It's, it's beautiful and it has a lot going on, so tell us what you set out to achieve with the writing of this memoir.

Okay.

Well, the main goal behind this was, um, and it was actually not exactly intended to be a memoir when I first set out to write it.

Um, I wanted to contribute, uh, to the travel space as, as a Native person.

As it stands today, there are only other, there are only two other travel memoirs that I know of that are written by Native people.

One of them we published at Heyday in the Berkeley Roundhouse.

It's a book called An Indian Among Los Indigenas by a Karuk woman, um, named Ursula Pike.

Yeah.

All right, Tarja, what do you think?

Well, something that somebody had reminded me of really recently, I've been doing a couple of these interviews for the 250th anniversary of quote unquote independence of the United States.

And somebody, it was an actual, it was another California native who was a reporter who was doing a story with USA Today, had reminded me that in 1776, the region known as California wasn't even a state.

So we weren't part of the incorporation of independence during that time.

We were dealing with a whole other set of problems in 1776, which I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, If I'm wrong, was during was in the beginning years of the mission period here in Southern California.

And so, yeah, that's what I really give some thought to.

It's like, OK, so we weren't part of the United States yet, but we were in one of the waves of encroachment that Dr. Rodriguez talked about just a bit ago.

What story did you learn about the creation of America growing up?