Did you know that our non-profit corporation has offices near Yosemite National Park in California and in the Nacoochee Valley of Georgia?
The California Office even operates a television station!
Did you know that we research the history and architecture of all peoples in the Americas, not just Indigenous peoples from Siberia? The reason is that we quickly discovered that many aspects of the past in the Americas had been concealed, altered or were unknown.
The foundation’s origin was in 1999 on the Creek Southeast Message Board on the new-fangled internet, when Creek, Seminole, Uchee and Chickasaw descendants began asking each other, “Who are we?”, because the orthodoxy promoted by anthropology textbooks did not match our families’ oral memories.
Apalache is what most of the Creek Peoples called themselves until around 1748, when the word, “Maskoki” was coined by the new High King, Malachi Bemarin. The Oklahoma Creeks don’t know this, but Bemarin had substantial Sephardic Jewish ancestry. He joined the Ladino (Sephardic Hebrew) word for “mixed race” with “ki” – the Old Norse word for “tribe.”
Mekko, the Creek word for a “chief or regional king” is actually an Old Norse and Archaic Swedish word that means the same thing. The Florida Apalachee never called themselves Apalachee, until their Spanish conquerors told them that was their name. Appalachian is derived from the plural of a Panoan (eastern Peru) word, Apalache . . . Apalachen.
You see, all along the Creeks and their offspring, the Seminoles, were ethnic Brunswick Stew.
by Richard L. Thornton, Architect & City Planner
The Apalache Research Foundation is a Native American-managed, non-profit corporation that was first chartered by the State of Georgia in 2016 to promote preservation of the Pre-Columbian and Colonial Period Architecture in Georgia. Due to genetic and historical discoveries, our interest area now includes all of the Americas, Ireland, Scandinavia and Polynesia.
Apalache is the Anglicization of the Panoan word, Aparashi, that means “From ocean (or Amazon Basin) – descendants of. It was the name that most branches of the Creek Confederacy called themselves until around 1750, when the hybrid word Maskoki (Muscogee) was adopted.
In early 2000, eighteen professionals and professors, with substantial Native American ancestry began messaging each other so often that they became a separate thread on the Creek-Southeast Message Board, entitled, “Who are we,”
The focus of the group quickly transitioned to fighting plans by the State of Georgia to lease Etowah Mounds National Historic Landmark to a politically powerful, private developer for a dollar a year, who announced his intent to tear down the existing museum and build a new one, named after himself, which would be devoted to Cherokee history.
Meanwhile, numerous state bureaucrats were creating a false early history of the state by sending out press releases and fake maps, which proclaimed the Cherokees as the long time occupants of most of the state. We eventually realized that these efforts were actually a “paper trail” to convince the federal government to approve several Cherokee gambling casinos around the state of Georgia.
Using an alias* identity on the message board, my long time, secret girlfriend from 1991 in the Shenandoah Valley, Susan Karlson, played an active role in opposing this abomination, because of her status as a covert FBI agent in eastern Cobb County. She risked being fired by flying to Oklahoma under another alias and notifying officials of the Muscogee-Creek Nation about the plans by Georgia officials to essentially give away Etowah Mounds to organized-crime.
*I only figured out a few years ago that even the name and background, Susan told me back in 1991, was fake. She was definitely Swedish (or else an extraterrestrial or angel) because she spoke a Medieval dialect of Swedish, only spoken in the mountains between Sweden and Norway, plus certain regions of Finland.
In 2003, a member of this thread, who used the moniker, “Gator Joe,” suggested that those on the Creek-Southeast thread, who were doing research that conflicted with the history books send their discoveries directly to the others by email. Gator Joe described himself as having grown up in Georgia, but was now living in California. He was actually the beloved actor, Pernell Roberts, who grew up in Waycross, Georgia. Richard Thornton’s parents were good friends with Pernell’s parents, when they lived in Waycross. They were all members of Trinity Methodist Church in Waycross. However, for almost a decade, Richard would not realize Gator Joe’s true identity.
In 2005, Gator Joe suggested that the informal group create an organization and publish a regular newsletter. It was to be called, “The People of One Fire.” It is not remembered now, who suggested the name, Gator Joe was also the first person, not doing research, who asked to be a subscriber to the newsletter.
During Christmas 2005, Susan announced that she was getting very tired of her “James Bond” lifestyle. We had known each other Biblically since late July 1991, yet the longest we had been together was nine days during a vacation in Mexico in 2000. She had amassed a huge savings account and stock profile, because Uncle Sam always paid her overseas expenses. She learned that she could take full retirement on her birthday, July 6, because of her hazardous duty status.
She proposed marriage to me and suggested that as soon as I finished the Etowah Model, we take a long tour of the United States with the two children that I had never seen and my dog. If we got along, then she would buy a historic farm near Winchester, VA, where we first became a “twosome” and we could get married in the Old Stone Church, a landmark in Winchester, constructed in 1788. When I was able to sell my farm in Jasper, GA, I could apply the profits to rehabbing the old farm. She said that once we were living together, she could finally, legally tell me who she really was.
Susan suddenly stopped answering emails in June 2006. I had known very little about her work after 2000, but she had shown me photos of her in traditional Kurdish clothing, while in northern Iraq. I assumed that she had been seriously wounded or killed in action in the Middle East. I called friends in the DC office of the FBI, who we had worked with in the early 1990s, to find out what happened. If she was dead, I was going to request custody of our son and daughter.
My friends eventually contacted me covertly to tell me that all evidence in the federal computer system that Susan ever existed, including her Social Security number, had been deleted. Her name had been expunged from classified reports, she had produced. They still had paper copies of some of these reports in their home safes, so they were sure that these reports had mentioned her. There were no obituaries or death certificates in the world, with her name on them or even for a woman, matching her description, who died after she last communicated with me.
I immediately poured all of my energy into researching the past as a way of escaping the grief. In November 2009, a company banned from doing business in Georgia, because of involvement with organized crime, foreclosed on my house, even though they did not own my mortgage. The company purchased the mortgage the day after the foreclosure from the real owners then sold it to Fannie Mae. The District Court in Pickens County, GA refused to hear my case. Fannie Mae quickly realized the fraud and offered me a low interest mitigation load to close in mid-January.
On Friday night, December 18, 2009, former National Museum of American History/National Park Service Director Roger Kennedy called me on the phone out of the blue to ask me to do research and graphics for him. We had not seen each other since July 1995. He didn’t answer when I asked him how he found me.
Early on the morning of December 21, 2009, two smiling deputies showed up at my front door to hand me an eviction notice, stating that I had to be out of my home by Christmas Eve, three days from then. I told them that Fannie Mae had announced a ban on evictions during the holidays and then showed them the letter telling me of the pending mitigation loan closing. They didn’t care. They said that they had to follow the orders of the Distric Court judge.
So, I soon embarked on living two years with my three dogs in the national forests or an abandoned chicken house. Pernell Roberts died in late January. I did not realize who Gator Joe was until I received in the mail, a scrapbook full of photocopied photos and news clippings. Roger Kennedy somehow again tracked me down in April while I was in Graham County, NC and initiated research and graphics requests. I set up my computer in a video game lounge, owned by a friendly Snowbird Cherokees. That provided money for me to live on, but there were numerous attempts on my life during those three years. My herd dogs saved my life on many dark nights in the forest.
While doing field research for Roger, I stumbled upon the stone ruins of the Track Rock Terrace Complex. The rest is history.
In 2016, we incorporated the Apalache Foundation to provide instintutional stability and credibility to the shared research efforts. It was created in memory of Susan, who had done so much to stop the takeover of Etowah Mounds National Historic Landmark, even though she was Swedish, not Native American. The word, “research” was added a few years later to clarify that the corporaiton was not involved in the design of buildings or providing paid services to others. We eventually added the office in eastern California. There are many Southeastern Native Americans in California, including over 10,000 citizens of the Muscogee-Creek Nation, who get very little attention from researchers in their state.
From May 2013 to his death from cancer on August 19, 2021, sociologist and historian, James Loewen was the primary mentor of my research, and later, the Apalache Research Foundation. He is best known for his blockbuster book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, but authored several other best-selling books. His wisdom is sorely missed.
In September of 2023, a DEA agent stopped me on a rural highway under the pretense of a law enforcement traffic stop. She warned me that the cops in nearby White County were trying to frame me for the disappearance of a man in their county, who they had, if fact, murdered. She also warned me to stop exploring the woods in Habersham County or going on the property of a neighbor’s house, when they were not there. There was a satanic cult – organized crime ring in the vicinity of my house, heavily involved with illegal drug sales and the operations of local law enforcement agencies.
Almost like an after thought, she told me that Susan was still alive. In December 2005, state law enforcement officers had put a hidden camera in my bedroom then posted the videos on a pay for view porno website. It was yet another effort to scare away girlfriends. They did not know Susan was a federal agent, but she was fired, because her top secret assignment had been compromised. She and our two offspring had been whisked away to somewhere faraway as a option to her being “liquidated.” Susan did stop by my house briefly in October 2023, but she did not tell me what her name was now, who she worked for, where she lived or where the two children are. Now you know.
Current activities
The foundation’s current focus is the 16th and 17th centuries, but it also documents discoveries of older architecture, ceremonial and community sites. Although founded by Muskogee-Creek, Chickasaw and Seminole Native Americans, the foundation studies the vestiges of all peoples, regardless or race or tribe, who settled in the Lower Southeastern United States in the past.
This foundation is also chartered to fund investigations by professional archaeologists. With more outside financial support, it is hoped that such projects will occur in the future. A high priority is the site of a Fort Apalache, trading post, mission and mule-breeding farm, constructed by the Spanish Governor of Florida at the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River in 1646.
The fort and mission were described, plus sketched, by Richard Brigstock in 1653, but its specific location remained a mystery until I then read a passage in Charles Lanman’s Letters from the Alleghenies (1848). Lanman visited the ruins of the fort and provided enough information for the site to be pinpointed with LIDAR. Until then I did not realize that the map of North America, drawn by French catographer, Jean Baptiste Franqueline in 1684, contains a cross at the spot where the mission was located. The archaeological site is one mile north of Helen, GA and is on local government-owned land,
This well-crafted video is a good example of the multi-cultural approach to history that the Apalache Research Foundation now uses.
