Haunting Thought. What if the agency in charge of cleanup of this place never really saw it? Or saw how it worked? What they are charged with cleaning up travels and then sometimes doubles back on itself and doses the source site with what got removed. How will we ever be done?

This lifelong learner is at the half-way point on the Indigenous Agriculture & Permaculture class and this week the emphasis has been on energy, so when Brad Mitchell the chimney-sweep known for the care he gives to protecting those of us who heat with wood by making sure our chimneys have been cleaned well enough we won't be having flue fires in the middle of February. But the instructor discussing energy, Kelda Lorax made me remember things we had done in the past, like the winter we all lost electricity during the ice-age that settled in on this territory in those back to back winters...back in oh-seven.

Since the real weather will be heading our way soon, having the chimney clean, the stove set right, then organizing the wood and making sure the kindling gathered is kept dry for easy lighting, let me turn to a few easy tricks. Several years ago I got to go to the old Cherokee homelands and along one of the rivers, if you slowed down, all you would see from bank to bank were stones just right for grinding corn, all sizes of them, some just right for giants, some for the Little People. I stopped and asked the river for permission to bring 3 home with me and they will set near the fire this winter, and they will radiate heat long after the fire burns out.

My mother used to say her mother would put warmed bricks in bed with her and her sisters. Why not try that? I wonder what time during the night that our bodies begin to be what keeps the bricks warm until morning?
Learner, may not be the right descriptor, it could be I was born to questions, I might really be an answer-seeker, but thinking about the issues here at Tar Creek made me think about all the energy being used to fix it. But what if some of that energy goes for naught?

We are midway through LEAD and WMAN's Virtual Conference and this week on Zoom I met 2 more of the technical advisors who have saddled up with us in this quest for answers at the Tar Creek Superfund Site and boy did I get some good ammunition: loads of stuff to add to my questions to EPA and the other federal and state agencies who are managing the reins of what is happening for keeps here. I heard Jim Kuipers explain the term that had only ever been words on a page: Conceptual Site Model. What you get once you figure out the model, you will be able to see the FATE of what you are trying to get rid of at a polluted site. After the work is done and the workers sent home, the fate of that stuff? It should be GONE.

All these years at this Superfund site, that is exactly what has been so disappointing. The darn stuff in the "piles" isn't all gone, the stuff floating down stream hasn't gone away, it is still flowing those same metals. You can watch it. One million gallons a day. And if you stand still you can see the dust whirl by you.

So the term that made the bells ring for me and if put to use after it is designed is:

A conceptual site model is a written and/or illustrative representation of the conditions and the physical, chemical and biological processes that control the transport, migration and potential impacts of contamination (in soil, air, ground water, surface water and/or sediments) to human and/or ecological receptors.

Want to know why after all these years we are not done with the superfund mess?
You can't get done if the model had flaws to begin with.

In part:

 EPA failed to consider groundwater (Boone Aquifer) as a pathway to what they term "the contaminants of concern." What's in that aquifer doesn't always stay in it because of use by rural well-water users, while some flows out at naturally occurring springs that may be used by landowners and those who use the water for traditional practices. Some of it is finding its way down into the aquifer the towns and county water districts are pulling water for our homes. Surface water and groundwater contamination continues unabated.

EPA failed to consider all of the watersheds’ historical floodplains as a waste spreader for residential, recreational, commercial, wetland, and farmland during recurring flooding events by surface water, groundwater, and surface mining waste sources (tailing ponds and chat piles) over decades.

Our waters flow to Grand Lake and chat goes with it so EPA needs to loop the lake into this work if we ever want done to happen, but it's not on the table. SO FAR.

EPA , FERC, GRDA and the Army Corps of Engineers, need to conserve energy, and get started on fixing the conceptual site model that will ultimately ... make flooding in Miami change and settle the FATE of our metals.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

To read more of LEAD's comments to EPA:

I was born to learners. My Dad's mother spoke Cherokee, but refused to allow he or his brothers to learn the language, but he always longed to learn.  When Cherokee language classes were offered in Vinita while he was in his mid 80's he and I would gather together the study materials and head to what was still Eastern State Hospital to attend the classes that were held in one of their classrooms. My Dad was willing and able, except he had lost enough of his hearing he could not hear the distinct sounds many of the letters emote. It was too late.

As a warning to you, they say it is never too late to learn, but sometimes it might be.

"Let us then be up and doing,
with a heart for any fate;
 still achieving, still pursing,
 learn to labor and to wait."
 
These are lines in "A Psalm of Life" written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  Memorizing that entire poem was the challenge my mother took on after her first stroke. She was determined to learn that poem by heart and she did.
 
Since I was born of parents who challenged themselves to continue learning as they grew older what am I learning? I wanted to learn more about permaculture and do something with it, here where I live and with what is learned, figure out how to make a dent in the damaged places that surround a bunch of us in northeast Oklahoma. This past spring Indigenous Agriculture and Permaculture was offered at NSU with the first class Saturday right before Oklahoma shut down for COVID-19. It was a long day with a series of great instructors including our own Kelda Lorax.

As it turned out that was the only in-class meeting we have been able to have together. It took months to reconvene virtually. So almost every morning at 10 a.m. I Zoom to learn the intricacies of permaculture. Homework assignments are delightful. Draw a plant and label its parts and uses for the plant, dig a hole and another hole and find out the types of soil on the site I have chosen.

But listen the next thing is going to keep me busy for awhile. I am building my Base Map.

I have learned how to look at USDA/NRCS to find out the soil types on my property, I have found my site online and measured the size of my home and out building without a tape measure.  I have learned my elevation and the degree of slope occurring here.

When deciding where to build my house all those years ago, I lined it up with the creek that runs below the home at the bottom of a steep gully. And now I can see the place is lined up N-S pretty well.

I am identifying the plants and the trees before the leaves all fall off and naming the microclimates here on the property, the pine forest, the stand of sassafras, the prairie proper and the ferns living and competing with the invasive honeysuckle on the slopes of the hill.

The Base Map is what is here, but listen the fun part is Part 2 of the class. Part 2 is the Project. What do I wish would be different on the property. Will what I want to plant flourish in partial shade? How will I deal with drainage issues?
Right now I am focused on the Permaculture class and picking up and practicing Cherokee.

But it has brought me back to the Base Map. Finding out more about where I am, the layers of information on this space is allowing me to truly know where I am, knowing more about where we are, the slope, the type of soils can help us as a community plan our growth, of housing and industry. How the land lays can determine if the next bill we receive will be for flood insurance.

We need to know our Base Map as a community. And knowing this allows us to determine our risk for flooding. But the unknown is how political power can be used to put many more properties in peril with the floods that will follow the anticipated rise of the lake in the future. The City of Miami fought and I am sure we will never know the amount of money they had to spent to get the professional assessments to fight like hell to protect life and property.

The City may not be able to but I am as a citizen going to say, sometimes elections have consequences and the next big rise in the lake level can be blamed on the way, yes the way some people in Ottawa County have voted. You get another chance November 3 to vote, you might want to consider checking out who is running for Senate and really ask yourself does that person want to serve this community or want to FLOOD US?

I am basing you back to reality. Climate change is said to be bringing ever more intense rain and drought  events, you and I can have little effect on this in our lifetimes. But we do have the power to elect officials who may not want to intentionally want to flood us.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

You might not have noticed but September ended without a word about LEAD Agency's annual Tar Creek Conference. If conferences can become legal, we earned it flat out last year with our 21st! But as many other large event planners around the country, we decided to adhere to the calls for safety and postponed the gathering until next year to do our part to prevent the spread of COVID19. We are hoping, like you that come fall 2021 our lives might be closer to how it "used to be."

People are still gathering in lots of ways and LEAD has chosen to keep you involved by hosting a Virtual Conference the last 2 weeks of October with the Western Mining Action Network entitled: Addressing Mining and Systemic Racism: Staying Connected During a Pandemic.

Numerous guest speakers will be joining us from all over US and Canada by Zoom. You will be able to register on our website www.leadagency.org. On the first day of the conference October 19, just as all other Tar Creek Conferences, we will begin with a Toxic Tour of the site and a discussion of the local environmental impacts and the steps being taken to remedy some of them by the Quapaw Nation, DEQ and the EPA.  

Because we are joining with the WMAN our topics will delve into technical methods of controlling waste from current mining sites and the impacts on the communities where extraction occurs.  Many of WMAN's Indigenous Caucus members were able to attend our Tar Creek Conference last year and knew they wanted the larger organization they are a part of to know more about our site, but they also want all of us to learn and explore more deeply the relationship between the descendants of the colonized and the colonizer. This language and that of understanding more about the doctrine of discovery and its connection with extractive capitalism. Yes, we will be hosting a workshop that will dive right into Anti-Racism, Anti-Oppression, Systemic Racism, and Colonization.

In Ottawa County why would these be of interest? We might look at our history, the establishment of the reservations for the 8 tribes who received lands for compensation for traditional homelands they were forced to leave before their for removals, then with government allotment, statehood and the loss of reservation and tribal recognition. The discovery of rich ore on the Miami, Peoria and primarily on the Quapaw lands, extraction and degradation of their lands then run off spilling down the creeks and rivers impacting most of the downstream tribes. Was there any systemic racism conducted in Ottawa County? Let's look closely at our past and the experiences of other tribes who will be sharing at this conference.

Systemic racism is a phrase in the news right now, and you will have a chance to consider the deep consequences as we learn together.

Communities are being overwhelmed by COVID effecting schools and work so organizing for social actions of all types may be taking a back seat, so virtually we will with the topic:  Mining &  Pandemic Recovery Suppression of Resistance during the pandemic caused by COVID19.

19.  So it is only fitting we will begin our virtual conference on October 19!

What would we have celebrated this year? The cleanup of the asbestos at BF Goodrich. It was not a miracle that it was discovered and money was found to remove this deadly material. It was creating a movement inside this community that made that happen. And to get the change we need for the cleanup of the Tar Creek Superfund site, that as we know has impacts to all of our county residents, rising up and demanding it is harder in a pandemic, as demanding equity and protecting democracy may be as well. But we can and you can too. Our health and our homes ride on stopping the floods if the lake level rises as proposed. We would have been shining a great big light on that at our annual conference, wouldn't we? With those next floods, there can be a widening of the spread of our heavy metals if Tar Creek lays across lawns and gardens and deposits them in future flood events. That old slogan, "Don't Spread the Lead" needs to be amplified for our neighbors who may not even be aware this is looming.

As the days pass and yet another friend has been laid to rest, another funeral gathering I have failed to attend, when missing has only adds to the wider grief I feel for those losing their lives to this virus, the loss to families multiplied by the frightening numbers growing daily.

Our annual Tar Creek Conference has been offered to our community as a service, a way we as a community bring regulators, both state and federal to task on the work they are doing "for" us and demand accountability and updates. LEAD Agency is still taking them on and in every way we can devise we will keep you tuned in with these efforts!
Let us continue in all these new ways to put our minds together as one and seek solutions and demand action.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Recently in one of the assignments for the Women's Earth Alliance Grassroots Accelerator program I was selected to take part this fall, we were introduced to the word Sankofa. Originating in Ghana, symbolized by a bird looking back, as learning from the past, fetching what is at risk of being left behind, to ensure a strong future.

I was asked to identify a person who represents the feminine upon who's shoulders you stand.   I first reached way back to my unnamed grand-ancestors who because they existed and loved and lived, I live now. But after truly considering who has brought me to this actual place in my life at this time, I have to share with you the closer truth is, that woman, the singular woman who has helped allow me to make the decisions that have helped make me be me, was my little mother, who would be 103 if still living.

She was born in 1917 a few hours away from where the 1918 Flu was born only a year later. Bea Bradshaw grew up in the Missouri Ozarks, attended a country school and had to leave home and live with relatives to finish high school, where she impressed her sister's husband enough he paid her way through medical school, graduating  as a doctor in 1939, just in time to take over the small hospital in Welch as the only physician when men were all called to war.

Just as COVID-19 came upon us months ago several items of hers appeared that she had worn to both protect herself but to be most protective of others. I found masks she had worn in surgery, that she would have tied behind her head snugly and the cap that went over and tied in the back of her head. The mask was made out of a multi-layered white cloth and still had her name printed inside. How had those masks survived 75 years and just randomly surface?

How was I to find these items now? in the middle of a pandemic where masks worn at this time is one of the only ways we know individually we can protect ourselves and others from the spread of the same kind of virus that my mother was born to. My mother throughout my life, was always there being that example of what kind of woman I wanted to be. Smart and ethical, delighted in learning and challenging herself to keep asking and finding ever more to learn.

Even just a few years ago I was still meeting people who all those years ago remembered a leg she had set, or that she had delivered them. She married my father and never practiced again. She closed her medical bag AND became the best mom to me and my brothers.

Bringing her forward, realizing the amazing woman she had been in my life, always encouraging, always accepting, knowing now she truly was my Sankofa. The person I never knew to identify as such, as the woman who had the influence that made me who I am. I will persist on this journey because I know she is still with me.

So this evening, I opened her medical bag and reached in to experience the reaching in she must have done under extreme conditions during home visits, as the medical emergency team, herself, a woman never weighing more than 100 pounds, attending to the sick, the injured, those broken and in pain.

She cared for my brothers and me throughout our childhood, as our first defense on all health and of course our broken hearts. And as she aged, I got to be there for her to the end of her life.  She is continuing to be there for me and leaving me just what I need to fetch. Her masks were used as patterns for the multicolored masks of the day. From the pandemic she was born into, to mine.

One of my former students lost his mother this week to our pandemic flu, she was a friend and a great supporter of our Cherokee Volunteer Society and later LEAD Agency efforts and countless other good deeds moms like her in our world do, all ending with her passing.

I asked all those months ago what sort of monument we will be inspired to erect to the dear ones we are losing. Think of the monuments we have constructed through the decades to honor those who have been lost to wars. Is this not a war? against common sense and decency? Let's pull together and do the simple things people around the world did over 100 years ago to protect themselves and put a flu to bed. Let's learn from the past to ensure a strong future.

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

The four sacred elements of water, air, fire and earth were known by the original peoples of this planet. The power of each experienced vividly by the hurricane only last week and the fires burning throughout the western states turning sky blue to red and air loaded with ash.

Women's Earth Alliance members from all over this continent and the islands from Micronesia, Guam from Alaska to San Salvador participated in an assignment to gather water samples of our water and describe our watershed, her original keepers and what is the work we are doing for it.

I had already walked down below the edge of the prairie where my house sits, lined up all those years ago, not with the sun, but with the creek below to visit, or as I say to "Go to Water." But the next morning had me off to Tar Creek to collect a sample in a mason jar, not unlike the ones John Micka collected over 40 years ago to demonstrate how trapped water can demonstrate how the metals separate out of the water when it is collected and allowed to sit for a period of time. John had taught chemistry at NEO College and with his demonstration project simply used 2 salad dressing bottles filled with Tar Creek water and in one he added simple fireplace ash. He wanted to have an easy way to demonstrate how something as simple as ash could help settle out the heavy metals found in Tar Creek's water. He had them captured together and when you picked them up and shook them water that had looked clear in the jars would cloud with the sediment that had gathered at the bottom.  It was a simple yet now time tested project that keeps allowing the generations of students later to consider some simple questions. Do you know what is in your water? And is there anything you can do about it?

Twenty-six women Zoomed together, those who woke to red skies and ash, pulled together while one appeared though sick, another while on call for her elderly parent, we sat and listened, smiling at the samenesses we shared.
The topic: Water. Water makes up half the weight of every person on earth. Our waters, clean or damaged, abundant or scarce, pulled from the ground, caught water retained, sustaining us and those dwelling within it. We were asked who is doing the water protection for our watersheds and who were the original waterkeepers. WEA had begun each of the last 15 years of  introductory programs by somehow introducing ourselves through our water. I envisioned how they could have while physically together, then been able to pour all of the waters and combine them, symbolically joining the team and the water as one. Traditions of all kinds are changed while we all gather in different ways together, don't they? 

A friend of mine once told me that is how new traditions begin.

We actually took some time to breathe in and consciously breathe out. As they say, Centering, clearing the mind, focusing on the act of breathing, the motion and effort it is to live. “Every breath is a sacrament, an affirmation of our connection with all other living things, a renewal of our link with our ancestors and a contribution to generations yet to come. Our breath is a part of life’s breath, the ocean of air that envelopes the earth.”  … David Suzuki

Air and water. But the thought on air that came was the fact learned that day that was known.

It is in the air, our President said months ago, acknowledging the corona virus is airborne and that is deadly.
It is airborne and deadly.
The facts were acknowledged, understood. We might not have mobilized as a nation then but now we act upon these words, we use protection, we create the barriers, we will live through this because we know it is in the air. Knowing will muster our teams together to combat what is in the air and lives will be saved. There can be on over.  Another president summed it up simply:

For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet.   
We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal. - John F. Kennedy

For fire to burn it must have air. For us to survive water we must have air. For the Corona virus to survive it must have a body of some sort and to get to it, it can travel by air.

Spend some time reflecting on and being with the people we know who with all their efforts are trying to breathe and all those health professionals who are extending every effort possible with every moment attending to those who will not survive without air.

I am proud to be the Tar Creekkeeper, but aren't we all our brother's keeper?

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

When the box labeled BLUE JEAN BOND paper came off the shelf, it was like finding an old friend. I don't think you can find paper made from blue jeans anymore, at least my weak computer search skills didn't find the company still in business or any others, but I am okay. I still have a nearly full box of stationary to use. I will use it, the texture of it feels good and accepts ink well.  When I opened the box, it was easy to brush away the dried spider body and extinguish the lone silverfish, but there were no inserts explaining the value of recycling denim and twice blessing someone's old jean cutoffs. On the front of the box there is a notation of it being 100% rag content from denim cuttings making it a heavyweight bond paper.

Using blue jeans to make paper, made the paper a nice light blue color, but before the big switch to cellulose, paper was most commonly made from cloth rags, and other fibers like rope, recycling done for  centuries, even then at a cost to the environment and the workers.

Connecting that box of found stationary to the fact so many of the environmental issues we face in Ottawa County stem from legacy mining, and it was a tailor in Reno, Nevada who made pants for miners that could stand up to those rough jobs using metal fasteners and riveted them using Levi Strauss' denim fabric.

But making those jeans also links us since manufacturing them creates pollution and water quality issues much as our legacy mining has. According to some references, "It would take 13 years to drink the amount of water it takes to make just one top and pair of jeans.

"While cotton only takes up 2.5% of agricultural land, it accounts for 16% of all the insecticide and 6.8% of all herbicides used worldwide by cotton farmers. Between 1 and 3% of agricultural workers worldwide suffer from acute pesticide poisoning with at least 1 million requiring hospitalizations each year. Furthermore, pesticides can pollute nearby soil and water systems, threatening food supplies and creating health risks!"

Indigo is a native plant that used to be used for the blue dye to make blue jeans BLUE. I have some growing in my pastures, but have never used it that way, tending to use the dyed pods as entertainment as I love the sound of the seeds rattling. Harmful chemicals are used now in the denim dyeing process, some like azo can release carcinogenic amines.

Which is why, though I like BRAND NEW JEANS, they always get washed right away to wash away any chemicals that were used. But washing any jeans that first time and every wash after releases 56,000 microfibers of denim AND microfibers from denim is even being found in the Arctic now! other microfibers are there but scientists looking at them can determine anthropogenically modified dyed blue cellulose and that there is a lot of denim in the environment. 

Knowing this could have added to how I feel. Am I blue?

We are all having so many changes, our lives are so very different. A song by Stevie Appleton, Feeling Blue Without You, might sum it up for all of us. Or some of us. I am missing people, and know we will have time together again, but that would be quicker if in mass we do all we can now to believe in a real future, a healthy one for all.

Collectively our mental health is being impacted, even in June there were estimated to be 82 million people distressed. Since this virus has lingered so long it is a mental stressor, there are economic challenges, schools, closing and re-opening. No football? AND an election and the holidays all coming. Hold on to your hat! This is going to take a while. Accept that. Our rush to the how it used to be "sets us up for failure." But it also is why we are seeing risky behavior, because when people don't feel like they have control, they often throw caution to the wind.

Wind it back in, talk to your friends about these feelings. We might all be feeling blue? Pull on your old blue jeans, reach out, do something that helps someone else, read, express yourself. And listen to great music, maybe even check out the Blues.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 

With Louisiana in the news, I remember an adventure my son and I had several years ago when we went to Baton Rouge on what turned out to be a failed mission to pick up air monitors. While we were deep in the discussion on sampling with members of an organization known to loan these canisters,  Lt. General Russel Honoré (U.S. Army, retired) walked in the door and commanded our attention almost at once. I remembered him as a national known military leader who in 2005 "spearheaded the Task Force responsible for the massive search-and-rescue mission and the restoration of order in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina" so we knew we were in the presence of greatness. The evening before Hurricane Laura hit this week, he was the voice I recognized on the news, speaking about the un-survivability of what was coming with Laura if the surge of water from the Gulf came as predicted.

Years before when my dad lived in Houma, Louisiana for a short time while on a work assignment I went to visit him the weekend after Mark Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. He took me to New Orleans, where he and my mother had a Monte Gras honeymoon. So it was a sentimental journey for him and an eye opener for me. We arrived on Palm Sunday and went into heart of old New Orleans and into the empty  St. Louis Cathedral at Jackson Square between services and in each pew were palms laid out for the parishioners who would soon arrive. On the evening news we saw there had been a huge demonstration outside those doors only hours after we had left.

On another trip to Louisiana, I got to visit United Houma Nation members in their homes and it is today I look into the Palmetto basket and find inside the note that it had been made by Rose Pierre, Marie Dean's daughter. The United Houma Nation is a state recognized tribe of around 17,000 tribal members who are spread out across the southeastern coast of Louisiana. They like many other tribal peoples around the country are basing back to our cultural ways, such as bringing back the artistry of basket making, using the available materials native to our homelands.The Houma use palms to create their unique baskets.  I got to visit with tribal basket makers and see the accommodations they have had to make to be able to live on ancestral homelands. They lived in tall houses. The first floor could be used for water to pass through and hopefully beneath the second floor where they lived since they have the unfortunate disadvantage their land is actually disappearing due to coastal erosion.

What General Honore said that evening about the surge of water being 15 to 20 feet and unsurvivable left the Houma on my mind and all of their neighbors for  parishes around.

Water connects us to these people, uncontained unstoppable water. Hurricanes for them which many studies show the worsening of these storms are caused by human-caused global warming and for us, uncontrolled political whims, the power to control water and the water level in Grand Lake for whose advantage? Where is our outrage? And how will we speak of it? Do what about it?

Our floods have been survivable.

We will survive the next flood. But a flood is a dirty deal, a deal I never wish to have happen to another person. How are we speaking of this to powerful people? Do we imagine we will not be heard? We will not be heard if we do not speak out. We will survive, but we could do a whole lot better than just survive. We want to thrive. We want to wake in the night during the rainstorm and just turn and go back to sleep, like lots of real people do all over, but those of us who stay quiet, the polite ones of us inhabit homes that are at risk here and in neighborhoods all over this country. We are the discounted people, people who will lose all we own in the next flood and will start over and over.

Water connects us.  And it also floods us. That is why LEAD Agency has become a member of an organization called Higher Ground, the largest flood survivor network in the country. The network is composed of 51 member-chapters from 20 states plus Puerto Rico, serving a total of 500,000 flood survivors and their neighbors. Our connections are stronger as the water rises and we understand we are no longer alone. It is also the reason LEAD Agency is a member of the Waterkeeper Alliance which works to ensure every community worldwide has drinkable, swimmable, fishable water with our Grand Riverkeeper and Tar Creekkeeper!

There are several interactive maps out there. You might look at floodfactor.com and type in your zip code and observe the predictions, then you may want to join in on a Louisiana rendition of Georgia on My Mind.
 
And keep all our flooded relations in mind as well.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

When pain can no longer be held inside, a dog will cry aloud when alone. Bess got older and so did I. When I am older yet and in pain, I hope there will be someone who will make that pain stop. Love can do that. Hard that it is. Love will not allow pain to continue.

For days after she quietly was able to rest in peace, I heard her cry. It echoed through the house and yard.
Now a week later, I still heard her.

I rarely cry, but my face is wet again. Loss. Whatever loss you have experienced is your own. We feel these personal losses in ways we may never express publicly. Life lost.

One of my former students remarked that she was only now recovering from the deep grief of losing both parents. It seemed to strike a chord with me, I miss my parents but I am over grieving, though I don't remember when grieving stopped and the pure emptiness of proceeding on with my life as a full-fledged orphan was acknowledged. Reflecting now on that and I haven't yet found a word for the dog-less person I have now become.

Monday was the last day to submit commits to EPA on OU5 HHRA, the local tribes and LEAD Agency officially submitted ours and we were so pleased that others submitted theirs as well. Thank you all.

LEAD stands for Local Environmental Action Demanded and since Action is one of our middle names, want some of that action? Like to read? Garden? Dig in the dirt? Take samples? Conduct a survey? Cause some good trouble? Make Action happen to benefit our community?

LEAD Agency will be receiving access to a scientist sometime next month though the Thriving Earth Exchange. We have plans for that person to help us do citizen science.  Fall seems like the right time to launch our signups.  Want to be a citizen scientist? Give us a call at 918-542-9399 or email leadagency@att.net and let's decide on our questions and take them on. The issues we face are real.

We wanted a map that you will be able to easily use that will tell you how high the water will be in your house when the next big flood happens AFTER the lake level rise has been approved. We want to know how the Inhofe Amendment got put into the NDAA. How does power work? Who else benefits?

Let's fight this.

Action. That is what it will take. Action can be as little effort as making a phone call or signing a statement. Many of you have done this. We Won't Take it Anymore.

That is bold and I am proud of everyone of you who signed these. Want a sign for your car window? want a button to wear? A banner for your yard? How about one across the highway? We won't take it anymore.

Starting to sound like action. Boy Howdy, there is no stopping you now. We will be protected by your action. Don't fuss, don't mutter, don't sit silently and wonder what you will save when the water is rising too fast to take it all.
Action. That is what we have to do now.

Action has taken me past the tears on my face, and the lonely sad cries of my dog. This one is for my friends, my former colleagues and all of their families. Action. We have to do something. Bold.

We speak up now. We make the maps. We speak out, we get yard samples now before the contaminated flood water comes across your property for the first time. We will be able to prove how much was deposited every time the water lays down and waits to recede.

We need the BEFORE samples to prove you have been damaged in yet a deeper way, with toxic metals from Tar Creek every time, more is deposited. We will use our Citizen Science hats and prove we have been damaged.

We have smart passionate people in this community and our surroundings who deserve answers and action.
Let's formulate the questions you have and figure out how we collect the data that will lead to the answers and use it to change, fix or otherwise bring solutions.

There could not be a better time to organize, educate and get set to make our lives better.

LEAD needs Lay Health Advisors who have been or will become our community lead poisoning prevention leaders. LEAD needs people who have small water crafts or live on or have easy access to every foot of the water's edge that touch us to survey our waters and be ready and trained to collect soil, water and fish samples.

LEAD has a history of citizen science, having worked on participatory research with universities with researchers who published journal articles for the wider good.

What pushes me forward?

The pain I have seen in the eyes of people who have experienced a flood, the struggle learning can be, the pain of serious health impacts. Kidney damaged lives, lives shortened.  Death and dying push me. Pain and the cry of a lonely sick dog reminded me to widen our team with others who are tired of hearing hurt.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

Sometimes we are asked simple questions like: "How are you?" and we automatically reply "fine." Not truly answering the question with our actual feelings but replying with the standard we are expected to give.

How many times have you gotten away with answering most any question with: "I don't know." When you really did know but didn't want to say, or didn't think it would matter if you did.

There are very few times we are formally given permission to share how we really feel or to voice an opinion. One example is when we are asked by a preacher in a wedding ceremony, "if anyone can show just cause why this couple cannot lawfully be joined together in matrimony, let them speak now or forever hold their peace ..." I haven't ever heard an objection voiced aloud, but looking around at the faces that have been present I must say there have been times, objections seemed imminent.

But generally speaking we rarely get chances to tell officials how we really feel. Which leads me to this important announcement: EPA is asking for comments from the public, that's US! The agency wants our opinions on their Human Health Risk Assessment for the Tar Creek Superfund site. The narrow focus of their work will provide a guide to the cleanup they will perform, perhaps for the next 30 years.

Do you want a real cleanup in Ottawa County? Maybe you think we already have gotten one and what's been done was good enough.

I was listening to a COVID webinar entitled "Returning to K-12 Education - Using Science to Keep Children, Teachers and Staff Safe." A speaker from Denmark explained shutting down their country worked because as a country, they have a history of cooperation and mutual respect. They cooperated in mass and trusted each other to abide by the standards and requirements. when they reopened schools, there were only 300 cases in their whole country.

We don't trust anymore. We do not have a culture of cooperation or a mutual respect for each other or the general public. Think about that. We have lost trust. Trust in each other and certainly we have lost trust in our government. That was easy to do here at the Tar Creek Superfund site, When they were going to get right to it, find money and began doing work, sometimes flawed, always with more, much more to do.

Sometimes we can do it over until we get it right. Overs. You probably never played jacks, but back in the day, it was a game a girl could play by herself or with a friend, using these metal stars and a bouncing ball. One of the options you had allowed you to get "Overs." EPA needs to get right with our county and the downstreamers and do Overs on their OU5 HHRA.

We deserve it. If they are going to commit big bucks to cleaning up this site and protecting the future exposure of children we can wait a while, our kids are worth it. Their grandchildren and theirs are worth getting this right.  EPA will never undo work here, this is our chance to ask them to regroup, reexamine their plan and give it another try. Lead Agency is submitting comments to EPA. A list follows. We believe they can do better.

1.  LEAD Agency believes that the RI does not reflect all the contamination found within OU-5. EPA has largely ignored comments from, and data collected by, tribal stakeholders and LEAD Agency during the Remedial Investigation process.
2.  EPA has failed to consider the contaminated Boone Aquifer as a source of potential human health exposure in the HHRA.
3. EPA has failed to consider the watersheds’ historical floodplains as a source of potential human health exposure.
4. EPA’s decision to ignore numerous contamination sources within OU-5 has led to an HHRA that is un-usable as a tool for protecting human health or developing an effective cleanup plan.
5. EPA’s decision to draw a vast boundary for OU-5 artificially dilutes the nature and extent of contamination currently damaging ecological health, ecological health, and tribal cultures.
6. This HHRA reflects a decades-long pattern by EPA of putting off to some indefinite “later” human health risks that cut across OU boundaries. It is time for EPA to acknowledge and remedy these systemic flaws by reassessing its conceptual site model and creating new site-wide OUs to directly address the most pernicious and persistent risks to human and environmental health.
7. The HHRA should be held in abeyance until the EPA reassesses all Tar Creek OU’s and creates such additional OU’s as are necessary to address sitewide human and environmental health hazards consistently excluded from treatment within individual OU’s. Only after this reassessment should the EPA re-do the RI and HHRA for OU-5.
8. As part of its sitewide review, the EPA should create a new Operable Unit that includes Grand Lake and incorporate Grand Lake contamination in the OU5 RI and HHRA

Groups you belong to like: Rotary, Lions Club, bowling league, softball team moms, could get on the phone, or meet in the backyard and decide to say something. You have until August 17. Check www.leadagency.org for details.

Or forever hold your peace.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

 Susan Raymond was a primary character in my first COVID dream which is a thing some people began having last spring.

Susan is an Academy Award winning documentary filmmaker, along with her husband Alan who were in our area filming a project a few years ago on lead poisoning for the Discovery Channel and that is how I met them. We have stayed in contact, as they continue to seek funding to complete their work on that subject.

In the dream my friend and I went to an impressive art gallery and Susan joined us with her understanding of the passion of the talented artists and their work, when exiting I realized I had not worn a mask. It was a MASK DREAM and the struggles of wearing one!

One of those talented people was Lauren Pelaia, one of the creators of "The Picher Project" which I attended last fall at Feinstein's/54 Below in New York City where I met her mother. I got a post from Lauren I would like to share with you:
"My mom was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's in 2017. The pandemic brought a whole new world of challenges. For the first few months, my brother and I didn't even enter my mom's house; we sat outside her screen door in lawn chairs. Since March, we have not been able to hold her hand, truly hold her hand, without a glove in between. For months now, she has not seen our faces without masks. Stakes are high, to take off a glove, to eat with her, to show her our smiles, could have such a consequence for her or us.

Given these,"uncertain" times, it's shown me the importance of the current moment. Don't wait to start living your life; to take that risk in school or work, to buy that thing you've been wanting, to learn a skill, to call a loved one to tell them you love them. We spend our whole lives saving, but for what? Sometimes, there are bad days, sometimes there is no why. The one thing that gets me through, the one thing that makes me find strength when I didn't think there was any left, is looking at mom, thinking about how brave she is, how strong she is, I'd like to think that, if I have half of her DNA, maybe I'll get the honor of being half the woman she is one day.

I promise you, there is no better time than now to remind people that you love them, to put the little things aside and realize that the only thing we have to get through each day is each other. The pandemic has created and amplified problems for many people and the same goes for individuals and families struggling with Alzheimer's. There will be a survivor one day; I will fight until that day comes.

We are all struggling in so many new ways. I ask that, if possible, you consider donating to my walk team, Team I Love You, for this year's Walk to End Alzheimer's. Please join me in honoring my mom and fighting until we find a cure to Alzheimer's."   Donate to a Walker

I didn't lose my mother to Alzheimer's I lost her just before she turned 92 with her brilliant mind reclaimed after stroke impacts. And physically fit. The morning of the day she left to die she was in bed doing bicycle leg exercises. Later while walking, she fell and her head bounced against the floor. "Fiddlesticks" she said in the hospital as she left for brain surgery. The last word I heard her say before the head trauma's damage took her away from us: fiddlesticks.

She actually could play the fiddle. I had forgotten. I have forgotten more than I can express. I am not going to funerals now. but I can walk for Alzheimer's and will be thinking of head traumas that can happen in a moment. And throw a young friend over the handlebars of the Raleigh Portage Touring bike that quick. A slick sidewalk fall could have been my moment last week, but the overhead work I am doing repairing the ceilings at home must have helped me have neck muscles that kept my head from bouncing off the pavement.

My mother never had a headache. Her mother often had them and would ask her, "What kind of a head do you have anyway?"

These precious brains in our heads are complicated intricate machines, and can be rattled just once too many times before shut downs occur. Sometimes in that blink sometimes it takes years to unravel. And sometimes the cause of what changes our brains stays in the cause unknown column.

Exactly my question. What kind of a head do we have? We know traumas from falls of all sorts can hurt us, but what triggers dementia? and Alzheimer's? Not yet known.

We know lead can have long term effects to our brains even before we are born. Lead is a thing we can remove and EPA will be funding more removal from this county as long as we keep asking for it. We must do what we know can protect these precious brains. Call DEQ and get your yard tested for lead. 800-522-0206.

Respectfully submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 

While attending the University of Texas in Austin I came to know Joe Gervers. He had made his own pipe organ from discarded pipes he and three friends had taken from the accumulated pipes they had and created a “Frankenstein” that they thought sounded surprisingly good. I went with him one day to the music building on campus and was amazed at his talent.

I thought about him this evening just at dusk when the frogs began to tune up inside the posts around the swimming pool. The sound amplified and it seemed as if each post was resonating somehow from the frog effort. I looked all around for them and then looked inside the square beams only to be face to face with the tree frog within.

There were multiple frogs along deck and as it seemed, all waiting for me to leave them and their tree friends to the evening’s inevitable performance. That pipe organ memory caused me to reach out to Joe after all these years and he assumes that if we had 12 posts with a frog at each post, that would be 1 frog for each note of a chromatic scale ----and, if each frog sang a different note of the scale, then it would be possible for them to "make music". I am sure it is music to them!

 This experience came to remind me of the marvelous rendition of Maroon 5’s Memory by the multiple voices of children performed on Zoom I had seen recently and now like to begin each day listening to.  

Having frogs near the pool is an annual event. It is theirs first and come mid-July the transition begins reversing the pool from the lake water it had become. We had watched the tadpoles numbering in the hundreds mature. We left items in the water for them to cling to and use for their entry to land and air. The remaining tadpoles were caught and put into the rainwater filled wheelbarrow along with the catch of frog eggs we found deposited on the pool every morning for the last 2 weeks. My garden isn’t the best this year. But the crop of critters coming out of this water homes has been banner.

It doesn’t take a tadpole long to become a frog, but it is magical to watch the metamorphosis of these pollywogs from being water beings to those who as adults breathe air as we do. It is such a responsibility to monitor the water for new eggs, and the reward is the serenade in the evenings from the relatives.

The annual wheelbarrow incubator is getting the best use ever this year. But it is also an awesome year for milkweed. I have seen bumper stickers with the phrase: I brake for garage sales.  Admittedly, I have been known to do that as well, but when on the tractor, I mow around milkweed all season. Here on the prairie, we have always had milkweed, but the rains have come at the right time this year and the varieties here have been productive. Milkweed is a must for monarch butterflies who feed on it as caterpillars and lay their eggs on them as butterflies and has a toxin which makes the caterpillar and the butterflies poisonous to predators!

Climate change puts many species on our planet at risk of extinction. The grassroots movement throughout the monarch’s route is demonstrating single efforts multiplied can help provide the needs of that particular species. We just need the rest of us to do a thing that will help some of these other friendless species so we won’t have only memories of them when they are gone in our lifetimes. And the memories bring back, memories bring back you ...

There's a time that I remember when I did not know no pain
When I believed in forever, and everything would stay the same
Now my heart feel like December when somebody say your name
'Cause I can't reach out to call you, but I know I will one day, yeah

Plant those seeds and grow those flowers, think of those who have no voices and little future without those of us with the power here on this planet. Rescue those tadpoles, help that turtle cross the road. Believe they deserve a future, too.  (photo below by Geoff Gallice)

Respectfully submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

Here's to the ones that we got
Cheers to the wish you were here, but you're not
'Cause the drinks bring back all the memories
Of everything we've been through
Toast to the ones here today
Toast to the ones that we lost on the way
'Cause the drinks bring back all the memories
And the memories bring back, memories bring back you

There's a time that I remember, when I did not know no pain
When I believed in forever, and everything would stay the same
Now my heart feel like December when somebody say your name
'Cause I can't reach out to call you, but I know I will one day, yeah
Everybody hurts sometimes
Everybody hurts someday, aye aye
But everything gon' be alright
Go and raise a glass and say, aye
Here's to the ones that we got
Cheers to the wish you were here, but you're not
'Cause the drinks bring back all the memories
Of everything we've been through
Toast to the ones here today
Toast to the ones that we lost on the way
'Cause the drinks bring back all the memories
And the memories bring back, memories bring back you
Doo doo, doo doo, doo doo
Doo doo, doo doo, doo doo, doo doo
Doo doo, doo doo, doo doo doo
Memories bring back, memories bring back you
There's a time that I remember when I never felt so lost
When I felt all of the hatred was too powerful to stop (ooh, yeah)
Now my heart feel like an ember and it's lighting up the dark
I'll carry these torches for ya that you know I'll never drop, yeah
Everybody hurts sometimes
Everybody hurts someday, aye aye
But everything gon' be alright
Go and raise a glass and say, aye
Here's to the ones that we got (oh oh)
Cheers to the wish you were here, but you're not
'Cause the drinks bring back all the memories
Of everything we've been through (no, no)
Toast to the ones here today (aye)
Toast to the ones that we lost on the way
'Cause the drinks bring back all the memories (aye)
And the memories bring back, memories bring back you
Doo doo, doo doo, doo doo
Doo doo, doo doo, doo doo, doo doo
Doo doo, doo doo, doo doo doo
Memories bring back, memories bring back you
Doo doo, doo doo doo doo
Doo doo, doo doo, doo doo, doo doo
Doo doo, doo doo, doo doo doo (ooh, yeah)
Memories bring back, memories bring back you
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no
Memories bring back, memories bring back you


Lyrics licensed & provided by LyricFind
Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
Written by: Adam Levine, Jacob Kasher Hindlin, Jonathan Bellion, Jordan Johnson, Michael Pollack, Stefan Johnson, Vincent Ford

For my whole career in public education as an Indian Counselor, 25 years at MHS and Will Rogers, the years you were all there becoming the people you would grow to be. Many of you were and remain my "kids." I like to say we grew up together.

When Evans Ray Satepauhoodle, a fellow Oklahoma Indian Counselor, was a bit older than I am now he phoned bemoaning he was in the "4th quarter," (having  turned 75). Evans Ray, a Kiowa, the grandson of Satank, known as Sitting Bear, was a full-grown former football player, determined to find ways to ensure the songs, language and the stories he knew in his language could be remembered into the future.

So at the oddest of times, he would phone and sing, tell the origin story of that song and who was there when he birthed it and why. I didn't know the Kiowa language, but I learned to love the sound of it and the way the words lay together bringing the message, the story forward. I was frantic because I could hear his plea. The guy was full blast and had more to give. Huge Foley at Rogers State University did capture some of his songs and stories which are now on the internet. He was in a race which he completed to some degree.

His story is more relevant now. It is profound. We all must be in the race of our lifetimes. We are still in the early days of a deadly pandemic that is taking the lives of Americans. We flew past the number of dead from WWI too quickly adding 23,000 more. Lives cut short, races lost by people who had hopes and dreams and stories to tell. Stories to help us remember each one of them. The mosaic of faces expands each evening on the news. We must listen to those numbers. Each one has a name, each had more to do and all gone too soon."Oh, the old ones. They had good lives, we can spare them." But we didn't have to.

So I am joining the race. The human race, to finish the thing begun, to bring it closer to the place to hand it off to those who remain. I am not sick. I am broken hearted for those who have been sick and who have died from the virus among us. But I am sharing with you my hope and dream for the future. I long for justice. Not for me. I don't need it. I live on a pristine prairie. The most toxic thing I have on the property is the poison ivy that followed me home from some place long forgotten, or was gifted here by the birds passing through.

I long for justice for the people who might not even know they have been wronged. Justice is big, and yes justice for all. But let's bring it in closer. Honed in tighter, I long for justice for the people and for the environment in Ottawa County.

That is why 22 years ago some folks sat in a circle and read documents in the library. We were looking to learn all we could about why and how we were poisoned and look for every avenue to seek justice to repair  the damaged lands and water. We organized as LEAD Agency, which stood for Local Environmental Action Demanded. This has been my 3rd quarter's work.

Demanded is a loud and pushy word and it has seemed a little out there for me personally, since generally I do not see myself as a demanding sort. But the pushy part does fit. I have been told more than once.

The lights for the most part are off at our office on A. Street, but we are working.

We are asking questions and we are demanding answers. Justice demands them. Why wouldn't LEAD Agency join the Waterkeeper Alliance in a lawsuit against the State of Oklahoma over coal ash rules that won't protect the public? What is the back story about the Inhofe Amendment which could ensure Miami gets much wetter in the future?  Why are we pushing EPA for a better Human Health Risk Assessment for the Tar Creek Superfund Site? We won't get justice for Ottawa County without pushing for more protections now. There is no chance later. This is it and those comments are due August 17. We will share ours with you. Won't we join in the effort to force Oklahoma's Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry to do their job and protect the public not just poultry industry wishes? You would not expect less from us. EPA removed asbestos from BFG, a slice of justice, but not enough.

Join our efforts and become a member. Make us stronger. How can you help? Debra Warner reads the news and forwards articles on environmental issues. JoAnne Walkup dropped off garden gloves, Debbie East and Georgeann Roye brought tomato plants. Shirley Giles and her daughter Caroline brought BOXES of books for our Little Free Library. Hands-on volunteering has been limited to be protective, but let's get creative. We have work to do, justice to seek, wrongs to be righted.

Races to win. This could be our 4th Quarter.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

A few years before I was born, Woody and Jack Guthrie birthed a song that comes 'round to me while crossing parts of my land in Craig County which lies as a prairie and dips down into a gully and up the other side, as if the land was attempting to become hills.
 
There is a cowboy buried out in the back portion. My dad always pointed where it was, sort of an Indian type of pointing, with a nod of his head in that direction. There was never a headstone and who he was and how he died are no longer known.
 
There is much mention of death and nameless numbers in the news and charts, numbers growing daily even in this state. I regret each loss. Where the dead are laid to rest will be known to only the few who take them since gatherings that bring large groups together have come to be dangerous in these times. Funerals I have attended in the past continued on to the graveyard and when revisiting those grounds, I am also visiting the people from my neighborhood, in their new neighborhood. (Which takes me regrettably to the Sesame Street Song, The People in the Neighborhood.)
 
Just this week, I was unable to attend the funeral of Larry Daylight, one of the world's finest Champion Fancy Dancers, who took great care back in the late 70's to teach my son those fancy moves. Much later, I learned the techniques required to fully bead a dance fan, a skill few can teach since there are so few artists with those skills who are willing to share those secrets.

Larry and his wife Blevins became Lay Health Advisors with LEAD Agency and could teach community and family how to protect children from lead poisoning. He was an important person in my neighborhood. How many others are we losing and failing to see laid to rest? What else is happening?   
 
Last Wednesday I went to sleep in Oklahoma and after waking and coffee when 9:00 came my son read aloud from a Supreme Court ruling I learned I had woken up in Indian Territory, right there in the Indian Nation Woody sang about. I woke up in the Cherokee Nation. I could not contain myself as tears fell.
 
In 1907 our tribal government ceased to be recognized as it was. The State of Oklahoma took our schools and other public buildings as its own. Throughout the Cherokee Nation grief settled in as the powers we had held were all gone, we thought for good. But last week, with the words written by Justice Gorsuch  which read like poetry. Justice. Treaties are law. Congress had failed to disestablish us.
 
Cherokee Nation if it was a single person, she would have been standing taller and proud beyond belief. So after the tears stopped, I stood up proud and tall, as possible.
 
'Way down yonder on the ... in those Oklahoma hills where I belong. I live on the land I belong on. When Cherokees were moved to Indian Territory, we were given a trade, Georgia, and our other lands in the east for the lands here. Equal value. So this is our Georgia and though our origin stories are not here, the rest of our stories are. We can value this place and run ourselves right up to the borders of our very own reservation and delight in knowing we are home.
                                               On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise.
                                          ... their new lands in the West would be secure forever.
 
The action of the State of Oklahoma dishonored each tribal member and made those living then  to feel lessened, perhaps shamed. But read this decision and over and over the State of Oklahoma is given the lecture on wrongs done and in every way the state had tried to prove the reservation of the Creeks was long gone, the court rejected. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The court all but pissed, excuse the language, on Oklahoma's reasoning and all the ways in this last one hundred and 15 years the state had justified taking our land, our resources and our pride.
 
All of that went away with every word of this decision. Rise up, and remember we were Nations, sovereign Nations, enough so the United States made TREATIES with us, like real countries. And those treaties are not over, dead and gone, they are the Supreme Law of the Land. This Decision said they live on and so do we.
 
No more Pinocchio's, we are real people, as our names would call us The People in most of our languages. We are not diminished. We are not disestablished. That would take an Act of Congress and they have not done it. They did not act.
 
This decision in the history of the United States is our Brown v. the Board of Education, this is our Roe v. Wade. In McGirt v. Oklahoma Oklahoma got "a talking to" as the Navajo call a session that is shy of a "go to your room" more like what is done during an intervention in the hope of bringing a loved one to sobriety.
 
What tribal people in Oklahoma got was some respect. Yep, those are our boundaries and we belong here and we got the papers to prove it.
 
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Oklahoma Hills
Words and Music by Woody Guthrie and Jack Guthrie © Copyright 1945 (renewed) by Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc., Michael Goldsen Music Inc., & Warner-Chappell Music Inc

Many a month has come and gone
Since I wandered from my home
In those Oklahoma hills where I was born.
Many a page of life has turned,
Many a lesson I have learned;
Well, I feel like in those hills I still belong.
'Way down yonder in the Indian Nation
Ridin' my pony on the reservation,
In those Oklahoma hills where I was born.
Now, 'way down yonder in the Indian Nation,
A cowboy's life is my occupation,
In those Oklahoma hills where I was born.
But as I sit here today,
Many miles I am away
From a place I rode my pony through the draw,
While the oak and blackjack trees
Kiss the playful prairie breeze,
In those Oklahoma hills where I was born.
Now as I turn life a page
To the land of the great Osage
In those Oklahoma hills where I was born,
While the black oil it rolls and flows
And the snow-white cotton grows
In those Oklahoma hills where I was born.

Drought can be declared after as little as 15 days without rain. It hasn't rained in weeks. Craig and Ottawa counties  have now officially been included on the 2020 drought map. Thunder brought hope this week, but not a drop came from the low lying clouds. The soybeans in my field were planted today with slim hope the rain will come. Gardens are struggling, yards and fields are stressed. That early rainy season ended abruptly, thankfully without disastrous floods this year, but not before our plant friends were spoiled and failed to put those deep roots they need now to thrive.

We have had too much rain during past summer holidays, Memorial Day and 4th of July bring up those memories. But during these holidays we think of water in that other way, as our relief and lots of people seek access to get into it. Oklahoma's Department of Environmental Quality posted their Tips to Keep You Safe at Lakes, Rivers, and Streams this week. DEQ reminds you to follow some simple tips to help keep you and your family safe while swimming, boating, canoeing, or enjoying other water activities since natural bodies of water, especially warm and stagnant water, can contain organisms that may cause illness. When swimming pay attention to water conditions: if it looks bad, smells, has dead fish stay out. AND don't get water in your nose, mouth or ears! Wash up with soap and water after swimming.

Both DEQ and the CDC state we should all Avoid swimming if you are ill. To stop the spread of COVID-19 if you feel ill limit close contact with people.

https://www.deq.ok.gov/2020-news-releases/deq-offers-tips-to-keep-you-safe-at-lakes-rivers-and-streams-14/

Many of us are not quivering in fear about our next flood, but we want to better understand when and how it may come for us. We know it may because of the number who are now required to buy flood insurance for the first time ever.  There are a number of "flood" maps and the latest one came out recently. We would like you to try it, the makers would like your feedback on how it works and if it is correct. How often do we get to "test drive" a tool like that? Check out https://floodfactor.com/ and type in your address to find out the risk right now you have for flooding with their modeling. (The makers: First Street Foundation notes their flood and climate change risk estimates not intended as precise estimates, or to be a comprehensive analysis of, all possible flood-related and climate change risks.)

https://www.propublica.org/article/millions-of-homeowners-who-need-flood-insurance-dont-know-it-thanks-to-fema

ProPublica discussed this tool stating there are millions of homeowners in the US who need flood insurance and don't know it. Homeowners outside of FEMA’s high-risk zones often believe they’re safe, underestimating their vulnerability. The researchers show how risk changes over time. Explore this interactive flood map and look at historic floods and how flood risk will change in the future. Look at any of the 143 million US properties analyzed.  
LEAD Agency is hoping to understand from this map and the other available maps how quickly flood waters rise and where the escape routes are. Residents who are new to the alert know it because they are now having to pay flood insurance. But what else do they need to know?

Those who have experienced local flooding can help us compile the best list of "to do's" to share with those uninitiated by water who will be new to being flooded.

For a couple of months LEAD Agency was taking the temperature of the folks in and around Miami, not with thermometers like are used now. Hundreds of people simply signed they had flooded and were TIRED of it.  Citizens were committing to do their part in making that different by voting. We dropped the ball. We didn't remind you that if you flood now or are affected by the local flooding it can get worse and the blame in the future floods can be given to a single person. We have never been able to give blame for a flood on a person, we have always blamed the "elements" - "climate change" - "God's plan" and of course GRDA, the gatekeeper at the Pensacola Dam. A single person, if ultimately successful in the near future may be responsible for widening future area flooding.

As individuals we can feel powerless to the natural elements or the forces of evil that swirl around us. But we have powers, almost super powers and can undo and unseat any person who is abusing power, certainly we have the ability to band together and use that power to protect our families, our community and our very own homes.

Ottawa County did not do that this week. The Senator who has put a specific amendment in the powerfully funded National Defense Authorization Act could raise the level of Grand Lake by 2 feet. If you think we have a flooding problem now, think what that would do. 1,236 people in Ottawa County must want you to flood because they voted for the single person who had the personal power to do this to us. Voting is your super power. November can bring us hope we won't have to float our boat on. You vote and I flood,

Respectfully yours,

Rebecca Jim

The fireflies at sunset, a young moon and dust that came from the Sahara brought a sky lit with the colors of the rainbow, brilliantly resting on the horizon, under lit by the on and off lighting from the bugs sailing along the tall grass in the field.

Images like that I have seen with my own eyes, but other pictures that I can call up to memory came because of the travels of a couple who have been seeing the world's sights and posting them for the stay-at-homes to marvel over. Jerry and Laura Edington shared their travels and now are moving on for keeps to Fayetteville, AR. I hope to be learning about their adventures in the new neighborhood and what they will see as they bike the trails there since moving about as world travelers ceases during this pandemic.

Americans may not be welcome for now in ports of entry where the virus is contained and life in those countries is rebounding. I remember a time in Norway the summer after the World Trade Towers were attacked when Americans were loved abroad. Now we are harbingers of the plague with the numbers of deaths climbing each day in our country and we are not weeping for our losses, but clinging to the thought of rebounding our economy and defending our right to freedom no matter what.

I was reflecting on the peace of the sunset and enjoying the heat that is building this summer and waiting my turn in our above ground pool which will begin after the last of the tadpoles gain their legs and walk themselves out of it. The thousands who have met me when I gazed into the water, as they came to the surface to get the air they were finding a need. But then remembering the Edingtons and the impact a single couple can have on a community and how many memories they can conjure up for us after they have long moved on.

That picturesque sundown got me thinking about Sundown towns and about the rally this week in a town once belonging to that category. Black Lives Matter Peaceful Protest. These types of events can gin up fears and real live feelings come to the surface. I remember before heading out to go to Standing Rock after seeing how peaceful protesters standing to protect sacred lands and water were being treated by state and federal troops, how I made sure my will was up-to-date and once there, had the phone number of a civil rights attorney written in permanent marker all down the skin on my left arm. There are times in American history when real people in little towns, and in big can stand together and peacefully ask for the changes that can be made to make this country better in our lifetimes. This rally might bring forward deep feelings of impending doom or a sense of being part of a larger movement while staying in your own neighborhood.

It will be the 144th anniversary of the Battle of Greasy Grass or as history has referred to it as Custer's Last Stand at the Little Big Horn when the speaking begins at the little rally at the Rocket Park.

Our tribal brothers live here in every 4th house and yes, we would like there to be a Indian Lives Matter peaceful protest for us and for the murdered Native women and for the list of wrongs we have endured, but we understand deeply there are great wrongs that need addressing and yet we can be part of helping to stand for others, too. We are generous in our desires and hopes for other dark skinned people, whose ancestors worked for us, and in our place when our ancestors were lost to violence or plagues.

Be there or in spirit join in. Watch the sundown in a different way that evening, let the setting sun of indifference set for the last time.

Care and show that you care for the individuals in your life while you wear a mask to protect yourself and those in our wider world. That wider world the Edingtons traveled to and shared with us on Facebook is out there waiting to be discovered again.

Respectfully Submitted

~  Rebecca Jim

https://www.theadanews.com/news/local_news/dust-and-sand-from-sahara-desert-may-reach-oklahoma/article_ab1f12f2-cd74-58e5-b1c2-dc07b7857b81.html

My life seems to center around a particular season each year. I plan important events either before or after it and events that should come up and interrupt it could be for the best of intentions with the grandest of people but are simply endured with tinges of resentment that I try my best to conceal or to talk myself out of feeling. But it is Blackberry Picking time that toots my horn.

I can hardly wait for it to be light enough to begin. But there must be light and one of the best times ever is just when the sun starts responding with the dew on the ripest of the blackberries in the field. Eye to eye with that glint, the roundness of each of the segments of the berry. After a great morning and evening picking I actually SEE ripe blackberries all evening long when I close my eyes. In those moments, the berries showing up are the ripest, the fullest in what seems like a private slideshow.

Decking out for the picking has become a ritual. Long pants tucked into socks. Tie on boots, laces tucked to keep them tied. Long sleeves, or jean jacket collar up and the hat, of any sort on covering my ears. In other words, I look like it is winter. Then the picking, then when the bending, stretching and isometrics of the exercise picking blackberries has worn me out or the heat of the day gives me the clue to stall out for a bit, the berries are put up, the boots stay on the porch steps and the rest of the clothing goes directly into the washer while the wearer gets straight to the shower. As they say, knock on wood, no chiggers so far this season. It is thought to be fact that for every perfect black segment on a berry, there are several chiggers hanging out looking for a better host with real blood, not that juice they are fooled with time and again.

Black is beautiful is also in season, as we look as a nation at the color of skin for some in an entirely new manner. Our countrymen and women wearing black so deeply want simply to be proud of that color and would like to know simply less hate for being in that skin. Brown can be hated too. I have felt that and understand the bewilderment as a child when stones and names followed me home only to be comforted by my bi-racial parents. When they married, my Cherokee grandmother resented my white mother, while many of my mother's friends wondered why she would marry an Indian. So their children, me and my 2 brothers are mixed blood kids.

My brothers can pass for white and I can't. Another thing happened when I was a kid, it was during the Korean War and there were many Korean orphans who were adopted in the US, and because of the cute haircuts my mom gave me, I could pass for one of the orphans, too, who didn't get a lot of love in the neighborhood either. So I understand deeply the feelings attached to skin, a thing we are all born into. Skin is the largest organ in our body and when you should sunburn and change it briefly it returns to its original color without missing a beat.

This skin we are in causes us to be labeled and labels are another way to call people names and names could be only words, but these kind of words are usually said using a tone that is unforgettable and totally clearly demeaning.

The summer I was 9 going on 10 our family went to live in the Southwest, in Aztec, New Mexico and Kingman, Arizona, where our little rented house had a grocery store around the corner. That summer the store had a special guest: Aunt Jemima. I saw the poster and went on my own to see her. She didn't seem happy, not smiling like the images I had seen. There wasn't a line of people waiting to MEET her or talk with her or hope to get a sample of one of her very own pancakes. Near the tail end of the 1950's the Civil Rights movement was about help her retire, but it has taken this movement 155 years after the Civil War to remove her name and image from the products the Quaker Oats company had been selling since they bought her from another company. That slave image "Mammy" was a real woman, an actual slave who over the century and a half has been on a lot of American breakfast tables.

So how can we change the way we think about color about skin color and the people in skin a color you might not have many friends wearing? Pick a color. I choose black. And by choosing black I will see it as beautiful. And during this season, this season which falls between the anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre and Juneteenth, each day's morning and that time before dusk, I will pick the berries and love the color and know that others can and will in the future come to know black as beautiful too.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Now, I understand at some point back the designation of elder became a word that describes me. It is hard to imagine where all the years have gone even though they all were filled to the brim with life and the people in it. Through those years there have been changes, personal decision driven, some accidental and for the most part the years have not caused a great deal of wear on the tread of me. It has not been so easy for some of my friends and family. But for the most part, we muscle on.

Recent events with the pandemic and the extreme emotions felt by masses of people, enough so they have as they say, "Gone to the Streets." This is a thing people in this country have been doing for what? almost since its beginnings. But throughout the years we have been a nation, the changes happen in the streets, then they happen at elections, which we know can have consequences.

This time will not be the first time there are stark divisional choices whether that be local or national. Rhetoric can be harsh, can wear on friends, but can tear families apart. This has happened in mine recently. With the relatively young who have not weathered the yo-yo of elections, feelings are raw right now. Things are not going like they thought they would. There are people in the streets, stopping traffic and it is working. They are changing the culture in this country. There is a right we have to free speech and this is how democracy works, but using that voice, those words to start a movement and make the lives of our citizens better, safer, more prosperous. But change can sound like losing but we can reframe this.

We take turns in this country. No one wins all the time. No party stays in power forever. Voters change their minds or don't and that is the way our country flows for those allotted years.

Several years ago,  an elder woman I so admired, came into my office and gently shut the door. I knew this must be very serious to her, so I stopped everything to be able to give full attention to her and the issue she was bringing with her. She mustered up the courage and only asked one question. "Was our president good for the environment?" I have thought of this throughout his tenure and the answer I gave then would be ever so much more adamant now. The changes to our environmental regulations and the protections that have been put in place by the only federal agency with Environmental as a Middle Name, have been stripped away, one after the other, Clean Air Act, not so Clean, Clean Water Act, getting Dirty, NEPA, oil and gas leases on sacred lands, protecting species or their habitat. Through the years of this administration, our opportunities to comment have been diminished on these actions and our hopes for a cleaner and healthier life for our children are diminished as well.

But we do get chances and you get a chance to learn more about ours next week. The Superfund program breaks up their work into parts, that they call operable units or OUs (not OSUs!) EPA is announcing more information on OU5, the Human Health Risk Assessment and LEAD Agency has worked with EPA to provide a chance, for you to listen to what that looks like and how much risk they think we humans have in the streams, river and lake. Listen and then the next day, these folks will be doing another session to help you and me write up our comments which are due July 17.

This is our only chance. Yours and mine to let these folks know you want it all fixed. Yes, a creek running through Commerce and Miami, about time it gets fixed and the land it floods each and every time it floods ought to get some attention, too. And those fish in the streams, when there are some, they should be fishable and edible, right? RIGHT.
Can we say something? Yes, will it matter? These agencies will never try to read your mind and may not do anything if you should say something. But take a hint. Sometimes people in power listen, they get the hint, the nudge to change or why did NASCAR decide the Confederate flag will be prohibited from all NASCAR events and properties? or why are some TV shows like COPS being taken off the air suddenly? Monuments coming down?

This could be our moment, this could be the WHEN THEY LISTEN TO PEOPLE HERE WHO WANT A CLEAN TAR CREEK AND A LAKE THAT IS GRAND AGAIN. Tune in, take time out of your life and do a WEBINAR, what could be more exciting? I will tell you what could be more exciting, it would be setting your kayak into a clean Tar Creek and not having it stained when you get out. We elders can do it so the little ones and those who follow them can dangle their feet and enjoy having the fish kiss their feet.

People power. You got some, let's put it to use.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Our country, our state has suffered before, and is feeling the pains injustice brings; it visits, perhaps not you or your family, but if you open the windows, look out beyond, you might see it landing on a person you have not known, a person none the less.

Who has feelings and hopes, and dreams for the future like you desire. We want so little actually. Shelter, food and love are staples and simply to find a way to work, to earn a living, to serve, to be of use, at best.

It was through my experiences with Service Learning I was able to meet Cathy Berger Kaye who on more than one occasion read aloud each of the words in a poem by Marge Piercy entitled: To Be of Use, beginning with the words:  "The people I love the best jump into work head first..."
 
It is work that can give satisfaction and when no one is looking absolutely pure joy. The confidence of practice changed directly into faultless skill is longed for by those who wait to be admitted into professional programs by gatekeepers who regulate admission it seems arbitrarily. Our young can wait and do wait until they climb on through those gates or seek another path, to find that other work, a life's calling that will do as well.
 
Some transition and follow paths forged by generations. One of my former Cherokee Volunteers did this. He followed after his father who had followed his father into dentistry. Three generations who practiced those skills "head first" for could it be nearing a century? When I first came to Miami, the elder Dr. Robinson had, as I remember an office upstairs in the Robinson building, able to see the sites of the city and his son, Dr. Tom Robinson's practice allowed him a view of the flow of traffic and now the younger Dr. Chris Robinson looks down from the First National Bank building at that constant flow and is doing "what has to be done, again and again."
 
Serving the public, a person at a time. I remember when he was in high school he worked afternoons on casting molds that might be used as crowns. He learned so easily:
                                                                         "the thing worth doing well done
                                                               has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident."
                       It must have been contagious these generations of Robinsons who longed "for work that is real."
 
The generation becoming our replacements need our support and our trust in them. They have conviction and I hope the expectation we will welcome and believe in them. We must remember we will be replaced, but work can continue and be carried on, better if we do the work of helping to prepare them for it.
 
Our country is hurting, we have to believe in it, too. There are injustices. But they do not have to continue to occur. It can stop with each of us. As is said, this country is built on stolen land. Tribal peoples have faced injustices since as Will Rogers explained, "we met the boat." Had tribes been made to work for nothing, had we not fought injustice, and been able to survive European diseases, there may never have been a need to enslave stolen Africans to do our work for nothing. There are generations of injustices to right. And as they say, the sins of the fathers, sits with even many of the southeastern tribes who in the "race" to assimilate adopted the practice, too of having our own slaves.
 
These legacies of owning and being owned are not that old nor is the status as being an "other" as defined by race, color or religion. But "others" are easily hated and hatred can be hurtful, and can lead to physical hurt. Having power over an "other" feeds on itself.
 
Another former Miami High School graduate, Scott Jones learned much more about how hurtful settings where power becomes unleashed when as a minister in Omaha this weekend he walked with other ministers to do his work to minister to people in a rally, only to be injured by what could have been a rubber bullet as it hit the back of his head. He spoke about that moment, the confusion, the fear, the pain of not ministering to others, but becoming an identified "other" and injured by authorities. It can stop with us as we find ways to widen the opportunities for our basic needs to be met, safe shelter, education and work that will sustain us.
 
To be of use. 
 
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

In years to come how will we remember our dead? Will we have a day, like Memorial Day to honor those who fell ill? numbering more than all who died in combat since and including Korea? How will we mourn and place the monuments? We will forget how we felt about our "rights to freedom" when being told to wear a mask or stay home. Our future children will know we could not pause to mourn our dead for fear of a disease there may never be a cure.
Perhaps it will be more than a day, maybe it will take a month or even a season, like Christmas extends way before Thanksgiving. A decision of this sort was made 70 years ago to declare May as Mental Health Month, to strive for it and perhaps to honor all who suffer through these otherwise universal invisible diseases and to remember those who served to help us face what impacts our own mental health.

Lots of Mays have gotten by without much notice. This year is way different and how we are dealing with our world is giving us pause to reflect and examine feelings we are experiencing. Perhaps nothing has changed for you. But for many life has gotten complicated, and perhaps lonelier. Some of us are observing for the first time isolation from friends, and family with no end in sight. Others are proceeding undaunted into a world that may expose them to COVID19. What emotions are going unspoken are carried inside, behind doors, and behind masks. These emotions can weigh on individuals and bounce back on others. How we feel toward others who believe like we do, and those who do not can and many times be stuffed and never spoken.

All sorts of organizations like the KRESGE Foundation (Sebastian Kresge, whose goal was to promote human progress) hosted a webinar introducing "Mindfullness." Their trainers demonstrated how to "be present where we are." Lisa Susteren, the author of Emotional Inflammation, an expert on the psychological effects of climate change explained: "how we think drives how we feel" and understanding our emotions is real "pay-dirt!" She suggested we take the energy of our emotions and redirect them into positive actions.

May isn't the month that one of my Mental Health Heroes died, but it is the month I will honor him. My favorite mental health professional friend of all time was born 70 years ago. Dr. Steve Abernathy was a friend and a professional who practiced in Ottawa County for a couple of decades, practiced in Florida and returned to Oklahoma to proudly work with a local tribal health center.

There are countless people, who got a brand new life after working with Steve for as little as one session. He was absolutely the best diagnostician ever. He could figure out how an individual got to where they were, what was wrong, and how to find the path to recovery quickly all while showing empathy with a side of joy.

May as a mental health month is hurting without this man living on this earth. He died 11 weeks ago, at the beginning of the shut down and like many others was not allowed to have the funeral and loving support of friends for his family.

His daughter wrote a tribute to both her parents,

"When I was little, my parents worked Disaster Relief with The Red Cross because my dad is a psychologist and my mom has her Masters in mental health. They worked the OKC bombing, tornadoes, hurricanes.. and now my dad is working with them again, despite how tired and in pain I know he must be. Providing mental health services to those who are scared and losing everything is so so important. Thanks Steve Abernathy and Melissa Ramsey Abernathy for showing me my whole life that helping others is such a valuable thing. Proud of you."

According to Mental Health America: The number of friendships you have early in your adult life and the closeness of those relationships can influence your well being 30 years later. My well being got a great start having a long time friend like Steve Abernathy. We all need those kind of friends who can read your mind and like you anyway.

Steve brought empathy in the door with him and believed in the good in each of us and found it. One child he helped years ago wrote to thank him not long before he passed. What a way to honor him, to have that grown up child remember those kindnesses and make the effort to say it. We must remember how much we can do with so little effort, and just go ahead and do it.

Steve also brought his past with him every day and never allowed it to stop the healing he would provide for others. He like some of us had physical pains, and long carried grief and regrets that surely must have provided the stimuli to help others work through theirs.

Melissa, his wife who survives is another champion mental health provider and my friend, a veteran ROPES Course Instructor who I hope will know we valued this man and what he shared, his ability to love us all.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

There is a lot going on in environmental news, but attention is going rightly to that virus that is making so many sick and killing many. As Wendall Berry says in The Peace of Wild Things:

                                                When despair for the world grows in me
                                                and I wake in the night at the least sound
                                                in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
                                                I go and lie down where the wood drake
                                                rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
                                                I come into the peace of wild things
                                                who do not tax their lives with forethought
                                                of grief. I come into the presence of still water.  ...
 
I thought you might want to know what has happened since you were sleeping and hoping to wake up as healthily as you went to bed being.
 
The Supreme Court heard and decided a case Waterkeepers and other environmental groups were afraid wouldn't go well. But Clean Water won in the County of Maui V. Hawaii Wildlife Fund. The new standard may be even better than the original standard.  It was a "Good Win" as described by Daniel Estrin, the General Counsel for the Waterkeeper Alliance, who spoke at LEAD Agency's 2018 National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek, on what else? The History of the Clean Water Act.

I had signed onto an organization's comments but I got busy and totally missed my chance to make a personal comment in an official "Comment Period" that would have allowed me to tell EPA to keep using science when making decisions on how to help communities like us dealing with Tar Creek and BF Goodrich. Comment periods are opportunities to say something, say your piece, tell it like it is, to people in agencies that should have our best interests at heart. I wasn't stellar in the sciences, but I value science and want real facts used when decisions are made on the long term human health issues especially when it hits home. 

Senators got Andrew Wheeler, the head of the EPA to testify and Senator Ed Markey told him, “Your decisions make this pandemic worse,” and get this: demanded Wheeler "apologize to minority communities for “harming the health of the most vulnerable people in our country right now as their lungs are being attacked by coronavirus.” Why did he say that? EPA has rolled back regulations for vehicle fuel efficiency standards and mercury limits from power plants AND implemented a temporary policy so companies can delay complying with air and water quality reporting and monitoring requirements during the health crisis. 

We have a chance right now to read up on EPA's Human Health Risk Assessment for what is called Operable Unit 5, the next phase of cleanup work to be done in the Tar Creek Superfund site.  Read up and on June 18 LEAD Agency will host a virtual session with consultants to go over what they found in the document to better help you focus on the comments you will submit to EPA. You will do that because you are not going to let this opportunity pass by to share your thoughts on the facts EPA will be laying out for the public. A lot of us have time to do this. We are filling up our days, but be honest, we can make time for a thing that matters.

Right here in Oklahoma, our Governor just signed into a law, get this, signed into law making waste water from oil and gas production a THING that is a resource. A resource that Senator Rader, who introduced the bill, feels will "attract entrepreneurs to innovate and invest in technology to process and treat oil and gas produced water and waste, resulting in a beneficial resource and a reduction in wastewater injection." This is how you spin it into gold, a THING that in most places in the world is simply toxic waste. Here in Oklahoma, we want to be able to sell it and hope somebody with land will buy it to spray on their crops.

I am thinking we are not using much science in Oklahoma either and if anyone buys it, better check their high school transcript for what they made in their science classes. House author Rep. Terry O’Donnell, R-Catoosa, said the bill helps clarify an issue that until now was ambiguous in state statute. He wants to use this as a way to diversify our state's economy. Not only will they spin this into gold, he thinks we can put it in the bank, too.

There is a whole long list of supporters, but the saddest one was a man we have met and had hoped would be a champion for the environment when he came to be Oklahoma's Secretary of Energy and the Environment. He proved with this which hat he is wearing.

During this pandemic, we will need to watch closely since the people in power may make changes that can make our world less safe and fail to protect human health for the future. They think we are sleeping.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

“In the old days” or “once upon a time” are phrases we use to alert our listeners we are taking them to a long ago place. Those were places our ancestors lived and figured out for themselves how the world worked and learned to make appropriate accommodations.
 
When myths become known as reality noted Mdewakantonwan historian and philosopher, Dr. Chuck Ross has been known to shout out, “How did those Indians know about that?” Many times important lessons were passed on in tribal origin stories. One example can be found in the Navajo creation myth:
 
As the Navajo entered the world, the Mice brought the seeds to establish the present day ecosystem. For this reason, mice are considered the landlords of the earth. However, mice inhabit the nocturnal and outside world and people the daytime and indoor world: there should be no close contact between people and mice. Such contact will result in sickness and possibly death. Additionally when the landlord mice enter a home and see that it is unkempt and not in harmony it is said that they become angry and may strike down someone in the household, usually a young, healthy member of the family (Simpson, et al).

In the early 1990’s my son based back to his Dad’s culture and attended some summer camps in the southwest US on the Navajo Reservation. So we were much attuned when in 1993 a mysterious disease began to kill young healthy people out there. Patients became ill but death could occur within a matter of hours after the severe respiratory symptom stage developed.
 
The Indian Health Service and the CDC worked together and the cause was identified as a virus that a common Deer mouse carried. Additional cases were discovered throughout the southwest and other states and over 700 people were known to have died of it during that season.
 
As it turned out, the research showed that the traditional Navajo elders and their medicine people Haatalli had predicted that outbreak and others AND the connection with mice as the bearers of that disease. They knew this because their ancestors had known when there would be increased rainfall the pinion trees put on more nuts, and more nuts brought more mice which would bring more disease.
 
When you live in the country, you may not live alone. The little ones can come unannounced, never welcomed. While the repairs on my home continue, my son and I are living in the house my parents lived in, but hadn't lived in since they passed. The house has not been unattended. It had been overrun by the little ones. Since we moved in, each day is a new discovery of their tenacity while they ruled the house. We believe they don't live here anymore, but they did and each drawer we pull out is the opportunity to remove their evidence of residence and give it a new start.
Mice, the little ones are not welcome, ever. But in a home with a Navajo, they are almost taboo. For centuries the Navajo have known that mice waste could be deadly and dwellings must be kept as clean and tidy as possible to deter them.
They can carry a deadly disease; we now know is caused by the Hantavirus. The early symptoms of the shortness of breath or difficulty breathing - acute, sometimes severe, respiratory illness caused by a novel coronavirus which are the same symptoms we know as the new COVID19. And it is surging now  through the Navajo community, with one of the highest infection rates per capita in the country with the peak weeks away.

The past is prolog. And we can pay attention or pay a price. The researchers found out more about the Hantavirus. It is one that can be passed from an animal to humans when it is aerosolized, when we breathe it in, so dust and particles of mouse waste and urine could carry it. The answer was to keep vigilant cleaning your home and keeping what mice want to eat unavailable and when cleaning to protect against inhaling those infected particles.

Now we are all learning about virus and how like the hantavirus, there is no cure, there is treatment, but the best, the very best is to prevent exposure. With the COVID19, we do that by wearing masks, staying home and limiting space between you and the air someone else breathes out. Airborne particles are free to the public and do not discriminate. The very air we need to sustain us can contain what can kill us.

If we could fast forward time, one day there will be myths throughout the cultures of the world about this virus. They will instruct the future generations in how to conduct their lives to stay healthy. For now stay in, stay safe my friends. And maybe do a little more spring cleaning because of the little ones.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim  

When my son was young he figured out sameness, when 2 things were alike, they could be called simply: Same Same.
 
So many years later, I met a remarkable woman who through her life's experiences and observations learned that not only can things be the same, but people, all of us, as we take time to know one another will find we too have sameness. Take time to discover this by looking deeply in any other and then differences disappear, the need for prejudices and discrimination can cease. Our world expands simply into the people who inhabit it with us. Equity begins because we are the same.
 
My knowing this began with Paula Englander-Golden's Say It Straight training and the exercises it requires.
 
Her life experiences could have been a movie. Living through WWII in a Jewish family, hiding in attics, in root cellars, carrying messages for the Resistance as a 7-year old, missing the Nazi roundups of families, being "baptized Catholic" and kept with her sisters in a Catholic convent bombed by the Russians because Nazis used it for wounded soldiers. After the war reunited with her parents, declared stateless, living all over Europe learning languages in each country on their way to find refuge in America. And in America finding  in our Bill of Rights the equity she longed to experience. A degree in Physics led her to meet her husband David Golden and his totally different upbringing helped her understand sameness anyway.
 
Paula obtained an additional degree in Psychology and developed  Say It Straight (SIS)
"a research-based experiential education and training program that results in empowering communication skills and behaviors, increased self-awareness, positive relationships, personal and social responsibility and decreased risky or destructive behaviors."
 
No one else in Miami, OK around anymore got to meet Paula. But for a number of years everyone enrolled in Drivers Education class at Miami High School got trained in Say It Straight.

Drivers Education was a semester elective offered during the school day at no cost to the students. Generally  12 to 15 students enrolled in each class with the first part of the semester for in-classroom instruction and afterwards everyday 3 students would receive their driving experience with the instructor. The year I received my training in Say It Straight, the Oklahoma Transportation Secretary took the training, too, which may have been why permission was given to conduct the trainings in those classes.

One of the first questions we ask in Say It Straight is, "Have you ever been in a situation where you wanted to say, "No" but for whatever reason said, "Yes" instead?"  Did you regret it, blame yourself? blame the other person? Did you come up with rationale, or did you simply change the subject and distract yourself or the other person? Did any of these actions change that answer?  What if we could learn a new way of communicating? That is what we did in Say It Straight. We got to practice saying what we needed to say even to a friend, a parent or other respected person. Everyone got to learn how to actually LEVEL with significant others and practice doing it. They were all practicing driving, so they were also all practicing speaking up for themselves in a way that respected themselves and the other person.

What might be the most memorable for the former students was an exercise I included to help demonstrate the different communication styles we all use as one of the role play "movies" we did together.

Each of us communicate with one another. Sometimes more effectively than at other times. After everyone understood each: placate, aggressive, irrelative and super-reasonable, I engaged everyone in the class in one great big role-play. Everyone brought their chair and they all got in the "car" with a friend who as they found out later had been drinking too much and they all had to try to convince the driver to STOP THE CAR. They tried to placate the driver, and beg and promise to do anything if the car would stop. They tried to bully the driver, they tried to distract and also to bore the driver with facts. As they gave out reasons to stop, I made notes of all they tried. Then they were given the additional tool to LEVEL with the driver, using their learned skills in Say It Straight. It is hard to level with a drunk driver, but if anything worked, it was this.

When that same car load of riders, had a driver who was a parent or respected elder who had been drinking. How could they stop the car? It got quiet, but the class of trained Say It Straight students, always rallied to save their lives with ideas.

I believe this exercise and the many other "movies" the students made helped save lives that  year and for years since. Paula did this through me and through everyone of the students who learned these skills and drove home with them.

Say It Straight has allowed me to speak truth to people even when it would have been easier to say nothing. Leveling with people respectfully, has demonstrated equity and ultimately our same sameness.

It was after my son was grown he and I drove to Austin for a training with both Paula and David at their home. He was able to confirm his theory of Same Same, but also to gain a vastly personal and timely lesson in forgiveness he carries deeply with him yet.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

Several years ago I had the chance to help Nick Calcagno do some repairs to the mural that started the mural craze in downtown Miami, the one on the side of Osborn's Rexall Drug Store. Actually I got to take a student from Miami High School to help him, and it was taking longer than the student was able to stay, so Nick allowed me to climb the ladder and dab the appropriate colors as he directed. I felt like and was working with a master, with the paintbrush and got on the top of the ladder to prove it.

It was an exhilarating experience that I got to share with the student whose name I have lost, but who demonstrated the confidence which showed me how to listen and take the directions just so.

After that when talking to Nick I told him how much I really wanted to learn to work with watercolors. While at his house, he simply took a stack of some of the best how to's ever written and gave them to me. And they have sat for all these years at my house. Until Emily Fansler posted a message on Facebook wondering if anyone would like to take a watercolor class on line with her. I jumped at the chance and this afternoon, we began.

This first one ended up looking like a mass of angry alien insects ascending into the sunset, but like Ron Seat told me once: "If you want to learn to paint with watercolors, do one every day for a year, then you will know how." So my year began today.

Much of our world is wrestling with how to manage within the guidelines of the pandemic, what is needed to be safe, and how to protect the economy while doing that and if that is at all possible.

Years ago a friend of mine Truman Geren, an AIDS Educator spoke at a gathering when we knew so little about HIV/AIDS. He told the facts that were currently known, and then added to the large gathering that "within 3 years you will lose someone to AIDS." I repeated his opinion when talking about AIDS to others, but 3 years later at my high school reunion, at that time, the only reunion I had ever attended, I was so very excited to see the fellow who had become my high school dream boyfriend. No, not to rekindle the relationship, but actually to ask for some money I had loaned him to buy his first car! He hadn't shown up and wasn't on the "dead" list. So I asked a former classmate about him. He wasn't coming, he had committed suicide the week before after being diagnosed with AIDS but the program had already been printed.

You will know people who will die from this virus and many people you will never have the opportunity to meet because of our isolation. This is a deadly disease and we all depend on you understanding it is.  Each of us must do our individual efforts to stop the spread.

The LEAD Agency office has been closed for a month of Sundays, (it feels like). But we are still working. This week a woman dropped off some paint chips and I will be able to test them for lead with our XRF. If you are doing home renovations and are wondering if some of that old paint could have lead in it, we would be glad to analyze it for you. Also if you are like me and come across a few antiques that you might want to use for your morning coffee, but wonder if they are safe to use, drop them by and we can test them for you. Just bag them with your contact information and leave them on the back porch. When you get your results, we will include some seeds for your garden since, this year might be a good time for watercolors, but it is definitely the best season for a garden you might ever have had!

We are all going to have a month of Sundays, lets fill each one of them with the good we can offer others and the joy simple pleasures can bring us. Learn something you longed to learn. Mark a thing off your "to do" list, but keep adding to it, we have time.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

I had always heard that phrase, "There goes the neighborhood," on TV comedy shows when I was growing up. But I got to actually say it myself when the houses a block away from the LEAD Agency office went down this week.
The last time this happened out our backdoor was when Colleen's Cottage was bought and taken down by the new owners in order to construct a confined space to place items too large for the nearby lot at East Central Pawn.

I remember it well. I and so many others shopped at Colleen's Cottage through the years. She moved her business to the shops at the Coleman and basically went uptown. But the day the equipment came and set up to take the Cottage down, I went inside with my camera to take a few photos which I then made into a set of greeting cards for the previous owner. We met often at the rose bush in the alley more often than in her shop and had become friends.

Mary Daugherty was working at LEAD Agency at that time through an AARP program and had brought her grandson Hayden with her that day. He was fascinated by big equipment and parked himself on the ramp out our backdoor and watched every piece of that building go down. There was a lot of noise as the glass in the windows shattered and the wood splintered.

And then it was quiet.

It got quiet again out that back door this week when the houses on B Street went down.

There goes the neighborhood. Houses have memories and people who have lived in them will remember the joy and the sadnesses they experienced inside those walls. Those houses were neighbors to each other. Year after year. Season after season, but the last several seasons, no one came to care for them, which reminded me of my 6th grade class in Big Spring, Texas. The teacher Miss Jewel, allowed us to memorize poetry and recite it aloud. She kept track of the number of lines we learned and at the end of the year, I earned a book of poetry I still cherish. 100 favorites, only some of them were ones memorized that year, many others were as they say, "over my head" and some actually still are.

I often thought about the gift she gave me for loving poetry, but also think of all those others who had the chance to be brave and stand in front of the class and speak words we might not have then known all that deeply. Since then and through the years I thought of prisoners of war and how some of what got them through long and lonely days were reciting poetry and lines of the bible that had been memorized as children.

One of my favorites memorized that year came to mind  lately and after these two neighbor homes when down, I flipped to Home by Edgar A. Guest to read those lines and reflect that indeed it takes a "heap of living in a house to make it home."

Abandoned and uncared for houses can become actual homes for ... vermin or pests of a great variety. Where I live in the Craig County, there just aren't any abandoned homes along the highway corridor north of Vinita, because, though vermin might come to be there, they also could serve as hide-aways for runaway prisoners, who do escape from the facility on the other end of Hope Avenue, which could be known as Hopeless (but no one says that outloud around there).  

For a number of reasons the houses that come close to falling down on themselves can eventually get some help from the City of Miami to complete that fall and to actually take away the pile. And that is what just happened to the houses on B Street.

The City of Miami has 13,500 residents but over half of the houses in town are actually rentals. Many of the homeowners become landlords, or as they call themselves property managers for houses they may have once grown up in, or for purchases made as investments. There are many rentals that are well cared for and maintained. But there are some that fall off the maintenance schedule for too long. Roofs go unrepaired long enough, the interior becomes damaged and the home is no longer rentable or habitable. No income, no taxes paid on them. These houses go to sleep.

And the City can follow procedures found in the International Property Maintenance Code which had been adopted by the City, follow procedure and bring those houses down and clear the property. There is a process and those processes may take a year to move through, but the houses on B Street got to the end and "there went the neighborhood." But honestly, the neighbors were already long gone, and for now we have a brand new green space to view and neighbors we hadn't been able to see before.

For more information on the process the City of Miami follows check out the miamiokla.net website for code-compliance.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

"When the Bones are good the rest don't matter" words from Maren Morris' song The Bones. This has become the theme song for what's happening in my world, and ours.

When the carpenters came during this pandemic to do that essential service on the bones of my home, I moved out. When they tore off the flooring, then the floor boards, then looked beneath, the report was the bones are good. Just not enough of them, not enough support for the house that came upon them all those years ago.

The Earth got a good report this week, too. Her bones are good and the skies are clearing and the quest for fossil fuels got a whole lot less profitable, making this a great time for the energy producers to change their ways and provide for our energy needs in the new ways that will give us what we need and in a way that gives companies the chance to be the saviors of the earth while we still pay them for it.

50 years ago the Earth needed help and people 20 million Americans demanded it. We got the Environmental Protection Agency and isn't it ironic that 50 years later its initials could almost be EPA for Environmental Pollution Agency since so many of the rules and regulations to protect human health and our environment are being rolled back by the current administration. A dear woman who worked for us at LEAD Agency came into my office and gently shut the door, sat down and looked at me, then asked, if the president who had been elected was good for the environment. That was early in the term, but that answer certainly and positively stayed NO, not good for the environment. Elections have consequences and voting matters.

And 50 years ago people 20 million people stood up and spoke up for the Earth and as Earl Hatley says, "Look on any April calendar, Earth Day is listed. We made it happen." Regular people made us all recognize the importance of appreciating the only real mother we all have. Martin Lively, LEAD's Americorps/VISTA pointed out through a series of photos that our environmental footprint can have long and lasting impacts but living in different ways and doing the work we do can demonstrate that footprint can be smaller and we are modeling how that can look.

The Rose Foundation's Grassroots Leadership Foundation helped LEAD Agency's bones this week when we received a $5,000 grant to pursue the work we do for our community. We join with other grassroots groups all over the country who like us pull the energy forward to change the places we live and make them safer and healthier. It was a humbling experience to meet their board members in a ZOOM meeting and learn the expertise they each bring. We will be well served through this organization and our relationship with them. They understand deeply about the environmental and personal struggles flooding causes and how leadership, local or global political leaders can influence our futures.

Groups all over the world held virtual Earth Day events, so of course LEAD Agency hung right in there with our own. Music was provided by the Picher Project with a song from their musical and from Moondoggy by Jordan Zable. We had a discussion with reflections and our deep desire as yours would be to find us all physically together with friends and family without the fear of the contagious virus. The Earth was in a terrible mess 50 years ago, some things got better, but she is still our home and we can look deeply into how we extend the years she can give us. We can believe the changes we are making now can be personal changes that can benefit us and make our lives and our own futures better.

Our bones are good. "The house don't fall when the bones are good."

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

P.S.
Earth Day -- The Beginning: A Guide for Survival Compiled and edited by the National Staff of Environmental Action is a book on the shelf outside the room I am currently sequestered while my house is getting her new bones. On the dedication page the simple words:
                                                                                                 To the tree
                                                                              from which this book is made