Welcome!

Welcome!!!! Great you popped by!

Do you like political humor? A twist to stories? Are you are searching for First Nations roots because Auntie Mabel told you that your great grandmother was Cherokee/Muscogee/Shawnee?

Have you ever heard of the Chickamaugans (aka Chickamaugas)? I did more than twenty years of research on them because my mother told me that she had visited the descendants of Tecumseh, a Chickamaugan ally, in California’s High Sierras when she was a child.

Originally Cherokees, they evolved into a resistance movement that included people from many First Nations, white British loyalists and African-Americans, both former slaves and free. They signed treaties with Great Britain and Spain and fought to protect First Nations land from 1775 to 1794. When resistance failed and they were threatened with starvation they migrated together in clusters and stayed together for nearly two hundred years.

I’m Carla. Born in Los Angeles, grew up 20 plus miles east of L.A. Shot at – age 19. I fled. Since then I have lived most of my adult life in Europe – where I feel safer than I did in the US. I also hope to share some of the things I’ve learned in Europe and some of the differences between Europe and the US.  For instance, as you already know, “pissed” in the US means angry, annoyed, irritated. While “pissed off” also means angry in England, “pissed” means very drunk.

The English have a wonderful expression: “take the piss.” If you take the piss out of someone, then you mock or poke fun at them.  And while the expression “piss artist” can mean someone who drinks too much in England, it can also mean someone who pokes fun at the indiosyncracies and foibles of themselves and others. Oscar Wilde was a piss artist (The Importance of Being Earnest). So was Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels; A Modest Proposal). I aspire to be a piss artist, too.

And just in case you’re wondering about the above photo of the house on the desert. My mother wrote, “Daddy’s ranch,” on the back of it. She lived there in 1921-1922, after they left Oklahoma (probably the Canadian District, Cherokee Nation) and before they moved to El Centro, on the California-Mexico border. It was twenty-seven miles from their nearest neighbor, on the Sonora desert. Her playmates were prairie dogs and horned toads.

Take care of yourself for now. I hope we meet again.