It doesn't get more precious than seeing children line up eager to use it.
We have seen it over and over at the LEAD Agency Community Garden. This year is no different. For the 4th season Boys and Girls Club of Ottawa County have allowed groups of children to come to our garden. They have dug and planted seeds, set out vegetables and flowers, weeded and stopped to celebrate toads and hollered out when they removed the wicked "devil's shoelace" from the plot.

But the most precious thing they do is when they line up in front of the brightly colored rain barrels to fill their watering cans. We have a collection of them, all different, as with the children, none the same. They are careful not to waste the water and they are careful not to drown the plants. Sometimes their shoes get wet in the work, but on those hot days absolutely nothing feels better than when they put the own hands in the water flow and then cool their faces down with it. I love that feeling myself. But it is a joy to see children enjoy the gifts water provides, always the plants first and then the relief and celebration of cool water themselves.

LEAD is mid-season with our fundraiser Garden Parties, with the June and July successes, we will have a Pile it On Salad Party in August and are delighted to announce that a Fish Fry will be held for the September Garden Party sponsored and prepared by the Afton Masonic Lodge with Joe Johnson cooking! ARKANGELO will be playing again for these events. After all these years with LEAD's work, it has been great to take time to host some parties, get together with friends and know there is more environmental work ahead of us, but to take time to celebrate what is being done. As with all of our events the public is always invited and encouraged to come.

We are also finding there are activists growing here too with more people aware, learning how to show it when they are reporting what they see to agencies, speaking up for their rights to clean water and clean air.  LEAD is hosting a set of Activists Training sessions beginning with one for Youth with more to come. Be sure and let us know if you want in on them, or want to let us know how you are already activated.

One thing changed October 2017 and parents are going to want to know this. According to 310:512-1-3 Oklahoma has made it mandatory for all children six years and younger to have their blood lead checked. Here in Ottawa County that should be a no brainer, but according to Oklahoma State Department of Health's Antoinette Arenas only a fraction ( one third) of our children have been checked to see if they are being lead poisoned.

Activists? Where are you? Every mother needs to make sure this is done for their child. Lead poisoning can be prevented. But there is absolutely no way to know if your child is being poisoned without checking. Their futures require it. Blood is thicker than water. We all need water, but we never need lead in our blood. It can damage absolutely every organ in our body. Find out and get started on that right away. Get in that line and if your child tests positive for lead, you and the health department, us and every one we know will help figure out where it is coming from and begin the process of making that child, your child's personal environment safer.

Water may be precious but not more than your very own child. Let's all become activists on this, encourage every caretaker to get every child checked for lead. Imagine. Oklahoma got this one right. A rule that we can celebrate that will help our children be identified and helped while they are young.

It was at the Intertribal Environmental Council ITEC Conference this week I learned about Oklahoma's rule for lead testing all children, but I also had a chance to visit with others who will be presenting at our 20th National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek Sept. 25-26 at NEO and to catch up with people who encouraged us all to keep asking questions. Larry Tippet is the best at asking questions, and Garet Couch with Wind Environmental Services challenged me to see Tar Creek's Sister Site where he lives in Bonne Terre, Missouri.

National Geographic calls Bonne Terre Mine: "One of America's Top 10 Greatest Adventures." One of the world’s largest man-made caverns, founded in 1860 as one of history’s earliest deep-earth lead mines. This was the world’s largest producer of lead ore until it was closed in 1962." Upper levels are used for guided walking tours while lower levels form a billion gallon, seventeen-mile long lake, illuminated by stadium lighting with boat tours on the crystal clear water revealing abandoned shafts and equipment below. Get this: it is home to the largest fresh water scuba diving venue in the world!

Four hours away. Their advertisement doesn't mention chat piles and contaminated yard removal efforts by EPA and that a city of 60,000 people live on top of all of these mines. I have to go find their activists and see that precious water.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

On my way to work I had to stop for The Frog and the Rabbit out on the road this morning. They both travel the same, they hop so they had much in common and it seemed they were in conversation about it before I interrupted them. (Frog stayed for a photo, but Rabbit was long gone)

While I worked with the Miami Public Schools as an Indian Counselor twenty-five years, the young people who came through my office door at the high school or at Will Rogers sometimes now come back through my current office door at the LEAD Agency.

Some have grown in ways to become unrecognizable, some never changed, their whole essence is just as I remember them. It is ageless and the moments with them totally rejuvenates me. We all walked through the school doors and into our then future lives experiencing the joys and hard times life can bring.

While employed with the school district, my work was never dull, ever changing always trying to meet student needs. One of the opportunities I took on rare occasions after the regular school day ended was to be a Home Bound Teacher when someone was ill or put out of school for discipline before there was an alternative school and a few times when a doctor recommended it for our pregnant girls. This week I got to meet the son of one of my students, I met him by reading an essay he wrote for a scholarship for college. It is an absolute blink of an eye to imagine he could be old enough now to head out to college, but he spoke with pride as being his mother's son. His mother who never let up on her studies and dreams of an education even though he joined her life before she graduated high school.

It kept happening this week when joined in our community garden by a Will Rogers' kid who has kids of her own now, so able and willing to help us help our Boys and Girls Club kids learn that work is good and teamwork even better, while June Taylor, a former Will Rogers teacher had another team of kids finding out what on earth Cockscomb is or are.

Tim talked while we pulled out the Egyptian Walking Onions. Our original sets walked to us when our down the alley neighbor Flossie brought them a number of years ago. The onion sets are produced on leaf tips, they get heavy enough to weight themselves down to the ground. As sets root the cycle is repeated and the onion continues to walk. Burpee, the seed company describes them as "A true conversation piece." We harvested the sets and will replant what we didn't give away during our monthly garden party.  

He spoke about his grandchildren's dad, another former student who claimed to have had me as an ally back in his school days and  who just hours later was putting the legs back on the tables Harold Post had given us. How fitting to have us all meet somehow in the garden where everything grows if it is nurtured and treated with the respect our living beings deserve. I took a quick break to put on my town clothes to attend a meet and greet for an Oklahoma Corporation Commissioner running for Lt. Governor and while there got to hear an update on the J-M Farms Black Water Incident. Then quickly returned, put my sweaty cloths back on and listened to Chris talk about the perch he and his kids didn't catch down on Tar Creek the day they discovered it black.

Martin Lively  and I got back to another round of the garden. It was all happening in the garden, but as evening was about to set in, a former teacher who lives near Will Rogers, Elaine Irvin drove up got her weed eater out and went to work, grabbed the loppers and got rid of some poison ivy.

The book club selection was Rebecca by Daphne duMaurier, a book I always remember seeing on the long book shelves in the hallway in the house where I grew up. When my parents moved back to Oklahoma my dad had to build identical shelves in the house they moved into and the books came with them and found their familiar places next to each other on the new home shelves. If you have ever read the book or seen the movie you would know there were no similarities between me and that namesake. And certainly not after or during a work day in the garden with clothes almost wet from sweat with the knees definitely showing our earth's color.

It takes a heap of living to make a home, but it takes a heap of work to make a garden grow. Our Community Garden is growing good neighbors and better friends. Our motto: Ga Du Gi in Cherokee, means what else? "working together." Our garden brings us together and our work at LEAD Agency advocating for a clean safe environment is easier with the citizens in our communities making a difference by reporting what they see and speaking out.
 
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

My Cherokee grandmother got an allotment. Her parents did, too. Members of the Cherokee Nation who were born before Oklahoma became a state and were living in their Nation at the magic moment got pieces of the quilt cut from the Cherokee land in Indian Territory and very few of those squares are left intact.

Land that had been owned by all members of the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory was wacked apart with the slivers given to single members to make each one a land owner, a property owner, a privileged citizen, with a pathway to prosperity.

President Theodore Roosevelt said at the time, "The General Allotment Act is a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass. It acts directly upon the family and the individual."

Many Cherokees lived near one another, they got homestead acreage, but the rest of their allotment acres was given in tracks of 10 acres scattered throughout what ended up being 14 counties in the new state of Oklahoma.

It is hard to love a piece of land you never saw, never walked never found. In 1907 there were few roads and no fences around these 10 acre tracts of land, no way to find it again if you found it the first time. There were no trees in much of the tall grass prairie to use as landmarks.

Allotment was the end of the trail for communal doings for land held in common where use was determined among neighbors, family and friends.

Allotment is used nostalgically by some, used as the boundaries of a family's homestead. I got to go to my grandmother's allotment a few times when I was growing up. The last time was with my dad and son. Inside the kitchen we saw a sink with a window over it and out through the window was a pulley system that took an empty bucket from the kitchen down to the spring house where it could be filled and brought back up to the kitchen sink without having to leave the kitchen, rain or shine, even in winter, fresh water without going outside to the well. We went down to what the relatives called the spring house. There on the hottest days, when you walked inside it was obviously built to serve the home owners, with cold flowing spring water to keep butter, milk and eggs COLD until needed by the family.

The other thing I saw in the home where my Grandmother grew up, was upstairs. There were several closed doors. All the same, all with white porcelain door handles I had never seen before. But in the new addition of my house, before seeing the upstairs of my grandmother's homeplace I had constructed that upstairs hallway in my own house, same number of doors, all with the white porcelain door handles. I was driven to make those doors, just like all my other doors, all handmade except the one Annabell Mitchell gave me to use.

Allotment is also the name of the short film by Mark Lazarz and JJ Lind. After seeing a clip I was struck by how attached place can be to our identity. JJ got to go into his grandmother's allotment home much more often than I was able to, but the structures were much the same. Old wood ages and undisturbed places let memories sleep and peak out at you when you dare to step inside.

Allotment changed tribal ways so much we can barely find the words. Places in the lives of our ancestors helped make us who we are, helped us find ways to be brave and be in balance with nature.

Allotment is the name of the film JJ Lind will show at the 20th Tar Creek Conference September 26. You will want to see it in Miami with us. Allotment is a verb, a noun, a governmental process and has for me been a dirty word, but for us, it is a movie that we will share together understanding more about our emotional geography.

That's a term my son's OCU English professor Brenda Pfaff at OCU used as opposed to our physical geography. The Cherokees became landless twice over a short span of history. Trauma occurred and traveled with them on the removal to Indian Territory and then once settled in, allotment changed the structure and how land was owned and how quickly in their generational memory it could be lost.

The emotional side of geography was felt this week in Miami, Oklahoma. A sense of place and loss of it was felt with a break-in and arson of Anders Shoe Store. A range of emotions have been experienced and questions how to heal the trauma of loss for the owner and the workers and the community. This shows the other side of trauma and that is the power of surviving through the strength of resilience.

Just a ways away from the burnt building is Tar Creek and its resilience was threatened with the black water spill 2 weeks ago. As a health educator said only yesterday, "How much more could Tar Creek take?" Nick Shepherd is a University of Oklahoma graduate student from Miami, OK with a thesis on the fish in the creek and is counting resilience one fish at a time and J-M Farms has made efforts to prevent another release.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

Not all teas are to my liking.

When given a choice of tea bags and hot water, I really consider them all and though Earl Grey is a good name, I hardly ever choose it because the favor just isn't right for me. Lemon and plain old Lipton end up my choice, being what I am most accustomed to since it was the only tea choice available in the stores in west Texas where I grew up. But a glass of cold sweet tea in the summer with plenty of ice, man that certainly can be the answer.

When I learned mining just north of Miami was done underground in an aquifer pumped dry for 60 years, then the pumps were turned off and the mine caverns of course filled up with water. I like to explain that water got bad by how it came to be brewed down there, much like sun tea without the sun, just by sitting there and when it was just right, or wrong, it was going to release itself all brewed perfectly with all the metals still in the mines findable in the water, plenty of lead, zinc, arsenic and cadmium, manganese and sulfur, and iron lots of iron to give it just the right color. That brew of mine water I have called "toxic tea" has been flowing down Tar Creek since 1979, now think about it, do the math, thirty-nine years. How long is a generation? in people years? I always figured in school years, 12 years of school plus 6 years to begin with, but with kindergarten and pre-school, I get closer to 20. So to my reckoning that is almost 2 generations, who never enjoyed a Tar Creek as the Miami city fathers would have had in their early city planning, planting their town between a creek and a river as they did.

The black tea that entered and blended into Tar Creek just a bit ago overtook it's orange tinge and changed the color for the time to true black. We will need to be watchful of our waters as it rolls by for changes in color, bubbles and of course dead fish. The bubbles or foam could be telling you there are nutrients being added to the water.

The other type of tea I have been familiar with is compost tea. Compost tea for gardeners is an extra step many now believe can be over-kill for the garden. It is made by adding water to compost, letting it sit to brew and then adding that water directly to plants. The too much is a good thing can kick in and harm the plants with an overload of nutrients. When manure is one of the ingredients that tea is even more potent.

This potent type of compost tea is what J-M Farms recently revealed was the cause of the fish kill and the black water in Tar Creek. Since it was a pipe involved sending the company's tea down the creek, they have been working on repairs that will prevent this from happening again. I am looking forward to seeing what that fix looks like on their property in a few days. We know that the water in Tar Creek is tested all the time by several entities but it has been getting great attention lately. Almost every day samples are being driven to Oklahoma City to the Department of Agriculture laboratory to be analyzed to determine actions that must be done for continued improvement. I am hoping the results will show our creek is rebounding nicely.

Clean water, we need it, and we have all been waiting for it. There will be a lot more money spent to make this little creek better. Former Senator Ed Muskie of Maine who fought for the Clean Water Act in 1972 asked:

Can we afford clean water? Can we afford rivers and lakes and streams and oceans which continue to make possible life on this planet? Can we afford life itself? Those questions were never asked as we destroyed the waters of our nation, and they deserve no answers as we finally move to restore and renew them. These questions answer themselves.

The Clean Water Act was a no brainer and was passed during the Nixon Administration and parts were made more clear during the Obama Administration on what WOTUS (Waters of the U.S.) means. It covered navigable waters but was vague on how far upstream protections should go to keep those water bodies clean.

We need to pay attention to the small print in what is going on with current EPA decisions because we can lose the protections the Clean Water Act intended. We need also to be watchful for the changes in the water bodies around us and make those calls to the regulators bound to protect them.

Take some time to be by running water, and make a glass of ice cold sweet tea to cool down. Think about how Tuesday afternoon felt like Friday and Thursday like another Monday this week.

What is right is wrong what was orange turned black.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim