There have been some distractions lately as the planning for the 20th National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek is rounding the corner as September is upon us and the 25th & 26th will be here soon. Beverly Miller our neighbor gave us a bushel of sweet potato vines to add to our garden, two young volunteers appeared just in time to plant them.

Nancy Scott from Cherokee Nation brought items for youth activists and met Linda Sue Warner and shared stories. Ron Seat brought two bags full of the best fishing supplies for the LEAD Agency Silent Auction all from MAKO, the Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma Fly Fishers Club, so fisher people pay attention to  add Sept. 20: the Fish Fry Kickoff for the conference sponsored by the Afton Masonic Lodge # 76. Tickets for the fundraiser are $7 and $5 for children (from 5 to 7 p.m. at our office).

Distractions continue, but the first ever banquet for Tar Creek tickets are $30, though the conference is free for Ottawa County Residents as usual as it is for Activists and Students. The stars of the show, the actors who have been here at the beginning and many who have been here throughout the years will come together for a time to reflect and remember and continue the fight for environmental justice right here, whether that is cleaning up a contaminated yard, as the agency head in charge of making sure that happens. The folks who are making bad water good. The people checking our birds and counting fish, live ones and the dead ones. Who are these people? What have they done? How about the people who MADE a Senator finally understand some places are simply not safe for human habitation. What about the artists who give us their best as they depict the worst around us? Will we recognize a whole cadre of recipients of our Mike Synar Awards, you bet. Come find out who they are, maybe they will tell us what got into them to do their part. What about the nurses who have tested our children for lead and followed them to lower levels? How about our lead poisoned children who have grown up and are making the best out of the lives they are living, lets never forget them. The teachers who struggled to make learning happen for these pupils who find even sitting still sometimes impossible. Let's commend those teachers.

We have never taken the time to look around the room and acknowledge the integrity and grit these people exhibit to serve us and come to this place year after year never being thanked for caring about this corner of the state most often forgotten by most. But we will celebrate our own efforts, our very important pieces of this pie we have bit off to do our part for the greater good. Get a ticket, go ahead plan for it in your budget, we won't do it again for a number of years. It won't be a Gala, but it could be fun to celebrate and while they are all in the room let them know, they are not done and we are not either. The work must continue and our environment, our creek, our rivers, our lake and all the land from here to there needs the attention and the cleanup we all deserve. The one our future generations are depending on us to have waiting for them.

If you are coming to the banquet, why not come for all of the events? Spend some time listening and learning from experts, share your thoughts with them and us, let's show we care. Because we do.

Distractions can be appreciations we may fail to fully acknowledge at the time, and as I began saying we have had some. One was writing a letter to Senator Inhofe with Lois Gibbs, known around the country as the Mother of Superfund. The message was printed in the Sunday Tulsa World asking the Senator to step up and bring a piece of legislation forward in his committee to reduce the risk of lead poisoning for every child in our country.
 
Get the Lead Out of Schools Act (S. 1401) would require that all school drinking water be tested for lead. The legislation also requires all results of the water testing to be shared with the school community, because everyone has the right to know what they are drinking. Senator Inhofe has been invited to the conference, hope he makes it, as we will be reflecting on the reluctant but needed help he has put forth to help fund the Superfund work at Tar Creek.
 
The Ottawa County Fair could never be a distraction, as it is an event that pulls our community together. LEAD Agency and our good neighbors, the Ottawa County Health Department and NEO Community Action Agency were in the vintage building. So many entered the drawing for the PUR Water System we selected three winners instead of ONE. We found fishermen/women who know their fish, met children and proud parents. Some of these children are lead poisoned but many have not been tested. Testing is the only way to know. Free testing available at the clinics and at our conference. Don't be distracted.

Respectfully Submitted without Distractions ~ Rebecca Jim

Last Saturday morning a group of Mary Sue Price's family members who had come to Oklahoma for a family celebration arrived. They had come from around the country and since they were  interested in environmental justice I suggested they should make every effort to attend LEAD Agency's upcoming Tar Creek Conference since Charles Lee the primary author of the United Church of Christ's Toxic Race and Waste report would be our keynote speaker. And dad-gum-it they were active in that church! One of 3 churches over a decade ago that approved resolutions for Tar Creek, her superfund site and for the people living within it.

The group arrived at the front door of our office and when they came in I discovered a handwritten envelop in the mail, quickly opened it after seeing it was from Gladys Keeton, peaked inside and got carried away with the group for hours, giving deep background of this place, passing around documents and drawings, and viewing maps before we headed out to see the sites. All the while keeping the yet unread letter from Gladys handy.

A real Toxic Tour must contain yes, the problems we have, but also our endearing places, historic treasures and our stories. We see the Miami Post Office containing the Eagle-Picher Central Mill mural painted by Nick Calcagno and the dialysis center where so many of my friends and former students receive life sustaining care for damaged kidneys. Cadmium and lead found locally in our legacy mining dust can be linked to kidney damage.  They learned about George Mayer and his horses and the brick factory in Commerce with the passive water treatment system established by University of Oklahoma to deal with his mine water discharges. (I did as usual infer they Google the site because the shape of the treatment system looks like it sort of spells out the word Jesus, in my opinion).

From there we could see the amazing statue of Mickey Mantle designed by our Nick Calcagno in front of the Commerce High School athletic fields. That led us to Mickey's boyhood home on "C" street. We stopped before turning onto old Route 66 to discuss the cave-ins that threatened that piece of the historic ribbon road before proceeding to the classic gas station on the corner opposite of the still open for business Dairy King in Commerce, OK. Just down the street we stopped at the very spot that would have had a GREAT DEAL more significance if I had actually read Gladys' letter.

Sophia the youngest and Maryn the elder joined me standing in the street in front of a lawn with a lone ore can filled with beautiful summer flowers. We stood facing outward as our triad demonstrated how men stood while lowered into the mines in ore cans as elevators for work each day. But in the letter I didn't read was Gladys' story about her own ride down the mine in an ore can! Just who is Gladys Keeton? She is a local poet LEAD Agency honored four years ago at the annual Tar Creek Conference, or more honestly, she honored us with her poetry and art. She is now 94 and demonstrates with the writing that follows, also a fine story teller:

The Coming Storm:  This is about an experience I had when I was twelve years old. My family consisted of my father, mother, brother and baby sister and myself. At this particular time my mother's sister was staying with us. We lived right across the road from the Benalair Mine. There was a big derrick that stood above the mine shaft. My dad was ground Boss and worked underground five days a week. On this particular day it was very cloudy with dark ominous clouds hanging over head and the wind was beginning to blow. My dad was very concerned and decided to get us to safety and away from the coming storm. He told us to get into one of the big ore cans that would take us down into the mine. These ore cans would hold three men so my mother, her sister and me + baby all got into  the cans and that was our way of transportation We weren't very happy about going but dad thought it best so down, down into the big well we went. You could hear water dripping all the way down, it was very creepy. My dad operated the hoist machine and he would ring a bell when it was time to take us back up. We finally landed and the first thing we saw was a corral where they keep the mules that were used to pull the ore cans when they were full of dirt and rocks which were encrusted with lead and zinc.
 There were electric light bulbs strung in various places. We walked a little way but the farther we walked the darker it got and where there were no more light bulbs it was so dark you couldn't see anything.
 Finally we heard the bell ring that informed us to get ready to be lifted up. We were so happy to see daylight again. and the storm had passed. I knew I was never going to go underground again. I would rather face the storm.

We finished the tour with a drive through the remnants of Picher, a quick over the line so they could say the most used line from the Wizard of Oz, "we are not in Kansas anymore," as our return trip gathered speed. We experienced "agazement" as we gazed over Tar Creek at the confluence of Lytle Creek and the mine water discharge after being up-close to the chat piles once used to great abandon by 4-wheelers and picnicking families. Then off to join their wider families for their joyous reunion.

Hopefully you and all who come won't have to face the storm Gladys faced with her family to attend our conference where we will put our minds together as one to discuss and learn how environmental justice weaves into our lives.
We have had many amazing artists featured at our National Tar Creek Conferences over these 20 years.

We invite each to our Opening Reception Sept. 24 at 6:30 p.m. at the NEO College Commons Hall to reflect on their work and celebrate the arts they create. There have been hundreds of students who have touched us with their art. All are invited to be celebrated as part of the environmental justice movement each has been part of creating, as art became activism.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Toxic Toured:  Leon and Maryn Goodson, Bethesda, MD; Sue Hughbanks, Chattanooga, TN;                 Tony Goodson and Sophia Goodson, Seattle, WA
 

The Environmental Protection Agency was established because the environment and all of us living within it needed protection. That protection was needed because our environment was then and continues to be polluted by corporations, industries and sometimes by us in smaller ways.

The EPA has a new acting administrator, Andrew Wheeler. Not many of us have met him, and he is not making the headlines like Scott Pruitt had made, but Mr. Pruitt was an Oklahoman and we did think he might in some way make us proud with how he might deal with our Oklahoman issues, including Tar Creek.

Mr. Wheeler comes with a history we may discuss another time but this week he spoke via video to the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NJAC) where he vowed to improve communication with vulnerable communities. We might not think of us and here being one of those places, but we are an environmental justice site and EPA will have opportunities to speak to us at the 20th National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek held Sept. 25-26. Perhaps Mr. Wheeler will join them, but for sure Charles Lee will be coming and no one in EPA can speak more clearly than he can on environmental justice.

Charles Lee is credited as the actual pioneer of environmental justice, as he was the principal author of the groundbreaking report, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. This document was published in 1987 as the first national report to comprehensively document the presence of hazardous wastes in racial and ethnic communities throughout the US. The report would serve as an instrument for the victims of environmental racism to become aware of the problems but also to able to participate in the formation of viable strategies and solutions.

Mr. Lee is noted to have helped spearhead the emergence of a national environmental justice movement and federal action that included the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, Executive Order 12898, the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice, the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), and the Federal Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice, the very group the acting administrator spoke with this week and that Mr. Lee had served as a charter member.

For decades he has been the senior policy advisor for Environmental Justice at the EPA, and leads the development and implementation of the EPA’s agency-wide environmental justice strategic plans; and so of course he received the Environmental Justice Pioneer Award on the twentieth anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 12898 which was issued by President William J. Clinton in 1994. This focused federal attention on the environmental and human health effects of federal actions on minority and low-income populations with the goal of achieving environmental protection for all communities.
 
Mr. Lee told me that, "No one in the White House can tell the people what their issues are." He has been listening long enough to know, we all know the issues we face, though sometimes we might not know how to spell them or what these wastes might be doing to us or to our children.

We will learn tangible results that have been achieved in minority, low-income, tribal and indigenous communities, many that have required decades of effort, and are a testament to the long-standing commitment, innovation and hard work of the EPA staff who do this work on a day-to-day basis.

We will be provided examples for how we can all work together more effectively to address disproportionate environmental impacts, health disparities, and economic distress in our nation’s most vulnerable communities to make them cleaner, healthier and more prosperous places to live, work, play and learn.

That is exactly why we have asked Charles Lee to come to speak. He has much to say because he has been in the middle of making the EPA protect more of us for decades. He is a serious man with determination that has been serving us from afar. You will get to hear him push us and the agencies represented at our conference who work for us to work with us to make this place better.

When I attended the Intertribal Council Meeting this week to invite all the tribal leaders to LEAD Agency's annual conference and how important it is for the tribal members who are such an integral part of our community to be there and have the opportunity to hear from the agencies who are set to protect us and for all of us to have a chance to challenge and inform them as we can and have been known to do. I blew it and didn't even tell them the Charles Lee was coming.

 I had not intended to ask for anything but their presence, but before they adjourned the meeting Chief Glenna Wallace suggested the ITC help fund the conference this year and to my utter surprise it seemed like a unanimous resounding YES!  I didn't cry out loud, but it is surprising and gratifying to know our tribal leaders value the work LEAD Agency is doing on environmental justice.

Mark your calendars for this important conference held this year again at NEO in the Student Union Ballroom September 25 and 26. The agenda is packed! The conference is free for Ottawa County residents. Register on-line www.leadagency.org or call 918-540-9399.

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

When I first started working for the Miami Public Schools as an Indian Counselor, Kay Condren, a member of the Indian Education committee picked me up after school one day and drug me up the stairs to Charles Banks Wilson's studio to "show" me to him, so he might want to use me as a model. I remember shaking my head, wondering how many other people had been drug up those stairs for that reason.

I don't regret going, because as a person who dropped out of college to go to Taos, New Mexico to be an artist, seeing his studio was absolutely worth it. Items around the rooms were set together as if they too were waiting to be selected to be in a painting, a drawing, a lithograph and in those ways to become famous or endless, forever remembered, frozen somewhere on someone's wall.

My brother, Clark Frayser and countless others walked those steps many more times but of course no one more so than the artist himself.

Monday afternoon I attended the 100th birthday celebration for Charles Banks Wilson held in Kah-Ne Hall in his namesake Art and Cultural Education Center. We were surrounded by his art on the walls in the permanent exhibit, but also with items brought from private collections for the event. That was why I was there, to show our original drawing. Woven in that open space were images of Nick Calcagno, who followed Wilson as an art instructor at the college for a number of years. Nick sculpted a bust of Charles Banks and it sat looking at me during the respectful celebration. Behind me was the etched glass image of the Eagle-Picher Central Mill Nick had done and that LEAD Agency has available in frame-able prints.

In my later years at Miami High  School and Will Rogers,  service learning caught on fire. Students ran with it  individually and teachers integrated service into their curriculum. Many got involved in the Tar Creek Project. Teachers who were on the edge of retirement learned to love teaching again. One English teacher, Judy David and her students did remarkable projects. Many of these students and others did service outside the school day, too. They visited nursing homes, picked up litter, etc. for no recognition, no grade in school, just did the projects because they felt good about themselves afterward. Mrs. David's brother Carlos  learned about those kids and sponsored pizza parties for the group near Christmas time. I never learned if he had had children, but I did learn more about him through those visits. He had been a railroad engineer and during his tenure a child was run over by his train, Ultimately he longed to do more for children of any age, and he found us through his sister's work.

After I retired and we had established LEAD Agency, I received a call from Jerry Cobb, who owned the Frame Shop downtown saying  he had a couple of framed pictures for me to pick up. When I arrived he showed the gifts and told me who had purchased them for us. He explained the donor had wanted us to sell the items so we would be able to use those funds to do projects with children, and he wanted to find a way to help fund us into the future. We have never sold either, because Mr. Cobb advised us to wait, hold on to the items, assuring us their value would increase, time would be on our side.
 
Both were bequeathed to LEAD Agency. I have lost touch with both Judy David and her brother. But on our office wall are Carlos' gifts. One a prized print of Eva and one an original drawing that has ended up so very often as a teaching tool. Called the "Roof Trimmers" it depicts the deep mining operation performed by a singular man on a long extension ladder held together with ropes and by ropes his team of miners held tight in that cavern as the man on the ladder used a pry bar  to remove rocks containing lead and zinc from the roof of the mine. Another team below would shine the light to illuminate the work. All hoped when the rocks fell from the roof they would survive the day. It must have felt like an overdressed circus act performed for the tiny crowd below witnessing it. And Charles Banks Wilson illustrated all of that in that small drawing back in the day, probably for the newspaper since a photo taken in that huge cavern could at that time never be able to capture the action and the brave men who worked below. The question I would have liked to have asked, "What was it like to see that?"

LEAD Agency continues with our Youth Activists Trainings and will be announcing our upcoming art contest for youth. What we have done for 20 years is to encourage our youth to have a voice and with it and their art to say something about their own environment, where they live and what they want better. The legacy of this place was felt this week in Kah-Ne Hall, art that lasts, images that preserve the past.

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

There is something about being with young people that makes me feel young again. That happens to others for sure. But I had forgotten how very special it is to be in their space, to be allowed in their world, greeted by a 5 year old like by golly a long lost loved one had arrived. Or to have their attention focused and see that excitement and interest build in anticipation.

Last week I got a wonderful dose of time with our LEAD Agency Youth Activists in Training and being with them was like being with people who will be my newest lifelong friends for the environment. We started with a small group and still didn't finish the training we had planned, so Part II takes place this Friday from 10 to 2 again at our office and more trainings will follow in the future.

As an activist, days off are rare. But last Sunday I took one and missed a chicken fight meeting that was held in Colcord, OK. Kelly Bostian would attend, I knew he would and from his writing in the Tulsa World I felt like I had attended. The people were lined in his photo in rows and voiced the concerns I expected them to be recorded saying, water shortages, bad odors, truck traffic and this is before the rest of nearly one hundred new chicken houses are to be built. They are stacking them practically on top of one another and all of them are pulling water from wells. And what got my attention, what made me wonder why on earth I hadn't gotten myself up and gone to that meeting, was the water from those wells is coming from the aquifers. Our aquifers: the Boone and the Roubidoux. Lots of chickens drink lots of water and the meter isn't running on the wells they are pulling from.

There was a moratorium on putting wells into the Roubidoux in Kansas awhile back because the way water works in aquifers is a study all its own. But what I was told and am sharing with you is the hydraulic pressure pulling too much water out of one aquifer creates pressure that draws that bad water in the Boone down into the Roubidoux in the cone of something. All sorts of people were at that meeting in Colcord, people who know water. And they better speak up and figure out how to consider the future, because without water there is no future. Those aquifers are generally old water, very old sequestered water stored through the ages for the future. Pull it all up for chickens here, pull it up for fracking operations other places and the future is sucked right out the door of the truck hauling those chickens to that new facility that did not get built here, that will use a lot more water in the slaughtering of the fowls.

Another chicken fight meeting was held in Peggs a few weeks ago and there will be more meetings. People care about their homes, their way of life and don't like change. I am that way and most people are, as well. Most don't speak out until an issue starts impacting that world of theirs. They wake up. Lots of times once they are woke up, they are generally more apt to stay awake, watchful and pay attention for the next buzzard to land nearby and when it does, they want to be ready. We missed out on the great opportunity a huge chicken processing facility could be when an Arkansas site was chosen, but the folks just not too far from us in the counties just a ways down the road are going to have their lives changed with what comes next. That new processing plant must be fed and the houses must be built to raise the birds that feed the processor and for the most part those grown birds will be bound to overseas markets. But the news on NPR last Monday morning was that the market was crashing for our food giants because of the tariffs and trade wars that are set to begin. Will that be the reprieve the chicken neighborhoods get? The aquifers get? could the trade war save our water?

What a possibility. We will have to watch and we definitely will be inviting the chicken fight activists to come to the 20th National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek and we will definitely invite those hydrologists to explain a bit better than I have how the hydrologic pressure creates that cone that sucks bad water down into our precious Roubidoux. All for chickens we are not raising or processing and certainly not going to have at our next Sunday dinner at grandma's.

We had chicken fighters on-line with our Youth Activists in Training and will again since it makes sense: we are connected by water. Folks in our community have filled the Miami Civic Center in times past, banding together to stand up for water and against Big Chicken who will need to stay tuned to these issues. It is their water, too.

Respectful of Water  ~  Rebecca Jim