When my son was little, he loved to read, right away, so his favorite book was perfectly: I Want to Read, by Betty Ren Wright, published 1972. Another reason he might have learned to love reading: he grew up with books in every room of our house and his grandparents, and both uncles!

He was devoted to the Lewis Meyer Bookshelf, a Sunday morning show on Channel 6 KOTV, with the host reviewing the latest books in his shop in Tulsa on Peoria. The last thing he said before ending the program was a simple phrase, "The more books you read -- The TALLER you grow."

As the years went by, it was turning out to be literally true. My son, kept reading AND he kept getting taller! Now all these years later, he is bound to be over a foot TALLER than me!

Anyone who ever had a bike of their own remembers how special it was, how it fit, color and usually longs to ride it once more. That was me and my son, Dana Jim. We had those kind of bikes and took them in the back of our pickup when he was in high school to Tulsa to ride the River trails, which on a bike is not far from the Lewis Meyer bookstore, so of course we went there, locked our bikes to a pole outside and went in holding our helmets to enjoy the shop and to shop, knowing no one leaves without buying a book. But as we walked out, both of our bikes were gone. We were helmeted, bike-less people. Mr. Meyer was appropriately shocked at this occurrence. 

Last year, Tony Booth, who had been one of LEAD's board members for years, walked up the ramp to our office 30 years later with one of the bikes, the red Schwinn Mesa Runner with new handlebars. Tony had bought it for $5 at an auction and was donating it to LEAD because we are all about getting people back on bikes. Dana's bike was back like magic you would read at that bookstore. And suddenly we recalled Mr. Meyer saying, "I think people who spend time with their noses in books are the happiest people. "Because books never let you down." And getting your bike back works, too.

Talk about books and someone who loves books that's JoAnn Walkup. She graduated and got the 50 year reunion sweatshirt from Miami High School, and she started a dream career when she worked in that library. Her whole life's work has been in libraries and you have to know books tended to follow her around those 50 years. But this week she decided to lay some on LEAD Agency.

JoAnn recently listed her home, and it sold quickly and reality hit her: she had to empty it right away. She has a giving-heart, so this week she has been "hearting" lots of people and places most of her processions...

And LEAD Agency was on both the "bring a pickup" and the dropping by with a few things lists. Precious children's books, some for our treasured Little Free Library, and some will be kept on our most loved book shelves in the office. Other books she was compelled to gift us were environmental, Indian, birds and garden themed. Think about birds? A stack of books, also binoculars, games, cd's AND actual birdbaths with a heater to keep water from freezing this winter, (if we have a winter) and a Bird Call! It was like that for gardening, too, with plant stand, books, a red azalea and what she called a tulip tree, both in large pots. These required a set of garden chairs and a settee of course to watch birds and rest from the gardening.

Resting from gardening should have been what Jamie Munson and I did today after hours in the beautiful spring like afternoon. Who else to get and proudly wear that blue MHS Wardog sweatshirt, but a "girl" athlete who did all the sports offered to girls back in the day.

JoAnn knows LEAD is always thinking about how to keep the lights on at our office, so among the items she gave might be matched with a good bottle of wine  for a Silent Auction such as the one of a kind book by a MHS alumni,  official Coleman Theater memorabilia and a colorful plate with a motto: until further notice... celebrate everything, which seemed appropriate with the joy she was experiencing while lessening her load with us. 

We are the silent keepers of a set of Pueblo pottery Storytellers her brother Bob Walkup had given her over the years. Keeping until her next home or nest is ready for them. What perfect gifts for his sister, the champion "storyteller" herself. Lots of her stories begin with a book and then take you off to what happened to who read it and what they are doing with the rest of their lives. Books written by then quite classmates she never imagined had a book in them.

And there is balance when the whirlwind of a woman left to find her next gifting, took a moment to sit out by the Little Free Library, made richer with her books.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

A friend of mine, Eric Ferrell, sent an article from the Joplin Globe about lead contamination in Paris after Notre Dame burned last April. Notre Dame is Paris and its beauty is renown.

The roof of that centuries old structure, held up with beams made from 13,000 ancient trees had been coated with between 250  and 440 TONS of lead thought to make it fireproof.  A fire started inside the structure and the beams burned, lead melted and dripped down into the structure and the flames carried the yellow fumes containing lead particles onto the neighborhood.  All these months later Paris is dealing with the massive cleanup that is required to protect human health from lead poisoning. They were finding lead dust levels 500 and 800 times the official safe levels. The levels in Ottawa County is currently 500 ppm of lead in soil would trigger cleanup. Imagine how high they were finding in Paris!
 
Pregnant women and children are being encouraged to have their blood lead checked even as cleanup continues. Some schools were cleaned up quickly but more schools have had to be closed after lead was also discovered there.  Paris is finding out a lot about lead, that it will not dissolve and dissipate, it is poison and it must be removed. We know this and Ottawa County residents are gearing up to make those phone calls to DEQ and get their property tested in 2020, and encouraging their neighbors to get with the program! If we got in gear, we will be cleaned up way before Beautiful Paris gets the lead out.
 
Back in the day, I thought of myself as an artist. My first love, painting took me to Taos, then I turned to beadwork being taught technique and skills on assembly from Betty Pinnecoose who ensured if work was constructed well enough it could be lost in the river and upon being found, it would still hold together. While living in Sapulpa, I took a basketmaking class taught by Hepsey Gilroy and began a lifelong love of making baskets.  My skills in basket making and beadwork allowed me to have the confidence to hang with a fledgling group of Cherokee artists, back in the day. The talent was immediately recognizable with Bill Glass, Jr., Mike Daniels, Anna Bell Mitchell and Knokovtee Scott and they allowed me to join the group in both beading and basket categories.
 
I have become a slacker.  Just today, I sat in my bead-making nook waiting for the beads to yell at me for leaving them to wait so long to become the something else they long to become. And took a walk outside to appraise the buckbrush and honeysuckle vines that claim they long to become baskets.
 And while walking, I thought of two of those original Cherokee artists who have gone on, first Anna Bell Mitchell, who used the clay from our land to create pots, some she actually gave back to us as gifts. The other newly gone. Knokovtee Scott used the purple mussels he found around area lakes to create shell jewelry with Mississippi Mound culture designs that had once been made in the southwestern U.S. a thousand years ago.
 
The latest photos of Knokovtee showed him always wearing a surgical mask around his neck, I thought to help keep the shell dust from entering his lungs when drilling or cutting shells. A comment he made in a 2017 Cherokee Phoenix article became more cryptic since his December death, “I’m in a race against time to make sure this is not lost again.” I have several items he created and I will always wonder if they helped cause his death.
 
But the other thing I never considered to be at issue with local shells is what else they contain. We know there are issues with lead in some of the fish in Grand Lake, Spring River and the Neosho. We have found lead in the teeth of some of our residents. Studies have shown lead in the tissue of mussels. But in the shells? Yes. Mussels filter heavy-metals in contaminated waters and can accumulate toxins in their shells.

Gillian Genser is a sculptor in Canada who learned shells used in her artwork had caused her heavy-metal poisoning only after suffering debilitating symptoms for years. Doctors found high levels of arsenic and lead in her blood. The mussels she had been working with for decades were toxic, likely contaminated from industrial waste. She had sanded, grinded shells for her sculptures but also had eaten the mussels.

Ms Genser hoped her art and suffering might create a sense of connectivity and reverence for the natural world. "I feel grief—both for myself and our planet." But also satisfaction from her art. "That’s how I find my hope. I call [one of her pieces] my beautiful death."

As artists, as natives, as people who want to base back to our culture, or live off the land, we have all expected our environment to be safe but now we know it may not be.

Be cautious but walk in beauty or go create it, "beauty is the promise of the future.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

This Holiday Season started out with a bang for one of LEAD Agency's board members, Grace Goodeagle when she received word that the case she had brought against the United States had been settled and she had won. You and I don't know very many people in our lifetimes who fought the government and ended up winning. She did and several other members of the Quapaw Nation have also won. So when Grace walked into the LEAD Agency office with a gift we opened it right away, and found a sign that summed that up ever so simply with the single word: JOY.
Isaac Watts wrote the words to what we know as the Christmas Carroll: Joy to the World while the tune may have come from several sources, I found myself focused on these words:
        
                                      Repeat the sounding joy,
                                               Repeat the sounding joy,
                                                       Repeat, repeat the sounding joy.

It seems like you have all the time in the world, and then suddenly there are only days, perhaps hours to bring people together who may have known each other decades ago. For me, that was how it was one day last week. My friend Diana Duran has lived in Miami for the last few years and worked at the Miami Public Library. She had told me her mother had known Leaford and Barbara Bearskin twenty years ago and had asked if I knew how to find Barbara. Of course, I said yes, but had not brought them together yet and suddenly there were few days left to make that happen before Diana was set to move from Miami for keeps.

We arrived at Quapaw's premier elder estate where Barbara currently lives and marched right in on her, the day after the facility's Christmas party. We found her sitting beautifully covered with the softest red velvet cover with white fleece trim.

I introduced Diana and she began describing her mother and where she lived in Wyandotte and how her antique business might have been the connection between her and the Bearskins. Diana gave clue after clue and then it was the most amazing thing, Barbara remembered Diana's mother's ashes had gone to Scotland and wondered why.
As we visited, Barbara provided more and more remembrances to Diana of her mother while she had been living locally. Bobby had died twenty years ago of breast cancer at age 66, near the age Diana is now, so to hear stories of her mother, things she would have said, details on her "attitude" and how she looked. Well, I have to tell you each remembrance was like a brand new gift. Each comment relished.

There are few things you can give a friend, but these words Barbara Bearskin shared with this daughter,  a woman she had never met, were treasures that could not be bought. The acknowledgment of the love Leaford emitted to people he encountered was voiced only then to become an endearment deepening Diana's connection to her mother. The graciousness Barbara gave, to listen and to remember will long be treasured by that motherless woman, my friend Diana.

Diana's mother had lived in a beautiful home I understood was near the old Seneca Indian Boarding School.  The conversation came to describe the home and the surroundings near the Boarding School, which had been prominently on my mind lately. I had been given the opportunity to review the results of a project Juanita Bigheart  had completed involving the former boarding school. She had learned by listening how those who had attended school there described the site, their days on that hill in Wyandotte and their recollections included the sounds of the bells ringing and the friendships they developed that lasted throughout their lifetimes.

It becomes more important to value not only the stories, but how very important it is to be asked to remember, to then take the time to pull out, perhaps slowly at first the strands and then to accept and take the time to listen to the flood that may follow as these memories begin to flow more easily from that bank account we have stored in our brains.

Big gifts or small, breaking the silence with answers to questions left long unspoken, sharing time with old friends and celebrating lost acquaintances and wrongs made right. All good, all real. These are bringing lasting JOY this year.
 
Find the things that bring you joy and fill your life with them.
And as poet Mary Oliver would say,

                                           "Tell me, what is it you plan to do
                                         with your one wild and precious life?"

Surely your answer will include what brings you joy.
 
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

 Last Year I got a word cloud for Christmas. It was a brilliant gift Martin Lively gave me.  You might wonder what a word cloud is. It is a way to view text visually because our brains prefer visual information over any other format.

And how did he make mine? He has secretly been LEAD Agency's webmaster for the last several years and as such, he used a bit of what it held to build the one he presented to me. He clicked on the Tar Creekkeeper drop down page and simply copied all my articles, lots of the ones you have read in the Miami Newsrecord get posted later on my blog there. He then used a "word cloud builder" and ever so quickly these words appeared. Larger words were ones I used more often and tiny ones way less often. He and Lois then chose the heart for the shape to contain the words, I guess they figured it was appropriate since they were written from the heart.

Bold words like WATER, PEOPLE  LEAD TAR CHILDREN GOODRICH CLEAN NOW look like they are being yelled as they appear in various colors, but the YEARS WANT OTTAWA PROTECT LAND are easy to find. I often have felt like when writing my pushy self is out there for the world to see, and there the words pop as proof.  Yes, it was quite a gift to boil all these columns down to the core like this, but It felt like the curtain was lifted or in the old days, my slip was showing.

So who could top this as a gift? You won't believe it, I certainly didn't, it was the Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ for short. Lots of times, year after year, I suggest, wish, nag and repeat how valuable it would be for our community to have an interactive map of all the clean / remediated residences in Ottawa County. Only about 1/4 of all of the properties have had their yard tested or remediated of legacy lead so far and we have been at this since... 1995! Which yards have been tested? which ones still need to be checked?

If you have had your yard cleaned up or want to find out it has already been cleaned before you moved there, you can click on the pink dot by your house and it will confirm it! It is like being famous for doing the right thing! If you zoom in with the interactive map, you may see that you and NONE of your neighbors have any dots.... YET. It is totally free and easy to call DEQ and get on their list so you can be a PLAYER on the map.

Why wouldn't you want to? Your property values? Can only get better if little children can play in your yard without the threat or promise of becoming lead poisoned. That is the whole reason this cleanup business is happening. It is because our kids are only little once, and if they are exposed early in life, it most often happens at home and your home sits in the middle of your yard, right? Little children can not become lead-free after being exposed without possible consequences that will follow them throughout their lives. How children learn can determine how their lives end up and lead can change how children think and process sound.

Prevention is how we protect children and DEQ is giving you a great big gift of a brand new yard or driveway if they are contaminated. Try going out and pricing gravel and how much it costs to haul in clean dirt, that isn't cheap and a little bull dozer to spread it out. Put a pencil to that and think FREE Tell me you can beat that? The other things you can save that you can't purchase are I.Q. points for your kid, or the cost kidney damage will set you back. You also can be sure you will be getting "Peace of Mind" all wrapped up from DEQ with a brand new pink dot on the interactive map for all the world to see.

You end up a hero to your family, to your neighbors, to all the people on the block and the ones on the other street will like you more. All for free.

I guess DEQ didn't just give the interactive map to me for Christmas, they gave it to all of us. Let's open it up and get with covering the board pink. All your country neighbors can get on board, all those rural roads could be lined up with pink, then we would be set and by next Christmas, we will all be sitting around wondering like me, who can beat this as a gift?

Want in? Call DEQ at 800-522-0206. Check out their website click on Tar Creek. go pink.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

My son was just a getting his "sea legs" when the 1973 shows caught his attention in a little apartment where we lived across the street from a steel factory. We could hear the pounding and racket of the work, so he stood at eye level at the little black and white portable TV to watch what came to be his favorite shows: Mr. Rogers and the Senate Watergate Hearings.

It seems improbable that the year the movie, we believe will be an award-winner Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood starring Tom Hanks as America's best friend, Mr. Rogers AND the Impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives would be what we are once again watching together. On a bigger screen of course  at the Center Theater in Vinita and our home TV 8 times bigger than that old black and white portable.

It was not that long ago, but here we are again. That familiar question of Mr. Rogers' "Won't you be my neighbor?" is still remembered by the tune the words conjure.

Always be kind. Those words echo in the Miami community as words and a way of life Angie Douthitt lived each day. People loved her immediately. Angie engaged and shined on you. But one day she asked me a question and I fear the answer. She wondered if her love of running, when running a route by BF Goodrich could have exposed her as she breathed deeply near the plant. I have to say yes. Why wouldn't it? for 5 years piles of the rubble we know were loaded with friable asbestos could have been exposing the public. As soon as EPA discovered this they have been here removing it.

I believe she is a casualty and I fear there will be more. Who caused this? A Rush for Greed and a hasty bankruptcy.
BFG never became a superfund site, but superfund is there now. If the community decided they wanted, no if they demanded real action to occur on the site, and ask for a complete cleanup and a real evaluation of the safety of the neighborhood, while superfund is still here we might get it.

What I know is silent citizens hopes for justice will not get justice. Only more casualties.

I go home everyday to a piece of the prairie, clean air, clean water. No fear for toxins in my garden or the wild plums, the rose hips. I want that for the citizens only 25 miles away. And for the life of me, I can not understand why it is not demanded as a right, a human right at every council meeting, county commissioner meeting, MAEDS meeting, Rotary, Lions and the Masons, much less the women's groups and every teacher in the county. It is not wrong or outrageous to want justice.

We have had role models, and we got them again when Angie became one for us. She and Mr. Rogers right now are reminding us to take the time to listen and be with who you are with. The moments we have on this earth are numbered and each one precious. It is always possible to be kind. It takes more time, but what on earth have we been given but time, and their lessons show us how best to use it.

I apologize to all the marvelous people who got tapped on the shoulder during Miami's Christmas Parade and thank the dozens  who signed postcards along with citizens all over the country who spoke up for us. We had hopes this "be kind stuff" might be contagious. We flooded the mail center at the capitol with cards with hopes for leniency from our senator, to reconsider and pull his amendment. The City of Miami fought hard on this but the wording is much the same as it had been and the lawyers will have to explain it to us, but overall, it doesn't seem like kindness won this one.

My friend Jim Shine, worked with LEAD Agency as a researcher from Harvard a decade ago, occasionally would quote his favorite poet Mary Oliver and was aghast when I had never heard of her, sent 3 volumes to begin catching me up.  The poem that summed me up after our campaign to encourage Senator Inhofe to remove the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act is called,

"I Worried" and begins with:
 
"I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall I correct it?
...
"Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning and sang."
 
I didn't sing today, but went out to our office porch to watch Academy students and Marla Stidham, their Alternative Teacher of the Year, cross the street to help us sort seeds and fill packets for the seed library. The room filled with the delightful aroma of basil as we  processed and sorted our dried collection and ate our version of Butterfinger candy we had made in the kitchen from equal portions of peanut butter and candy corn, heated gently and spread out to cool.
 
Submitted Kindly with Respect  ~ Rebecca Jim

I have been thinking a lot about coal lately, especially with Christmas around the corner and the old threat to children who had been naughty of receiving coal in their stockings instead of toys.

Coal is made from plants that were alive even before the dinosaurs. Coal as such is a non-renewable source of energy and has been used as a source of heat for centuries but 2 centuries ago, it began being used to generate energy that basically moved humans into the Industrial Revolution.

The United States uses coal primarily to generate electricity that runs our appliances for example a household refrigerator would take a half-ton a year, an electric water heater uses 2 tons a year.

The US has more coal reserves than any other country in the world, and we learned lately that Oklahoma is targeted to have coal leases let on tribal lands held in trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. BIA has not always handled leases well on tribal lands and we know that by how well they handled the land they leased for lead and zinc for members of the Quapaw Nation. 

If you want to see what surface coal mining looks like in action you don't have to go far, just go to Vinita and then put yourself on the road to Nowata and you won't be able to miss it as the earth opens up so close to the road it will mesmerize you. Not all coal mined sites get cleaned up and put back to good use like the "strip pits" just north of us in Kansas. Oklahoma hasn't always made sure this happened. But this latest notice from the Bureau of Land Management and BIA over 800,000 acres in Oklahoma could be affected.

LEAD took a shot at making a protest about the coal leases in Ottawa County. Gosh, what else can we take? We already have BF Goodrich Benzene, the Tar Creek Superfund Site that runs right through us, but add that to the flooding, that then spreads those toxic sediments farther each flood, which is always a threat, but now nearing a promise if Senator Inhofe's amendment in the National Defense Authorization Act doesn't get pulled.

People talk and lately I heard GRDA's coal fired power generates more electricity than is generated when Grand Lake is as full as it can be, like when it is flooding Miami.

When LEAD Agency was doing the Grand Lake Mercury Study, a research project with the Harvard School of Public Health and the Oklahoma Health and Sciences Center, we all learned a lot about coal and how burning coal releases heavy metals, especially mercury. We were interested in learning more about local fish, since we knew we ate fish and lots of other people did, too and since there were fish consumption guidance on lead in local fish and since lead and mercury can harm young children in much the same ways, we thought it would be important to learn how much local fish could be consumed and what kind and how big they should be to eat, and how big they should be just put back to have ... more babies. Check our website for more information on our results.

We learned coal is actually a dying industry. Lots of coal plants across the country and around the world are going to bed. They expose us to mercury and other heavy metals, but coal is a fossil fuel, from the age of the dinosaurs and it has outlived its time. Burning it also releases gases that effect climate and we know better now and have generally outgrown it. Except GRDA of course, which could have put theirs to bed when it got struck by lightning? yes, which could have been a sign for them. They decided to invest in natural gas but also continue to use coal.

When coal is burned we have what comes out of the smoke stack, but when it is cleaned out of the furnace, the ash has to be removed and stored because coal ash (known as flyash) is then a hazardous waste.

If you have ever picked up a hunk of coal, you know that their slogan "Clean coal." It's really a dirty lie.  There is nothing clean about coal. Wind and solar, that's what clean can look like and no trace of toxic ash. Our hope for coal:  Keep it in the ground, we know better.

The lump of coal naughty little children might have woken up to on Christmas mornings, linger long in our environment, too. Coal is a dirty lie but flooding is in reality the dirty deal we get long into the future unless we act in unison now.

Send a message to our senator, make a call, sign a postcard during the parade. We'll be there hoping he won't flood us and wondering what he will get in his stocking?

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

How awesome it is to wake up each morning and go to jobs All my life that have been challenging and engaging with purpose.

My dad loved to work and put his whole self into it. Hard work and later before retirement he was supervising, and the harder they worked, the better his day was. I know that was true because even when my brothers and I were young, our dad loved to give us a Saturday morning jobs that would take grown men all day, and stopping to encourage our progress.

Later when I was a grown woman, he would pull up on a Saturday morning, I had hoped would be a day off, honk his horn and expect to find me dressed and ready to go fix fence or add on the barn, work in the garden that was a practice football field long. But it worked, I learned to love to work and we got stuff done.
I have had the privilege to work with dedicated people. And value the time and effort they put into serving the children, the people and later the environment.

Not everyone has been privileged to work at jobs they love. But work done to put food on the table and pay the house payment, and put gas in the car and hope it lasts another season. I value and respect the work done to provide the services we all depend upon to be there when we need them. The emergency room never closes, fire is never planned, and our police come when we call as if each call may save our lives. We want the lights back on, no matter the weather they are on again. Fast food lines are fast because the staff is trained to serve you quickly.

But down the street from where 900 children go to school, over a thousand workers reported for work every day, with 3 shifts of people making the tires America put on their cars, their pickups, farm tractors and tractor trailers. They worked hard and made friends that lasted a lifetime, though some of those lives were cut short on the job or because of the toxins they were exposed to working there.

And now 33 years after the gates were shut, the gates are open and workers are inside again doing the work that will protect those 900 children from exposure to one of the toxins left behind at that site. Two teams are working behind closed doors and below ground removing asbestos forever. LEAD Agency wasn't around when the tires were being made, but is now and we have with many locals been providing our thanks to the cleanup crew with cookies and donuts. And will continue until they complete their work mid-January.  Bet we will get a second round organized if and when the benzene crews make the rest of those worries go away.

During seven decades in the last century, there were others who were working below ground providing for their families, too. They worked without sunlight in large and small spaces and some whole rooms that glistened with light hitting the crystals of quartz, zinc and lead. Those fairy rooms came apart and turned into pieces that went right up the shafts and made some folks rich and most of the others a living. They too made lifelong friends and friends they buried long before their time, because of accidents that were not rare beneath the ground and when they no longer could breathe when their lungs failed them with miners comp or silicosis.

We have lost a lot for the opportunity to work. We have lost grandfathers, fathers, uncles, brothers. So many men never made the memories I had the opportunity to have with parents who lived long lives and taught me to love to work.

There are over 60 people reporting for work every day now and may be doing it for as many decades it took to make the mess we know as the Tar Creek Superfund site. We honor their work and will invite you to join us as we cookie this team a few times before Christmas for the work they are doing, clearing land, selling what can be of use building roads and building a mountain of the toxic chat that will be capped and left on site as the mesas of our mess. They are employed by the Quapaw Nation, the first tribal nation given the right to use federal funds to cleanup superfund messes on their own property.

Work, grateful work. Don't we all long for work that provides the living we want with a safe work site to protects us and our future environment. When the horn sounds in the morning the joy of walking out the door to do a thing that needs to be done and the joy it brings to having completed it. 

From the poem

                 To be of use by Marge Piercy

                The people I love the best jump into work head first...
                 do what has to be done, again and again
                The work of the world is common as mud...
                But the thing worth doing well has a shape that satisfies but were made to be used.
                The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.
 
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

I watched a special about N. Scott Momaday and heard a voice that didn't age. He had spoken at an event in Santa Fe, New Mexico when I was much younger, his same voice carried with him the stories  he says were superimposed on the historical events of his tribe.

We each in us carry the voices and the stories we remember, but deeper are the ones we know through instinct or intuition, our embedded knowledge, the old ways and why we did them and how come we thought that way and how we came to be. Our origins.

Tuesday morning I went on a walk with two young women: Elizabeth Elliott, an Oklahoma Wildlife biologist and Rosalee Walker, with the Grassland Restoration Incentive Program. We took off to walk to the end of the world. The end of my property, where the road had long washed out to see what had become of the edge of here. The briars and the Sumac mingled with some cedars and beneath along  the way we found a carpet of honeysuckle. Not climbing but nesting beneath the grasses. Some of those native grasses were taller than me, the Indian Grass, but the Little Blue was putting on a show  as they are heading out with their fluffy seeds. We ventured farther and headed to the stream that runs clear and sweet through the bottom lands.

The invasives have not needed water and have left it as I remembered. The adventures of finding it and following it as it snaked back on itself. All this made me think of how sometimes, you can't go back? But sometimes you can. Suddenly I was a child again, leaping from rock to rock, climbing over the roots and up on the stream beds and then back down again as the creek turned again, all heading us back to where we began.

It was like a month long vacation without a clock, no time, though all time set backwards and decades were gone and the adventure reigned.

While walking backward into the past, my past, the land's past and the water, the ever present water, still good, not tainted from a neighbor or his neighbor's wrong choices. How incredibly precious this place is and that my grandfather knew it before statehood that this place must be part of our lives, it must be kept.

And then I knew the why I work and push and hope so much, it is for the bad lands, the harmed lands the little streams containing toxins and metals and less life found in it. How this is just wrong and knowing all of it can be undone. Rights can be righted for the water, the silent always running water and willing it so must work if only enough of us do the willing, right?

And enough of us speak up for the what needs righting as the time is fitting might be what works and why not try it, since silence has not worked. One easy speak out would be to call Senator Inhofe and ask him to remove his amendment from the National Defense Authorization Act, which can be found in section 6021. He could listen, just because he doesn't always, doesn't mean we don't ask when we call 202 224 4721 every time we call.
Use your voice.

My grandfather was born One hundred years before me, my grandfather who found this piece of land I now live upon. So his voice, I never heard, as Momaday would explain, I never heard the spirit that lived in his voice. I never thought to ask my dad, to tell me about that voice and did he speak about this land? the little creek that runs through it? The clean water he would have seen. Did he remember or was he a witness for his father in old age that he had outlived his valor? Or did he remember my grandfather telling how he had been alive?

And can we remember when we were alive? And how that felt? Then begin to think of what made us feel that and that the generations to come should be, also alive with where they live and how it is for them. Which takes me and us to what we do to protect this one precious earth for those who come.

We have only this much time to right it for them and by golly to do it for ourselves. We can buckle down and begin and with that begin to be alive again and find the spirit in us our future ones will know existed. We fought at the end of our lives before the end of time, to protect us from flooding, to stop that eternal flow of evil running down Tar Creek, to celebrate the last fiber of asbestos as it rolls out of town wrapped in the protective blanket that protects us from it.

We have together time to share seeds, read N. Scott Momaday, find out how alive feels again and discover, reclaim the sacred places we value. Put your boots on and if you stomp dance and write poetry, like poet laureate of the United States, Joy Harjo, I suppose you would attach your turtle shells to your yellow cowboy boots and get your culture to move you through these times to come.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Debbie Clark Seely had been out of my life for over 36 years, losing track of her once she left Will Rogers Jr. High and went on to high school. Then a couple of years ago she attended one of our LEAD Agency meetings and talked about a dream she had.

She dreamed of developing a housing community for people with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity who are deemed "Canaries" and fail to thrive in the regular world with all the chemicals  there are to be ingested. Think Canaries like the ones used in the coal mines, if the bird died, the mine would be evacuated to protect the miners from carbon monoxide and other toxic gases before they hurt humans.

Multiple Chemical Sensitivity is noted as controversial on the OSHA website or still under debate at Johns Hopkins. But think about it. Chemical companies have power and they certainly would not want that category of disease recognized, as it deems their life's work a potential danger to society. Through the years those suffering symptoms had even been labeled with "environmental illness,” or "sick building syndrome.”

This week Debbie posted a poem she had written, Taken for Granted filled with the whats she would love to do, places she would love to go. She was always a bright and gifted student and still is continuing her education, on-line but longs to:

                                                                          to sit in a classroom, peruse
                                                                          the shelves in a library, walk across the
                                                                         stage to accept my diploma;
 
As it turned out earlier that same day before reading her poem, Jamie, one of LEAD Agency’s new volunteers lined out what she was planning to do the next day, how she was going to mop and leave the place with a really nice smell. We really value each moment a volunteer offers, but my thoughts went straight to Debbie and others who come to our office as a refuge from added chemicals they must work around. We have tried to make the office be “Kings X” for our Canary friends.

You will catch a whiff of real lemon, cinnamon, fresh baked cookies but not artificial or harsh chemicals at the office. These Canaries reminded me of a soon to be rare bird, the Bluebird of Happiness, the beautiful blue glass birds made in Arkansas at Terra Studios.

About the same time I knew Debbie as a teenager, the Chaplin at Baptist Hospital worked in partnership with me in counseling several youths and their families and out of the blue, he gifted me my cherished Bluebird of Happiness which was probably one of the first ones made. This week the makers of these beauties announced they could no longer make them. They were choosing to no longer make them because of their contribution to climate change.

"It’s time now," James Ulick said. "We can’t wait any longer not if we’re going to protect this wonderful planet that we have for our children and grandchildren." He went on to explain in one year they use more than one-million cubic feet of natural gas to make the birds, which produces a tremendous amount of greenhouse gasses that threaten the earth.
He did not want to be hypocritical and continue the process because it goes against what they stand for — "protecting the planet." During their 37 years they had contributed to greenhouse gasses by using 37 million cubic feet of natural gas, contributing to the threat to the earth.

Protect and cherish those little blue birds and as you do, think about your Canary friends, people you don’t see very often and wonder why. They can’t go to most stores for the bombardment of the odors and smells that they must walk through to shop. They can’t as Debbie said go to church and sing in the choir because of all the shampoos and perfumes mingled in the choir loft. Going out to eat sits you by those lathered with aftershave and freshly applied name brand perfumes that can be detected by a sensitive.

So enjoy your Bluebird, protect your Canary friends, be mindful as the season with the most associated scents. Use real cedar or pine, not artificial. Bake plenty of cookies or bread and quit using the candles artificially scented when you might use bees wax candles produced locally.

And consider the songbirds you have enjoyed throughout your life and understand since 1970 US and Canada have lost 2.9 billion birds including the canaries and blue birds. Their habitats are declining, the quality of our water, air and the availability to find insects gone due to agricultural practices. What affects our "canaries" we must be woke to know can affect us, as Silent Spring author Rachel Carson called out in her book at the beginning of these die-offs.

"If bird populations across all habitats are declining, that means something systemic is happening out there that is no doubt going to be affecting us too," according to John Fitzpatrick, executive director of The Cornell Lab of Ornithology. "Isn't life just better to be having these beautiful things around our yards and over our heads?"
Time has come to change our ways, protect what we have and those who already are allergic to life.

The following is Taken for Granted by Debbie Clark Seely and shared with her permission.

Taken for Granted
I want . . .
to plan a party, open my door to
guests, accept the bottle of wine, pass
a tray of canapés;

to take a bus tour, hike
a trail, walk a shoreline, suck down
raw oysters and champagne;

to go to a movie, immerse
myself at the opera, dance all
night at an open-air concert;

to soak my feet in a bath |
of warm water, get my nails
painted, my hair cut and styled;

to push a cart with a woogedy
wheel, try the samples, buy large
boxes of brightly-wrapped goodness;

to worship in a church pew, sing
from a hymnal, pass the collection
plate and take communion;

to sit in a classroom, peruse
the shelves in a library, walk across the
stage to accept my diploma;

to go to my friend’s parties,
lick sauce off my fingers at
their barbecues, visit their homes;

to crunch frost underfoot, taste
the rain on my tongue, smell
the damp earth at dusk;

to scrunch my bare toes in
the grass, pull a carrot, rake
brightly colored leaves;

to sit under a weeping willow, cast my
jig into the pond, watch children
toss bread to the ducks;

a pat on the back, a
handshake, a massage,
a seduction;

to hug, and
laugh, and touch, and
smile and feel.

Then I will become whole again.

Debbie Clark Seely

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

A Latin phrase in the news lately means "This for That," but in my life, the gifts that walk into the LEAD Agency office don’t seem to be a this for that. Genuine people drop by and bring this and that’s for us. It is a thing that happens, not solicited, but honored for the what the who has brought.

Just yesterday Elaine Irvin came by just for a moment with a brown paper grocery sack and when I peered in, there were the seeds from the low growing yellow flowers she has along her walk way that I had admired this summer. She like some others of us, find the treasures left behind after the first freeze as treasures for the spring and this sack contained enough to get us ready to be able to share our own come this time next year.

Brown paper sacks used to be a thing we all had, but now they are the tool used for the Pollinator seed collecting done by people from places like the Euchee Butterfly Farm. I keep some in my car to reuse each time I go for groceries or stop at a dollar store along the way. But I have to peek inside first. One time recently I got one out of my car for the groceries and to my surprise, when the grocer attempted to fill it with my purchases… the milkweed seeds tried to float out of the sack and get loose!

Some gifts are just like that, light as a feather or a milkweed seed, others like the next surprise to come through the door this week were I would say some of the heaviest gifts we had ever received. Buckets and a bushel were lugged into the office and immediately ogling began. That is a thing that had to be done with the things my friend Dale’s Uncle George had spent his prime collecting.

In these containers was the proof when I talk about the miners having the first viewing of the underground fairy caverns they would chisel into and lug out the pieces to make the batteries that still start our cars to get us to the grocery store or made, as we know the bullets that won both World Wars. Heavy, yes, but the light made the chunks inside shine and glitter, like gold! But the dominate color was SILVER with lead and zinc brilliance twinkling inviting the common man to reach in and lift it to admire. We could not resist it ourselves. But the mothers, the grandmothers who go home to the babies in their lives must be protected from the tiny bits of dust we might create with our delight to explore the ore within these most appreciated lugged in treasures.

They are the teaching tools we will use when the batches of students and researchers come as they do in waves to the largest abandoned lead and zinc mining site in the lower 48. What is the fuss about this place? What was the work, what did the dads and uncles, the grandfathers we never knew because they died too young to tell these stories fail to be allowed to tell us? These weighted gifts will demonstrate how strong these men got to be, the able ones, tearing the walls of the earth beneath us down and finding the minerals men were paid living wages at the time to pull down and haul out to feed their families and provide the whats to make their children watch for them each day the whistle blew.

Dale Allen’s Uncle George collected these specimens bringing them out in the pockets of his overalls piece by piece. And this is the what Dale hopes we will do with them now. Let each one take one. Not this for that, but this one from Uncle George, to pass along a bit of treasure in what we now may call a teaching stone.

Before this collection leaves, we will invite our “rock” loving friends to come for a viewing of sorts, a naming of what piece of the history of the world might be in each of these treasures hauled out by a man who spent his youth, his productive life bringing them out, only to have their dangerous dust enter not just his pockets, but his lungs, his bloodstream and that dust took his life, injuries to his organs no man is strong enough to endure. These specimens are the poison that took him and the men in our county for the generations the mines brought jobs. But the jobs took their youth and made them old men too soon, and even sooner gone.

This for that. What a teaching tool, my friend Dale has brought for us to use. The minerals that made this county cost us all. Some more than others.

This for that, whether that in the lives of our dead relatives, or the substitutions we use in the kitchen when we don’t have buttermilk and have to add vinegar to milk for a recipe. Or the lives of the Ukrainians on the line waiting for military aid to protect their homeland from an invader while their leader and our leader negotiate over what might be said so their lives might be saved.

Respectfully submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

The last purple asters, sunflowers and goldenrod may help the monarchs as they make their way to Mexico. It is tempting to brushhog, or as the OSU professor John Weir calls it 'Recreational Mowing' taking the tops off the hope the last of the butterflies need to get on with their lives as they pass through. All my country neighbors are mowing their pastures, after having hayed their fields perhaps multiple times this year. The patches of remaining wildflowers are farther apart now that we have had that first freeze. My fields are waiting to give what we have to these visitors and to allow seed collectors to harvest some of the flowering plants: liatris, button bush, and milkweed.

The BF Goodrich plant has been how my seed collecting friend has viewed the sunset for most of her life. It sat beneath each setting sun when it was operating, when it went dormant, when it was raped by the "recycler" and now as it begins to disappear. There is less of it now since the EPA's fully hazmat suited team began hauling off the asbestos loaded rubble just days after school was out for the summer. If I could have my druthers, out my window I would prefer plants, purple asters and blazing stars, not the plant she has faced all these decades.

There may be less to see, but the carbon black residue and the fear of what lies beneath will remain for her and her down the street neighbors.

She became the first person in all these years of writing columns to request a topic, so I immediately agreed. Why wouldn't I write about tires for her? Not what treads to get for the upcoming winter driving, but why not to practice one of my tried and true beliefs: recycling and re-using.

I had known for awhile if you need a carcinogen to make tires, why wouldn't that substance be part of what begins to be emitted where the tire comes to reside after its life-cycle of use on the highways ends? We know as the tire is used it leaves tiny bits of it as dust along our roadways and bigger pieces you would have had to dodge behind a big rig. Knowing what tires are made from, surely industry has had a hand in making sure they have not been labeled hazardous waste, with EPA classifying tires as simply as municipal waste, leaving the burden of getting rid of tires up to the consumers and the cities they live in or near.

When LEAD Agency decided to start a Community Garden, we wanted to create one using our style of reusing and re-purposing materials, growing and saving our seeds for next season. 5 years ago we wanted to discourage the use of tires in the garden, especially when growing... what else? edible vegetables. Why? we didn't want to chance the chemicals in the tire getting into the soil and later into the very vegetables we were encouraging people to consume promoting healthy lifestyle.

We planned to use the garden as a classroom and to use one old tire with multiple layers of paint, sealing the tire, and use bright red swath across it indicating NO, DO NOT USE TIRES IN THE GARDEN. We later decided passersby might not understand our subtle message, they might just see was LEAD Agency USING a tire in the garden. So the tire stayed in the storage shed, and waited until the next tribal tire collection day.

There is even more known now about the use of tires in vegetable gardens and generally, the environmental and health risk is still there.

Another growing concern over reusing tire material on synthetic turf fields beginning in the 1990's deemed safe by their producers. There are 12,000-13,000 synthetic turf fields in the U.S., with an estimated 1,200–1,500 new installations each year, tire crumb rubber is the infill material.

Was anyone concerned? Enough concern the Children’s Environmental Health Center of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai urges a moratorium on the use of artificial turf generated from recycled rubber tires. Grinding them into very small crumb pellets that are used on athletic fields, or as mulch, put on playgrounds furthers risk of exposure by what they called increasing the surface area and the likelihood of accidental ingestion. EPA put out information this summer on this issue and using lots of numbers and grafts showed yes they were finding metals, Semi-Volatile Organic Chemicals SVOCs, Volatile Organic Chemicals in artificial turf fields with the SVOCs from indoor fields 1.5 to 10 times higher than outdoor fields!

That residue my friend worries about carbon black, a material made from petroleum which she believes arrived from the plant by wind to her property and into her home. Also found in the crumb rubber in turf it can become small enough to be suspended in air above the field and be inhaled.

To sum this up modern tires are made of natural and synthetic rubber, carbon black, metals, including cadmium, lead (which is neurotoxic) zinc, and chemicals known to be carcinogens. My latest concern came from reading all of these ingredients can be absorbed on the carbon black in the tires, and not what neither my friend or I wanted to learn.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

You might never have had the chance to meet Jerry Hill. He went to Miami High School and would have graduated with his class, but lacked a few credits and had to come back for a semester to finish them. But he didn't finish.
People who knew him all have distinct memories, times they will never forget. Like when the Native students attended a workshop, got matching t-shirts, and moments later, he had ripped the sleeves off and "thrashed" his to demonstrate his style.

He was one of our fancy dancers on the Indian Dance Team and enjoyed dancing, but may have enjoyed being admired by the girls even more.

Before his Senior Prom, he agreed to wear a tuxedo everyday to school for a week as a promotion to  get one to wear for no cost to the Prom because money was an issue in his life.

When he and his mother moved to Miami, they lived out near Dotyville in one of the units that had once been a motel. They didn't have a car, so if he missed the bus, or wanted to get around he would have to walk to town. Later they were able to move to tribal housing just past the turnpike.

After weeks of trying, I convinced him to come home with me by listing all the things he could do there: ride a bike, run, practice tennis, or archery, take a hike. He asked me: What do you have a RESORT OR SOMETHING?  No, I just lived in the country with dirt roads and no traffic. So biking or hiking was much safer than walking was for him out on the highway where he lived. We had a big bale of hay my dad had brought so my son could practice archery. We had a wall of the house he used to hit tennis balls.

Sometimes it is easy to take for granted what we have when someone else has so little.  A friend recently spent some time in the house my parents had lived, a quarter mile from mine. He found an old bike of my son's to ride, took the Gator out for a spin on the mowed trails through the pastures, fed the barn cats and dealt with the raccoon that was living in the attic. When he heated up the house, all the hibernating red wasps began to appear to check out the reason for the sudden change in temperature and he discovered books waiting to be read all over the house. He enjoyed solitude but wound up a few antique clocks just to stop the sound of silence.

Where I live is special to me. The mowed trails are perfect for mountain biking and the dirt roads lead to all parts of our county. The wildflowers still blooming are providing the last monarchs a boost to get them on to Mexico and the seeds are sought out by others to grow even more of those pollinator plants. The tall grasses have recently been dug up to be used as background for studies comparing plants growing in contaminated soils at Tar Creek with the same type plants grown in clean native soils.

My land has been in use by our family since the 1880's. Here in Craig County the Toxics Release Inventory indicates the whole county has zero toxic emissions. So I can breathe the air and not worry about styrene, lead and cadmium, ammonia or hydrogen sulfide or benzene pooling in a perched aquifer beneath the ground. I don't worry about the ground caving in beneath me as I drive a tractor as heavy as some machinery operating on the Tar Creek Superfund site, with operators at risk for collapse each work day. As my son says, "People work all their lives to retire to a place like this."

I don't live in a fancy house, but one my dad and I built over two summers while working for Miami Schools as an Indian Counselor, where I got to know Jerry and so many other students. I came home to a safe and healthy place and got up the next morning and continue waking up and going to a place I want to become better, safer and healthier and a place with more hope for young people who sometimes lose hope.

For some, the network isn't there, or they don't see it wrapped around them, with the care and support we all thought adequate, until we find we were wrong.

When Tisha Blakely told Jerry she lived on Morgan's Hill he immediately  said he liked that and was going to have a Jerry's Hill. He never got to live in a "resort" or his own hill and for reasons we shall never know or understand, took his life before Indigenous People's Day became a thing. He never got to understand how his culture could become a protective shield. But it can and will be for ones who follow.

Then future celebration days can be: when the last of the asbestos is hauled away from BF Goodrich, when the last chat pile is gone and when Tar Creek runs clean. And hopefully sooner, when suicide is no longer needed as an option for anyone.

Respectfully Reflecting  ~  Rebecca Jim
 

                                              Suddenly All my Ancestors are behind me. "Be Still" they say.         
                                           "Watch and Listen. You are the Result of the Love of Thousands."
 
The constancy of knowing there will be seven generations to plan for might also be called a Golden Rule to live by, used by Native people since the stories began. To deliberate the important matters and make decisions that will protect or ensure the seven generations in the future will not be negatively impacted by decisions made in the present. The long look, the plan that gave hope to those yet to be born that their ancestors knew they were coming and planned for them.

The world has not for the most part been operating with the future in mind since the frenzy of extraction of coal, oil and gas, which actually are the accumulation of past energy, the product of photosynthesis, of condensed geological remains of once-living organisms millions of years in the past, of the concentrated essence of life on earth once lived. We have been burning up what Lewis Mumford called humanity's bequest.

As early as 1847 George Perkins Marsh was speaking about what would later be termed the greenhouse effect. In 1864, during our own Civil War he wrote the Earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant and could result in the extinction of the species. Resource management should take the needs of future generations into account, and he warned, "the world cannot afford to wait till the slow and sure progress of exact science has taught it a better economy."

Scientists a century later in 1957 explained using these fuels had become a large-scale geophysical experiment where we have returned to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years. We did this. What is happening now is the result of what has been burned in that last 200 years. Historian Andreas Malm asked, "When the awesome power of coal and petroleum was unlocked, who could have predicted that by burning up the past, we would imperil everything to come?" If we  wait some time longer and then demolish the fossil economy in one giant blow, it would still cast a shadow far into the future: emissions slashed to zero, the sea might continue to rise for many hundreds of years.”
 
Clearly decisions have not been made with the seven generations in mind, in fact if we could number the generations back, all seven generations before us have been involved somehow in the world we all have inherited. It comes now to us, each of us to begin to do the things we can to save what we can of the world those future ones will be born upon.
 
Our youngest generation now old enough to be speaking out, are. “Young people are starting to understand your betrayal,” Greta Thunberg said. “The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: we will never forgive you.”

They are only speaking now, but as they and those who follow them begin to realize what is happening on this earth, our only home, they will be YELLING at us. They have every reason to despair as well and to give up. But the resolute abundance of collective good lies within them and if you have ever had a new phone and didn't know how to do something on it, these are the ones you turn to, they know instinctively how to fix and figure out how to do the whats needing done. We need them to clean up our mess and we need to encourage them with that effort. To pick it up and do it for ... the seven generations yet to come.

We must ask ourselves: Are we violating the rights of those yet unborn? What are our ethical responsibilities? Are we seeking the best for the seventh generation? What kind of ancestor do you want to be?

Will we be the bad ancestors? Or can we ourselves begin doing what we can to change our role in the history of the planet?  I think we can suddenly remember that we are the result of the love of thousands and we will respond.
 
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

I retired by using the old system known as “80 and out.”

That was the magic number teachers could use to allow for a full retirement with benefits from the state. It was determined by adding age and years employed in education.

As an Indian Counselor for the Miami School District, with a position I loved that never felt was work, retiring was a topic of discussion but not one of great interest to me. But the same year the Twin Towers came down, an incident at the high school occurred that changed my thinking. My office was set in the hallway with thick opaque glass open-less windows covered with burgundy calico curtains to protect the identity of the students who might be in counseling.

One day during passing period, there was a crash, breaking that what had been thought to be unbreakable making a sound like a powerful gunshot, showering the student with the curtain that served to protect the student from direct exposure to the glass shards as I hit the carpet. There had been school shootings even back in those days, but that is what it must feel like to those who suddenly taste fear in an actual deadly event. I got up opening the door to discover a student had merely been slammed into the window during the rush to classes. No guns, no mass shooting, thankfully. But it was the moment that changed my thinking and adding age and years of service added up equaled 80 and later that spring, my resignation went in and I went out. 80 and out is long gone now and the magic shifted to 90 and out making retirement a longer reward for years of service. 
 
The shift I made was to focus more directly on what citizens might do to advocate for a cleaner and healthier environment and this too has never felt like work either. We have numerous issues that need addressing both locally for sure but also on the wider-world we all hope to protect.

In a community with a neighborhood full of good people who sleep deeply, while lying beneath them is a perched aquifer as Oklahoma’s Department of Environmental Quality defines it of benzene, a legacy chemical used in the building of the tires and for the cleanup of the workers each day for decades, at the renown BF Goodrich Tire manufacturing plant nearby. Tires made there made Miami thrive, paychecks were spent downtown and money made family life the iconic one seen on TV during those days.

Tires were the symbol of the economy here. While in Commerce, OK our neighbor, tires were stacked in the late 90’s over one hundred thousand of them sat scattered on a property catty-cornered from what the locals called the Green Hole and the Red Hole, both sink holes located near the Commerce High School. A fire started among the tires and the owner had trouble putting it out. He was receiving fines daily for not removing the tires. Through a phone call with the DEQ he got permission to put all of them into the Green Hole and that’s what he did. But they wouldn’t sink right away, but eventually did.

What we know about tires is they are about 19 percent natural rubber and 24 percent synthetic rubber, which is a plastic polymer, with the rest made from metal and other compounds. Modern car tires require about 7 gallons of oil to be made and truck tires can take up to 22 gallons of oil.

Tires wear out, like the 100,000 tires showcased earlier. As you drive, rubber wears, and tiny bits of the tire are ending up in oceans. “Tires,” says Joao Sousa, who studies marine plastics at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, “rank really high in terms of contribution” to the microplastics problem. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, estimated that tires account for as much as 10 percent of overall microplastic waste in the world’s oceans. A 2017 report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature put that number at 28 percent.

Research has found that passenger light truck tires lost nearly 2.5 pounds of rubber during the average life of 6.33 years. I’ve driven these type trucks for years and contributed my share to these numbers.  

Another study found Americans produce the most tire wear per capita and estimates that, overall, tires in the U.S. alone produce about 1.8 million tons of microplastics each year. Tires are actually among the most common plastic polluters on earth.

Once these particles are in water, marine life eats them, and end up for example in shrimp guts. And we eat the shrimp. Keeping the cycle of reuse going.

All this information puzzled me because so many people I know want to do the right thing and recycle everything, and give it another life. But each time whether it is tires in the playground, or tires cut apart to be swings, all will continue to deteriorate and slough off more microplastics into our environment and after big rains like last night, won’t more of them make their way to the oceans?

All that to say – I won’t be reusing tires; they will earn the right to retire.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/09/20/how-to-recycle-plastic
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/09/tires-unseen-plastic-polluter/

There are lots of reasons, but ultimately we had to get the people with power in the room and let them learn to like us enough to want to help us.

When the first "Tar Creek Conference" happened 21 years ago, LEAD Agency was a baby as we sat down with the Quapaws, the Health Department, university researchers, high school students and community members to plan a conference. Why? Back in those days, too many children were lead poisoned and our hopes looked bleak. There was an urgency to get action to protect CHILDREN and to do that we needed to get federal and state agencies to LIKE US, to get those same agencies to break their own barriers, let us be part of the solution and TALK to each other SO they would help fix our environment quicker.

Miami High School Cherokee Volunteers were at a table then and Cherokee Volunteers returned for this conference as full functioning adults setting aside their responsibilities to rejoin the mix of the thing they helped create. The son of one was a winner in our first ever Poetry Slam Monday night.

These conferences pulled people who knew about acid mine drainage and health impacts of mining to share with the pubic, students and to put this out in front of the agencies charged with doing their job here. We wanted to create a place, a time for collaboration to spawn. And we wanted to be able to see it happen, right before our eyes. We figured if we made the possibility of it, added art and music, and a pie auction, why wouldn't it?

We wanted to get people in the chairs. We needed the diversity of our cultures to be valued in a space that provided time for it.

It was thought through. The template was established. Each year since, the pieces look different, but the components lego-together as we build how the conference will be the vehicle to bring us closer to cleanup of this environmental disaster we call home.

We learned about aquifers from the USGS, how they hide and where they lay and what divides them and their age, where they go and how they can bleed out and can be contaminated by what lands on the land, is absorbed and comes finally out of our tap at home.

Tons and money with lots of zeros. Tons of chat hauled off land costs lots of money. And will take MORE time and more money to bring those once Quapaw Reservation lands back, but 800 acres have been done and crops are growing there, not chat blowing there. We celebrate and wait and honor the workers there who are doing it. And their environmental department who put the plans together for the next plot of work to be done.

If you want to keep the attention of your audience, we learned you need to entice them with birds, or butterflies and we had both. It gets different when you look at how the environment we get up in the morning each day can harm the least amongst us, the birds we barely notice, continue to be the "canaries" for us.

Our hope is for each conference to spur our attendees to action. The action this time was to tell our senator he has made us mad. The Inhofe Amendment was blatant and the kiss of death to the City of Miami and a promise the next floods will continue to be worse. What came of it? Tribes, the City and LEAD Agency standing together, he will not divide us, only bring us together, stronger.

Most conferences you will attend are built to make you smarter. Ours does that, but we aim to make you feel human emotions. I had many and having my niece, Mary Moon, my brother Clark Frayser and my son Dana Jim there, gave me courage.

It takes time to move mountains. But it takes tears to move us. I had them this year. Maybe you did, too, attending or Facetimed with us.

That child did not see me cry. But the man he asked did. The question he raised was, " as a soccer player on the fields near BFGoodrich am I at an elevated risk for lung cancer?”

The only child in the room asked the question we all could not muster courage to ask. What about those children going to school nearby? or their teachers, the neighbors? Parents go to sleep each night wondering. But parents, it is worse. Your children may know enough to worry themselves.

Each day EPA is removing more danger by driving TONS of it out the gate. The urgency moves it and moved Mike McAteer to fight for us. I can't begin to tell you how important it is to know someone inside that agency.

It is a remarkable thing to see people from the past set back into one of the last places I saw them in action, 21 years ago. Cori Stotts and Chris Robinson were a force when they were in high school. They took on Governor Keatings' Tar Creek Task Force and bellied up there and asked the big questions, because they deserved answers and they were not getting them.

Collaborations occurred this time, I witnessed them, snapped a few, and others will surface. People in charge sat down with our moms and talked one on one to reduce their fears.

The annual conference at Tar Creek was filled with citizens, agency people, not nearly enough angry people but all informed and inspired to demand this place better.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 
 

Agencies we may know only by their initials will be gathering in Miami, OK on September 17 and 18 at LEAD Agency's annual environmental conference. If conferences could gain legal status, this year would mark ours. 21 years old, the conference would have earned adult privileges if that might have been possible.

21 years ago, we were all younger, more able and many still had our parents, who we thought would live forever. That was the year President Clinton was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice, a gallon of gas was $1.15, Google was founded and Viagra approved by FDA. Peace came to Northern Ireland and a little known man, Osama bin Laden threatened the lives of all Jews and Crusaders.

Tar Creek was already running orange and had been for nearly 20 years. It is still pouring metals downstream every day. Every 3 days we have the equivalent of what is known at the Animas River spill that occurred a few years ago. But our Tar Creek has been doing that for 40 years. A long time friend called me yesterday to ask about the corn seed she had sent me. She hadn't planted her seed because that river water had contaminated her soil, so she sent it to Oklahoma, to better soil. But then the rains came and continued all summer.

Remember the soggiest summer ever? No matter how well tended our gardens were, drowned gardens do not produce. But I saved her seed, there will be another summer, another time to plant. But her soil will not fare so well. Contaminated soils loaded with heavy metals like she has now, do not heal themselves. These metals will have to be removed. The people all along that river will have to organize and prove to the EPA their land is harmed and fight for clean soil and wait for the fix.

We are in the middle of our fix here in the Tar Creek Superfund Site, yes, right in the middle. Rather stuck. We never really fought for the cleanup, so it is fitting we got the cleanup we asked for. Slow, year after year, yard by yard it is occurring. The Quapaws have sped up the pace of the take down of the chat piles on tribal land. How did that happen? Their Chairman, John Berrey has spoken, loudly and forcefully to politicians and federal agents and he is getting results. The Quapaw tribal members' lands are being cleared off. The mess is off to its new home, the man-made structure looking like a mesa in the west, on their land. But stacked higher and higher. It will be seen, since it will be the tallest structure in the county, if it isn't already.

All those initialed people are coming sort of like a reunion. They have grown old together, helping our land get better, protecting more children every year from the source material that lead poisoned so many. We are going to recognize two of them and a couple of our own local people who found the work that improved our hope for the future. You are welcome to join us in these formal recognitions as we plaque them.

The EPA will be in attendance. of course but missing Rafael Casanova, who you have read about over the years in this column. He passed away due to the exposure he received from asbestos.  His memory will be honored and we will call forward EPA's Janetta Coats to thank her for the respectful way she has been to our community these long years. We will surprise yet another when we ask Mike McAteer to come forward. He served time with the Tar Creek Superfund site and came back and with the long wet summer was able to safely clean up LOTS of the BF Goodrich site of the stuff that killed his colleague, Rafael.

Mike McAteer will update our community on the summer's work and what comes next. Will we be surprised? I hope so. ODEQ, more initials, the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality's Ray Roberts will update the community on the Benzene and what the latest studies are showing and what actions will be taken to make us safer soon.

We'll allow questions, because we all will have them about the BF Goodrich site. But also we will hear about our aquifers, the Boone and the Roubidoux. USGS, the United States Geological Service and the OWRB, Oklahoma Water Resources Board are conducting a study of the water quality and quantity in them. They will be able to let us know if they are seeing indications those Mega-Poultry houses may be drawing down more than their share of water.

These two sessions should be filled to capacity. Without water, good, clean water, what do you have? The 900 children going to school near BF Goodrich need that safer air to breath, too. Be like John Berrey, be there and be heard.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

The country has been watching a slow moving disaster, a hurricane moving at 1 mile an hour, and even stalling. We know what slow moving disasters are in this corner of Oklahoma, we have seen them, lived through them. We have seen back water creep slow enough for the worms to run for their lives as they cross the yards and catch a ride in the water. We know more floods will come. We understand the need some feel to keep the lake "Grand" at any expense.

We have grown cynical with 40 years of bad water flowing down Tar Creek, the #1 Superfund Site in the Nation, with all the resources EPA has had, to allow the BIG ONE to fester all these years and Tar Creek to still be running metals into that Grand Lake of theirs. We get hopeful when the Quapaws take down another chat pile and the landscape reclaims the look of the Plains with crops and grassland.

But we got miffed when BF Goodrich closed and the jobs left town, then went silent for 30 years with the discovery of the Benzene plume 10 feet below the neighborhood nearby. We didn't holler for nobody. We saw the "Remediator" take down some to the buildings on the site, haul off the metals he could sell and then disappear with his bankruptcy leaving the mess of rubble piles. Those rubble piles contained tons of then loosened asbestos and when we found out it was like a hush came over us. The hope the wind wouldn't blow from the west and into the schools. And we held our breath.

The kids at the Miami Academy woke up to that concern, wrote letters, made some ART and created their own movement and now 2.8 million dollars later, we are going to breathe out easier. People came out and asked some questions, got some answers from EPA's Mike McAteer and were treated with respect. That first Phase is about to be completed. Come to the 21st National Environmental  Conference and hear what comes next at BF Goodrich. Come and help LEAD Agency award Mike with one of our Mike Synar Environmental Excellence Awards. But stay and help us start the movement we always needed.

At this year's conference we will have in the room at one time the 3 people who could put their heads together as one and make our homes and our lives safer, healthier quicker. Imagine if they saw a whole set of folks saying in unison, FIX ALL OF THIS MESS? We have not had this combination of people in power in the same room in Ottawa County since people put their minds together as one and struggled through and received the Buy-outs at Picher/Cardin. People have power. And we could use ours together.

The new Region 6 EPA Administrator, the Oklahoma Secretary of Energy and Environment and the Executive Director of the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality all at once, here.  This is the moment. You get a turn. You could see what a movement looks like, how it sounds, what a difference it could make in your lives and the lives of your grandchildren. Come try it on, sit yourself down in a chair in the Ballroom at NEO College and see what collective good can do.

If you have children who have been lead poisoned, who later struggled to get through school, who may not have reached their full potential and you might be raising their children, you will want our environment clean and every yard those children play in clean and lead free. If you want the legacy of BF Goodrich toxic waste removed, so the good memories of hard working men raising kids in the American Dream can resurface. If as a Quapaw you want your land reclaimed quicker. The list goes on to show, each of us have a reason to want our lives better and have a healthier community life. Come demonstrate in the simplest way ever, by sitting in a chair while the people in power over those decisions can see you there waiting, 40 years, 30 years.

Come early, Sept 16 at 4:00 bring your gloves for a 40 minute Tar Creek cleanup,  come at 7:00 with a poem, for the Poetry Slam and draw a cartoon for the Cartoon Contest, judged by Tulsa World Cartoonist Bruce Plante.

There has never been a real movement without art. So we added it and you will experience it as you walk into the Ballroom with the Picher Echo Exhibit created by Sabrina Staires who has achieved a sort of visual poetry.  Be part of the movement as the photos on silk display the echoes of the past.
 
We have a Vision for the Future and it all gets better with you in the movement.

As for the future, EPA breaks up the work at a superfund site in what they call Operable Units. The next one is OU5 and it is bank to bank streams, creeks, rivers and the water and sediment. A community meeting about this will be Wednesday Sept. 18 at 6:30 pm with a consultant who has broken the science down for non-scientists like me and some of you.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
http://www.leadagency.org/registration1.html

Greta said that in January. With ice melting at the poles, glaciers around the world disappearing, and chunks of Greenland crashing into the ocean. And the lungs of the earth are on fire, the Amazon in Brazil. There is an urgency in the calm way she states the truth. And stands or sits to make a statement.

A tribal leader asked me this week, how do we get youth activated to care about protecting our earth?
The next one you come across, take the time to talk. Perhaps they already are up to date on what is going on, but have not been given permission to act on it, to speak out loud and say what they feel and talk about their fears and their hopes for the future they hope to have.  Our young people get very little time to express the deeper concerns. Allow this to happen with you.

They are the treasure and the earth's true hope. Just as we were to our parents. We are the era who used our earth's resources, scarred, scraped, raped her and mixed and mashed, and finally burned those precious parts until we have changed her in ways over the last 50 years, 90 years. This earth is hurting and hurling through space, each day on her path around the sun. The earth our home will fail to support the species who has done this. The earth will continue. We will not kill her, we will change her, our only home.

Greta Thunberg first learned about climate change when she was 8 years old.  By the age of eleven she became depressed and got out of it by promising she would do everything she could to change things. She attended marches and demonstrations. In 2018 she was diagnosed with Asperger's, ODC and selective mutism and speaks only when she thinks it is necessary and "Now is one of those moments."

Now 16, she and many young activists around the world are concerned they will bear the brunt of the climate crisis created by earlier generations. This is overwhelming. And this fear already has a phobia name, eco anxiety. You may be experiencing it too, like I am. But like Greta, actually speaking when her age, I avoided, enough so, even transferring colleges to avoid taking speech.

The changes occurring to our climate, the endless rain and tree branches down this season by the winds, that and the fear of ever more flooding. t is all intolerable and hopeless until you invest some time with a group of young people who in barely an hour that group began to look like a MOVEMENT of Social Action. Now that will give you hope.

Find these people, or if you must, practice turning a neighbor, a brother or sister on.  The climate changes we experience in Miami, OK get worse when we have one of our elected leaders in the Senate actually sets the city up for more and even worse flooding by the simple act of slipping an amendment into the most sacrosanct bills Congress passes, the National Defense Authorization Act to benefit recreation over property and livelihood for you or your neighbors.

Greta Thunberg, a Swedish climate activist, has told world leaders: 'I don't want you to be hopeful, I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day and then I want you to act.' In an impassioned warning to act now on climate change, Thunberg told her audience at Davos:  'Either we choose to go on as a civilization or we don’t.

I didn't panic when Brazil elected a president who was bold for economic development, but the indigenous people living in the Amazon did. And their lives and the forest which produces much of the oxygen we need is being allowed to burn so farmers and ranchers can have it. The greater good scientists and most 8th graders know it provides for the world is burning, and all within it will burn as well. Can America or Europe stop this? They did it, too, to their own vast forests in the past centuries.

The North American tribal people experienced this and know it is happening again while they and the world watches. And that is why twenty five years ago, eleven year old Eddie Wade sat up straight after hearing about Tar Creek and said, "We're Indian, we are for the earth!" knowing he must even then start speaking up for her.
Tribal leaders are adopting Rights of Nature giving legal equality to non-human life as adopted by the United Nations. One of our own has been there and spoken up, James Walkingstick.

Fifty-six years ago this week Martin Luther King Jr. gave his I Have a Dream speech and interviewed afterwards he used a couple of phrases that are helpful in these times. With bold and grim determination... we must subpoena the conscience of America... in those days and these he was speaking about racial justice. But these same words could be coming from Greta Thumberg as she is seeking to enlist each human on the planet to act.

There is an urgency because our house is on fire, and my generation and perhaps yours lit the match.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

I have been known to myth build. I think so much of people and their actions and tell their stories so long and often their stories grow in importance in my mind and I project that story, giving their role in what occurred perhaps more worth than might have been considered appropriate.

We need heroes. We certainly need environmental health heroes, the Tar Creek Superfund Site has some, and we deserve more. I was telling one such story to a woman at the Ottawa County Free Fair this week, and with the fans pushing hot air around the building, to tell a story, a person raises her voice. And that is what I caught myself doing while telling this one.

It is an important story how actions taken by the Indian Health Services brought 300 million dollars to Ottawa County and one of those responsible never knew it happened, never claimed his fame.

Don was working for Indian Health Services in the 1990's when I got to know him. He dealt with helping tribal families get access to potable water, either from a well or from rural water districts, served as the safety officer for the facility and made sure tribal nutrition centers were food safe.

Working 9 to 5 in the years before the internet, to earn his Masters Degree in Public Health, he jumped on the turnpike after work to make the evening classes held in Tulsa by the University of Oklahoma. In order to finish his degree he had to produce a thesis, which required research and the libraries he could use were closed the hours of his day he had available.

Surveillance of data for trends could have described one of the duties he took on near the end of his stay in Miami, OK. It was there that he discovered a trend that concerned him, that of lead poisoning of our tribal children, discovering over a third were lead poisoned.

I cannot tell you how often I told this to high school and college students in the years since knowing Don, but he may have done something major to help protect the children in Ottawa County from lead poisoning, but he has inspired countless students to find the ways to do their research, continue their education, just by learning that his very own research could impact such important change. But it wasn’t just the research project, or presenting it, that made Don’s efforts so memorable to me, it was the next step, it was what he did with it. He passed on what he learned to the authorities who for whatever God Blessed reason, took their next step, to confirm his data, and then begin the long process to make the children in Ottawa County safer for the future.

But just as the last steps of this story are important and most significant, they could not have happened without the earlier part of the story. Let us begin with a simple conversation between a nurse and the new woman doctor who worked, at our “Indian Clinic.” The doctor wondered out-loud to her nurse why so many parents were requesting a drug known at that time to help with the symptoms of hyperactivity or Attention Deficit Disorder for their school-aged children. The nurse had read the latest research on lead poisoning suggesting children could have been lead poisoned since lead was being linked to those symptoms. The doctor had been taught in medical school lead poisoning frequently occurred in inner cities due to lead-based paint in deteriorated housing units. How could that be possible here on the plains in small towns? The nurse explained the proximity we are to then abandoned lead and zinc mining district. With that understanding, the doctor ordered all children since to have their blood tested for lead. And all the results were placed in their charts.

And that is where Don Ackerman found those surprising numbers he later reported to the then EPA Region 6 Administrator.

And where the story could have ended, another story began, EPA assessed the possibility the Indian Health Service "underlying" might be on to something. And he was. Not just Indian children but all kinds of children were lead poisoned. EPA’s immediate actions began in 1995 to begin removing the lead and zinc from places children played and the work continues now for places children play, their own yards. Throughout the county, all are eligible to have their yards tested for lead and to have it removed at no cost and replaced with the soil those children could both play and raise a garden of their own.

There are some powerful stories in the history of the county. But you might not have known this one. But you have heard the myth-building story. You can hear Don Ackerman tell his own at the 21st National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek September 17-18. The other thing about Don, he is a poet, and you can be, too. Be sure to come for our Poetry Slam on Sept. 16th at 7 pm in the Ballroom at NEO. The other thing you might get to see happen, Don gets to meet the new EPA Region 6 Administrator, who will be attending the conference.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Months go into the planning of each of the 21 Tar Creek Conferences, each done to provide an opportunity for our community members, just regular folks to have a chance to meet the people who are doing the work on what is known as the largest Superfund site in the Nation.

We have a chance to see the science, see the results, question the techniques and the reasoning that went into the decisions that are made to make our environment cleaner and safer. Some years we have big crowds of people, some years lots of people, but scant local faces. We want to change that. It is your face in the face of regulators that will make this cleanup as good as it can be. It is your questions that make federal, state and tribal officials re-examine the methods and even the practices that actually may not be practical.

For many of the people who come, it is some sort of reunion, they have been working on this site for decades, and you don't know them. Let's change that. Come early Tuesday morning Sept. 17, walk right up and pick up your packet and walk into the Ballroom at NEO in the Student Union, choose a seat where you can see THEIR faces, follow the speakers after their presentations and meet them and ask the question you wished you had asked aloud. We will save you a seat.

The conference is free to Ottawa County residents, Activists and students. It helps us get you in the door quicker if you will register and you can do that at www.leadagency.org. You can bring a sack lunch or buy a ticket to eat in the college cafeteria at lunch, which is another great time to meet the regulators and deciders who are charged with cleaning up our mess. You will also have easy access to other scientists doing research here, for US, as they learn what happens to our water, how our birds are faring if they live in chat piles, and what happens to those birds when their homes are remediated and what kind of birds like a clean environment.

If you have planted those pollinators and have been watching them all summer out your window, and are seeing the butterflies loving them, then you will LOVE hearing Jane Breckinridge from the Euchee Butterfly Farm. If you have some questions on how much water all these HUGE poultry houses might be consuming you will definitely want to hear about the study two agencies are doing on the Roubidoux and the Boone aquifers. I will be taking notes on that.
We all have been waiting all summer to find out how the cleanup on the asbestos at BF Goodrich has been going and Mike McAteer with EPA will give an update and welcome questions. DEQ will let us know how the benzene cleanup is going, too.

Sure we have been having these conferences for 21 years, but we have had BAD WATER flowing down Tar Creek for 40 years come fall. That is just too long. A couple of generations have lived in a town that shunned that creek, but it will help us put the PRESSURE on these agency people if we show our LOVE for that little creek of ours and that we want it better.

There will be many speakers coming from all over the country, that is why it is a national conference and with all the topics, that is why it expanded to be environmental rather than specifically only Tar Creek.

Wonder why all this extra money is being spent cleaning up this site? It is because there is lead in that mess and lead can poison children and it poisoned lots of ours. The fellow who made that public, Don Ackerman is coming this year as a keynote speaker. He didn't even know that his little letter revealing that 1/3 of our Indian children were lead poisoned has been the catalyst to bring EPA back in force to find ways to remove it to protect the future generations. He also writes poetry and that is another thing you must get set to do. Write your own environmentally themed poem and enter the Poetry Slam we will have the evening before the conference starts.  All of this is open to the public, because folks, it is for you we do this work.

LEAD Agency will be posting the whole agenda soon, but it will be packed, so save the dates on your calendar, register early so you will be able to go right past the long line and get coffee, a Danish and settle in or you can select the sessions of greatest interest and slide in just in time for those.

Some of the most influential individuals in our community have attended these conferences in the past, but many have passed on and you must take their place, take some responsibility and become the informed public that you need to be. We need you to do this.

                                          ...the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy
                                        and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility.  - Wendell Berry

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

It is that season a person who is wild about WILD PLUMS could  only have dreamed about. Whatever we want to say about the climate changing weather we have had this year, it somehow has been the most perfect conditions for the crop of a lifetime for both of my favorite fruits: blackberries and wild plums.

I anticipated making mansion out of a pigsty when a WHOLE field of mine gave it up and went full blackberry. People recommended POISON to get rid of them. But they did not know the way these little guys make me smile as I contort to pick the ripest berry as the sun catches on the smooth surfaces of each tiny segment.

So with the plan for the field made, I brushhogged rows only wide enough to be able to pick from both sides and not have to OvER reach to the middle. I kept the rows mowed. Until, if you remember the monsoon season hit and the field was TOO soggy to continue mowing. I know this because I got one tractor stuck and almost the second one getting the first one out. I picked lots of blackberries, for sure, but the rains knocked those ripest plumpest ones off, but the crop was good, the grasses TALL and wet to walk through to pick. For a month it looked like I had voted in every election in countries that require marking a finger with indelible ink, to prevent subjects from voting multiple times on election day. I am a marked woman during blackberry season.

Then the quiet time as anticipation builds as the wild plums take their time to ripen. The little trees were covered. High winds, heavy rain did not do them in, these trees are producing the most amazing beauties ever. Red, ripe ones almost jump into your hand and if they don't they will in a few days. Some make the leap when no one is watching and lay on the ground for me to find like that candy we used to get at the movie theater, those bright red chewy treats in a flat box. While picking these jewels, it is tempting to pop them in your mouth to get an instant delight. But they for the most part are more like bright red marbles than anything else I can compare them to.

Every day for weeks, I go back to my favorite places. My dad and I tried over and over to transplant some to my property because he knew how much I loved them. He would be so happy to know they came on their own, in their own time.

Just as picking blackberries gets a bad rap because of the chiggers, which are known to have a symbiotic relationship with that fruit. It is best to get right out of your picking clothes and into water right away to deter some of them. For the plums, I am finding it most important to do the same practices, but the followup that is necessary is to take a long close look on this skin you are in and inspect for the tiniest of meanness's: the mite.

A young friend of mine declared fond memories of picking wild plums with his mother and seemed excited to be invited to come do some picking with me. We picked on that hottest day we had, both of us sweating. He filled a bucket and I filled containers of varying sizes until almost dark. I have taken a few other young people to pick, but none who showed such signs of pleasure at the quiet effort of picking.

It wasn't that day the mites got me, that happened today. I am sure that the native relations who hunted these plains put a big black X on their winter counts for this place ensuring only visitors, no permanent communities were built as they discovered the weapons of war the land here uses to protect herself: chiggers and mites. The wee ones.

They and the ticks got the last fellow to escape from what we locals call the Vinita Prison. He escaped in the heat of summer, after blackberries and before plums. He was walking up my dirt road when I met him. I was hot riding in my Gator and was out of water.

He asked for water and I responded I wished I had some, too. When he asked to use my cell phone, I asked what number he might want me to dial for him. He replied with his mother's number and when she answered, I told her where he would be waiting for her: a hill about 2 miles from my house. From there he could watch for her. He walked on and I called the sheriff and they were sitting up on the hill waiting for the reunion of the mom and her son, when the escapee gave up and walked out of the bushes. He told them he was thirsty and covered with chiggers and ticks. But you know he had to have those little mites, too, they were the ones that brought him in and should have gotten some kind of reward.

There was another escapee. I would have thought he would give up because of these little varmints, but regretfully when he was found he had committed suicide on the grounds where he had taken shelter from a rainstorm.

Respectfully Plum Crazy ~ Rebecca Jim

The last chief of the Cherokees before statehood lived in Vinita, IT (Indian Territory) and I knew his last living daughter, Margarette Buffington Garner as my old friend. I mean she was old when she allowed me to become her friend.

What a gift she gave, of herself, of the old ways, and an example I hope to pass on to the young people in my life who allow me to be their friend. She used to call me out of the blue, once saying she wanted to give me something. I went to visit and she regretfully stated she had something that had come over the Trail of Tears, but had broken it that morning. She had placed the blue and white pitcher and bowl. She had put the bowl in the sink to wash it and the temperature of the water had broken it, into 3 pieces. She explained it's history, first the trip from the Cherokee homeland, then how it was buried packed with hay along with many of the other family treasures in their backyard during the Civil War. It glued back together and the set has been a joy now for over 50 years.

Generations of separation begin not to matter when we simply take the time to talk through them and understand the significance and pass them on.

Evans Ray Satepahoodle, say that fast, was a great big full blood Kiowa who remembered all the old songs, and created many for his tribal family members. He would call late at night and tell me the story of how a song was created, where and who was there, and why and then sing it. He was desperate to pass these on. He called me one evening and said he was in the 4th quarter, and as a former football player, he meant he had made it to 75 weaving in his football heritage. I would try desperately to take notes of the story and try writing the Kiowa words by how they sounded. But thankfully Huge Foley at Rogers State University learned of Evans Ray and recorded many of his stories and the accompanying songs. You can find them on YouTube, honest.

Evans Ray had been an Indian Counselor during many of the same years I had been, so we knew each other well enough, if he had had a bad day at work, serious issues lay on us as counselors, he would call and say simply, "The counselor needs counseling," as a signal it had been one of those heavy days. As a counselor, sometimes having a listener made all the difference.

We were connected even before I ever heard of him. One of my distant Cherokee cousins Sparlin Norwood had told a story about meeting ER as we called him, when life was not going so well for him. What Sparlin  did after listening was to reach over and tap him on his chest and say simply, "There is a good man in there." Those words made all the difference to him and he spent the rest of his life being that good man. Sparlin was known to speak up and out for cause.

These elders allowed me into the tail end of their lives and have given that generational sharing gift I intend to pass right along.

And this week, a young woman who I had come to know after she knocked on the front door at LEAD Agency as a freshman at NEO College, Maddie Geiger came to visit, bringing her love and her loved one with her. We talked of the past, only slightly, but on to the lives we live now. One of my questions was how to have a Poetry Slam at this year's National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek Sept. 17-18. Did I learn a lot? Oh, yes, so get to thinking now about the poetry, or the story you want to share with the broad topics we will cover this year: Tar Creek, of course, BF Goodrich, lake level flooding, Poultry and by golly climate change.

Are friendships only with people? Not so to me, this land, this piece of the earth I live upon and the earth that stretches beneath all of our feet, leaving still room for others. We have not filled each spot, we have room, and all of it needs our care, our, if you would dare to say, it needs our love.

Our earth, much of the solid ground we have been counting for the future will be going under, as the ice melts at the poles, in the glaciers around the world, our seas will cover more of our ground. There will be less ground to share and peoples along the coasts, and our island people will be heading for higher ground. As Sally Whitebird said 25 years ago, "We have only one mother." She meant our mother earth and all of her children are going to be scrambling to stay dry.

That Sparlin Norwood, I spoke of earlier had a great deal to do with the establishment of the National Indian Education Association and they had a conference in Alaska that I won a trip in a raffle to attend. And while there was able to visit briefly a glacier. Peering into the ice was a blue I will never forget. Old ice. Our old friends are passing on, our old ice is melting away adding daily to the steady rise of the oceans.

I'd like to keep my old friends longer and keep our glaciers and poles frozen longer.
One is silver and the other blue...  Friends are warm and the ice caps cold, (my new versions of that song about friends sung by the Brownies/Girl Scouts).

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Earlier this week Oklahoma's Secretary of Energy and Environment Ken Wagner and ODEQ Executive Director, Scott Thompson actually sat on our couch at the LEAD Agency and we had a conversation. They each brought some of  their staff so pretty much every chair in the room was filled.

LEAD Agency has been the environmental justice organization for NE Oklahoma since 1997. We listen and when we are allowed share your stories with people who have power and influence to make our lives safer and better. That's what we were doing while June Taylor and Tim Jones worked with the Ottawa County Boys and Girls Club on their last day of summer in our Community Garden. Lois Lively was quietly making cookies because nothing makes a place smell friendlier and cozier than freshly baked cookies. And since I was probably most nervous the scent made getting through the experience easier.

It is a responsibility to carry the messages of community members, to get them right, to hope to convey the seriousness protecting your health and your children's health is to us. As the author and therapist Clarissa Pinkola Estes would say, "Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach." Right there in the front room we discussed a complaint I made on the DEQ Hotline, a complaint about something I was relieved to learn the whole entourage had seen for themselves on their site visit the day before.

 As a Waterkeeper, my role is to protect water and especially waters most at risk from polluters and that is exactly what it appeared we were seeing as Virgil Tarter drove his mother's car down a narrow dirt road in the all but abandoned area known as Hockerville. After we had driven around the Tar Creek Superfund Site and mile after mile we had viewed restored land, reclaimed from the mine waste that had laid upon it for nearly a hundred years, now green with growing crops from the work of the QUAPAWS, DEQ and EPA.

I was prepared to see even more as we crept up a narrow tree covered dirt road nearing what had been the always disappointing scene of a huge sinkhole where thousands of used tires had been dumped over the decades. I had prepared myself for the relief of NOT finding it, just knowing it would have been filled, and of course all the tires removed before the filling. But I was aghast to find it was still there, the tires not visible as the whole site was covered with car bodies. It was as if all those old tires had called their cars to join them in the void, "Come on in the Water's fine!" Not all the cars and trucks and the lone boat could get in, as there was a brand new shiny chain link fence keeping them from entering as the crane, not a water bird, as the crane-able-to-lift-a-car-type crane stood like the prison warden inside.

But what I saw were vehicles with oil, gas, antifreeze all sitting on the edge able to be spilling those fluids into the sinkhole and as such straight into the Boone Aquifer, still a drinking water source for people not far from there. A young man was working on a vehicle as we passed, demonstrating it was not an abandoned site.

Just think: A single drop of used motor oil can contaminate a million drops of water, or a single gallon of oil can contaminate a million gallons of ground water, it was clear right then that operation must stop.

Had you seen it, you too would have known, THIS IS NOT RIGHT. And that is when we have to remember the thing we say to kids, "See something? Say Something" and in this case the who to tell is the DEQ Hotline 800-522-0206. Ottawa County does not have a ECLS an Emergency Complaints Local Service person anymore. When Clyde Mason and Sharon Robbins retired, DEQ closed their office, so the person to investigate the complaint has to come from Delaware County. I hope he took help with him to investigate this complaint. Sinkholes have been known as great places to look for missing persons.

All to say, the conversation continued as they listened, and their staff discussed why they have made decisions we have not understood when changes to the cleanup standard is proposed.

The topics to be covered that day were on a cheat-sheet only Martin Lively and I had, and we went through them. But we were all caught off guard when LEAD's Board President, Louis "Red" Mathia interjected his hope that the barrels buried offsite and the sludge be investigated. Barrels that were brought here from Sayre, Oklahoma. It got quiet as he spoke.

Reflecting at that moment of the list we have and how it can grow with the knowledge our community members have, we truly are an environmental justice community and as such need the ear of the people in power who come to visit.

UPDATE: I received a call from the DEQ ECLS who investigated the complaint. They already had an open case on it. These things take time, I was told.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim