ABOUT

 

 

Chera Van Falcon Burg was born and raised in Rochester, New York near Lake Ontario, though her father moved the family to California two years in a row for part of the year when she was 12 and 13. Their home in Rochester was surrounded by a park, which was on the ancestral lands of the Seneca. The park, with its meadows, creek, marshlands, hills, woods, birds and wildlife, provided a childhood refuge from a difficult family life. 

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As an adult, Chera lived in Rochester and the Finger Lakes region of New York state before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area for 17 years, during which time she frequently traveled to Europe. Needing a break from California, she moved back to New York state where she lived mostly in Saratoga Springs near the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains until she missed the west a few years later and moved back to the Bay Area for another decade before moving back east as a migrant from smoke and wildfires.

 

During the pandemic, Chera helped move her elderly mother from Rochester to Washington state to live with family in the eastern part of the state, while Chera moved to Bellingham, Washington north of Seattle. A year later, as the pandemic caused housing costs to spike in the Pacific Northwest, Chera moved east again and after a brief stint in Vermont, she settled in Door County Wisconsin, a peninsula between the shores of Lake Michigan and the waters of Green Bay, where she currently lives. Of course, all of these places are on the ancestral lands of indigenous peoples.

 

 

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