by Bill, whose daughter Elvy Patch also became “a Bole Maru leader in Sulphur Bank.” [89]

Similarly, Drew Shoemake dreamed a Maru dance done by women: “They formed a crescent between the center post and fire. They danced in place. In their hands they held shredded tule tassels about 8 inches long with cloth handles on which a black cross was sewed. The women swayed their hands from side to side.” [98] This looks like a tradition that preceded the use of cloth handkerchiefs in many Maru dances.

 

Annie Jarvis, yomta and teacher of Essie Parrish

Annie Jarvis began dreaming two years before her group of Pomo people left the Haupt Ranch (where they had taken refuge during the land seizures) for the Kashaya Reservation. It is said that she lost her voice for a prolonged period when her powers were first developing. On the new site she directed the erection of a dance house. It may be entered only on bare feet. During the ceremonies the center pole is wound with cloth on which ‘the rising sun, the moon, stars and crosses are sewn.’ ... When ceremonies are in progress six flagpoles are erected within the enclosure around the dance house.” [Dubois, 100]

Dubois says that Annie Jarvis lived in a house right beside the dance lodge, in some seclusion away from community doings. “She is reputed to cure through dream powers.” The anthropologist described this yomta’s prophecy in negative terms: “The content of her harangues is largely moralistic.” She failed to understand why it was imperative for the Kashaya to forbid alcohol use and church attendance, both of which posed a serious threat to the preservation of Kashaya ways (as for so many other Native peoples). “We are a different nation and we should stay apart.” [100. Dubois did recognize, however, that the Bole Maru group solidarity “represent not only a survival but a revival of such customs as survived.”] 

This declaration of the yomta Annie Jarvis cannot be understood without being aware of the historical traumas and dislocations that Pomo people had already suffered, from the forcible removal of the northern Pomo from Potter Valley to Round Valley to the terrible massacres at Clear Lake and the Russian River. Religious ceremonies were spreading rapidly in this time of crisis. A Pomo witness John Smith described how “The Willits Indians had gotten together and were dancing all the time.” [Dubois, 88]

The whites felt threatened by the power and unity of these spiritual dances. They forced the Pomo to move to Round Valley, under dire conditions. One of the main Dreamers did not call for any dances there “because his people were treated so badly.” All the regalia and feathers were burned: “The [government] agent ordered them to do this and there were five hundred soldiers there to make them do it. They never gave the Maru dance up there again.” [Dubois, 89]

The built-in settler bias of virtually all written sources is illustrated by this rare historical mention of Annie Jarvis: “Pomo dreamers like Annie Jarvis, head dreamer for the Kashaya Pomo from 1912 to 1943, stressed the Bole Maru doctrines of Indian nationalism and isolationism. [Why not “cultural self defense”? This is bias.] Jarvis outlawed intermarriage with non-Indians, forbade gambling and drinking [for very compelling reasons: the economics of survival, prevention of violence, and protecting social cohesion], and halted attempts by government officials to take Indian children to boarding schools.” [Irwin, 340] That last is an impressive achievement, especially in light of what Indian Country was suffering in that same era; but Irwin talks about it as if it was a bad thing, part of what she calls “isolationism.”

The remote location of the Kashaya allowed them to keep their culture intact for longer than many other peoples, but the time came when they needed an organized defense against external interference. This is why Annie Jarvis pushed back against missionaries (thus her telling people not to attend church) and fought against state agents trying to break up their families the same way they had done to other peoples, by taking children away, forcing them to speak English and all the rest.   

Essie Parish’s daughter Vana Parrish Lawson contextualized the transitions that Jarvis (and Parrish after her) had to negotiate: “In 1919, the Round House center pole of the old ceremonial building at the Haupt Ranch was moved to the Stewarts Point Rancheria under the supervision of then Spiritual Leader, Annie Jarvis. This was because the pole represented Kashaya Pomo Indians’ continuum of the traditional ceremonial spirituality of the tribe. Upon the death of Annie Jarvis in 1943, Essie Parrish took over responsibilities as Spiritual Leader of the Kashaya Pomo Indian tribe at the Stewarts Point Rancheria.” [Parrish Lawson, 7]

The yomta impressed upon her daughter the importance of remembering these traditions and the connections they sustain:

These things we do, they speak of who we are, the families we're from, and about our relatives, too. We are not just one person; we are many. In just one there is the whole tribe and our ancestors too. White people call this 'history or tradition' or something like that.  [Parrish Lawson, 7]

Parrish Lawson also speaks to a shift toward women’s leadership. Most early accounts name men as leaders (though the information above shows that the Bole Maru was never a male-only movement). The Big Heads dance and some of the other earlier ceremonies seem to have been men's turf, originally. But this changed, as women began to participate in Big Head dances and to wear the regalia (as Essie Parrish herself did. Vana Parrish Lawson observed, “The dreamers, or "doctors," gradually developed into a single leader or dreamer. Eventually, women began emerging in this position, as the men had become boasters and overpowering in their ways.” [Parrish Lawson, 8]

 

Mabel McKay

The “old time doctor and Dreamer” — and master basket weaver — came from the Long Valley Cache Creek Pomo, but she lived much of her life in Wintun country. By the time she was born, only six people survived among the Cache Creek Pomo. So the girl was raised by her grandmother, working as migrant farm laborers, which allowed her to escape the settler-socializing school system and develop her gifts. As a child, she began Dreaming and receiving instruction from Spirit. "You're a Dreamer, one who trains only by me, not by anyone on the earth." She was told that she would become a doctor, and would receive a pipe, elderberry clappers, and cocoon rattles for her work.

Coast Miwok chief and historian Greg Sarris knew both Mabel McKay and Essie Parrish in his youth. (See his biography Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream, 1994) He says that McKay’s great uncle Richard Taylor founded the Bole Maru religion in 1870, at a time when Pomo culture was threatened with destruction. She herself told Greg Sarris about the shocks, dislocations, and terrible suffering that European conquest had inflicted:

 “Yes, them days was hard time. Raping time, how they [settler men] done with the women. Starvation. People moving... You know about people moving around, different people.” [Sarris 1993: 29] She remembered the hideous history of slavery, torture, and massacre, like the one at Clear Lake (1849) and the slaughter of 140 people at Bloody Island on the Russian River (1850). They took the girls and raped them that way —tying them with ropes, like cattle. A lot it happened that way.” [Sarris 1993: 55]

Sarris says that Mabel McKay was "the last Dreamer and sucking doctor among the Pomo peoples." She became the adopted sister of Essie Parrish (they both dreamed each other before they ever met). They did ceremony and doctored together many times. She kept up the Strawberry and Acorn Feasts after her sister's death, and continued her own weaving and doctoring. Sarris explains that being a “traditional weaver” means that her work “is associated with power and prophecy. She told him, “Everything is told to me in my Dream. What kind of designs, what shape, what I am to do with it — everything about the baskets — everything is told in my Dream.” [Sarris 1993: 51]

Not only are the baskets imbued with “designs and their inherent messages,” but the basket is to be fed with water once a month, prayed over, songs sung over it. “Her baskets are living.” They have “stories, songs, and geneologies. They have helped us on our travels and told us who we are as a people. They have healed the sick and forecast momentous events.” [Sarris 1993: 60-61]

 

Sources:

Kashaya Texts, ed. and translated by Robert L. Oswalt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964

Greg Sarris, Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Wholistic Approach to American Indian Texts. Berkeley: University of California, 1993

Sarris, Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream, 1994

Cora Dubois, The Ghost Dance of 1870. Berkeley: University of California press, 1939, in series: Anthropological Records ; 3:1.

Mary Ann Irwin, “Historians, Politics, and California Women,” in California Women and Politics: From the Gold Rush to the Great Depression. Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011

Vana Parrish Lawson and Richard Andriano. “The Kashaya Pomo Indians of Metini - The Roots of Our Culture / Stories of Essie Parrish.” Fort Ross Conservancy Library: http://www.fortross.org/lib.html

Other prophetesses:

Dahia al-Kahina, Amazigh prophetess, Aurès mountains, Tunisia

Muhumusa, exiled Rwandan queen, oracle of Nyabingi in Uganda

Mauricia la Bruja, prophetess of the Old Ways, Venezuela

Teresa Urrea, la Santa de Cabora, healer and revolutionary seeress, Sonora, Mexico, El Paso, Texas, and Clinton, Arizona.

Libuše, prophetess, tribal judge, and founder of Prague, Czechia

Pau, kaula wahine / seeress, Hawai'i

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