Through the years there have been casual comments generating some tinge of laughter when Tar Creek comes up, with the quip about the Tar Creek Monster. Art students have depicted the monster in various ways. One of my all time favorites, was Meredith MacQueeney's done simply with pen and ink. But I saw him for real the other day myself. He can be found not far after leaving the Neosho River upon entering the mouth of Tar Creek. He doesn't greet you as you enter, he is more the sentry for those who leave.

As the Tar Creekkeeper, and using my vessel, the kayak bearing its name, I went down the ramp at Riverview Park to find the confluence of the creek from the Neosho River. Butch Flick, who had recently returned from being a fishing guide in Alaska agreed to accompany. The ramp was muddy but the launch easy, witnessed by the folks visiting in separate vehicles. The Neosho is a brown river but easy mover. It is a lot farther to the train trestle than it looks, but just before the bridge over the highway, turn left and there you are in the slow to sluggish for sure "Tire Creek," the tire always visible along this stream, Tar Creek. There is little evidence it is ever found. It is wide and slow. The big trees bare the orange stains of the past floods.

The Blue Heron complained along our route for the intrusion. And a big fish or his brothers leaped for joy to have us there. Quiet and slow. Both sides of the creek's wild spaces were slowly joined by tree stands back from the water indicating some people join the site during certain seasons. What we found was the makings of a treasure, a wildlife refuge, practically untouched. We came upon 2 fellows standing on the bank, one owned 30 acres with 300 pecan trees he had just listed for sale. Land is a hard thing to give up, didn't Will Rogers say, "they ain't making any more of it?"

But this land this creek will get a brand new start, once EPA is funded enough to get to it. It is complicated, first fix it in Kansas, then follow it, keep chat from the big piles from getting into it, dreg what bad is in it and then figure out how to deal with the mine water discharge, keep dredging it all the way to the other train trestle, the one past Twin Bridges. With funding this could already be over and Luke could get that land sold, or be glad, very glad he kept it as its value increases with the clean stream he would have on both sides of him.

We have to think about this stream and figure out how we keep it clean, and then we have to consider all those sister streams and those unnamed streams that feed into streams that must be protected. That means we have to think hard about choices we make now that may impact our neighbors. Each of us with portions of land must think hard about holding on to it or making restrictions on our deeds that will end up protecting our heirs and their neighbors. What we do to the land we do to the water. And we all need water and all the future generations must have it too.

When we consider the future, we must think big. It is heavy the responsibility we have. Do we protect the land owners right to pollute your air, your water, your land? How right is that?

The Tar Creek Monster is really there, it is the choices made many years ago to fail to spend the money to keep pumping out that aquifer so water would not hang out long enough to become toxic and taint us for the rest of our lives. The monster is the choice humans make that create the monsters that will haunt us, poison our children and make our lives intolerable.

My homework is to study the Oklahoma Agriculture Statutes. This section looks out for Agriculture, not our land, our water or our people. Ag is for Ag. Those pages indicate a lot of laws have been repealed, sections of our anti-corporate farming laws, because our early Oklahoma lawmakers already knew about corporate farming and put protections for us and those laws have been degraded since 1992 when Big-Ag started seeing our plains as gains for their companies.

Kent Ryals, an attorney in Vinita said that can be changed. I agreed and legislators need help in making the laws protective of what is important, our future. What we also need are people who want the laws changed, not to infringe on farmers, which there aren't that many of anymore. But to help farmers make good choices and the state's future. We need no more monsters, no more degradation.   

My other homework can be shared. Pick up a pen and write your letters now. Have an opinion. With the election coming up soon, write to those running for governor, since the winner will be appointing people who will serve in positions of power in every department of our state government. Elections have consequences and we must give the right to protect us seriously when we vote.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

I grew up with parents who enjoyed time together. But every so often they would Rooster Fight. Each would pull a bent arm up close to their body and then flap it a time or two before the "fight" began. It never seemed like a real fight because they both began to laugh and it was over practically before it began. It was my kind of chicken fight.

But what we have happening right now is a Chicken Fight on a much larger scale and no one is laughing. It is just now reaching Ottawa and Craig County, but our sister counties are covered with trouble already.

It is time to join the Oklahoma Chicken Fight for Water and our Future. You can begin right away. No one has to know you have joined. You can start in your very own house, or on your break at work. Make a decision to do something. That phrase, see something, say something, that was made for us. Go in your kitchen, turn on the tap, see the water? Want to keep seeing water you can drink? Then, yes, say something about it.

Who will you tell? You can start with your household members and they can pass it on. We can inform the people we know that water and a healthy future is at stake.

Then what? Tell every local elected official you are concerned and you want them to speak up. Every local tribal elected leader. They all respect our Mother Earth and know Water is Life. Call the next layer of elected officials, the Governor and everyone running for Governor. Call the Secretary of Agriculture and Forestry James Reese and each of his board members. Good start. Then call every other agency that has something to do with water in the State of Oklahoma, and by all means call the Oklahoma Water Resources Board.

Many of us learned to write letters while we were in 5th grade and because of email and texting, we probably haven't written one since, but this would be a great time to start. Write all of those folks you called, as a follow up. Just like in texting, use ALL CAPS SO THEY KNOW YOU ARE SERIOUS. And you really could TEXT most of them too, without a stamp.

The dirt is being moved on new chicken houses south of Miami and north of Vinita. Each of these BIG ones are 3 football fields long. Some of us can't even walk that far without getting winded. But once they come in getting winded could happen quick for folks you know who already have asthma and COPD. We could care about them and the air we breathe. We could protect the air quality and speak up for it to all those folks you contacted about the water quality.

Ottawa County has paid her dues, providing the lead for both World Wars and having the land left like it was the war zone. She dutifully provided jobs for breadwinners with BF Goodrich which now sits abandoned like a second warzone with fears of asbestos and Benzene beneath the ground nearby. Ottawa Countians have had generations of our youth lead poisoned and their potential and our communities' hopes for their futures dampened. All that heavy metal dust has fairy dusted all of us ensuring many lives have been lost years before their expected expiration dates. Tar Creek got hit in 1979 and has been the blight we want to forget as she runs silently past us and dumps her load of metals into the Neosho out of sight, just past the boat ramp in Riverview Park.

We are a Superfund Site with her name. We are a damaged place. Every resident in the county can have the soil they live upon tested for lead because it could have been spread and been long forgotten. But lead does not sleep, it will not cease having the power to harm children, no matter how long it lays there. It must be removed.

Craig County for the most part has protected herself all these years. We are not a superfund site, we did not grow with the influx of workers to a polluting plant like BF Goodrich. We have good people who breathe good air. Your neighbors need your support now. Your neighboring counties need your support now.

Vinita and the Rural Water District #2 drink Grand Lake. For an 18 month period ending last year we were all drinking water with HAAs which can cause cancer and other illnesses especially for our most vulnerable. That was because the lake water needed more chlorine added to kill what was in the lake water before you drank it. The chlorine changed our water. More chicken houses produce more litter and that litter can lie in the Grand Lake watershed and add to its burden which will cause it to be treated and that treatment can harm us. More chicken houses = more waste that will be distributed on the land, harming our Grand Lake or her sister lakes downstream.

We pay with our health, we pay for treatment and we pay for corporate farming. This is an industrial disaster come upon this land and her people that can harm our environment and suck water right out from under us. Chickens love water, just like you do. And when you have 300,000 chickens per house and 6 going in right away, you might want to add in your message that you want our Roubidoux to remain drinkable, the tap water you drink is at risk. Why?

It goes back to mining days, when they mined the Boone aquifer, and when they quit, water filled those abandoned caverns where it brewed into a Toxic Tea, not like J-M Farms Toxic Tea compost nutrient rich water that got loose and ran into Tar Creek this summer and killed fish. No this Toxic Tea is loaded with heavy metals, and when the caverns got full it has flowed down Tar Creek ever since.  The Roubidoux lies beneath the Boone and if lots of water is pulled from the Roubidoux, the Boone will try to fill it, and if it does, it can contaminate that tap water you like. You might not drink the Roubidoux but your Bluejacket and Ottawa County neighbors do.

Lots of chickens can drink lots of water millions of gallons per house quickly. So be quick with your letters, calls, texts. Very quick. It's your chicken fight now. My parents would be all over this one.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Our 20th National Environmental Conference began with environmental justice and ended with water. Trevor Hammons, the Supervising Attorney for Environmental Complaints with the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality had presented at our annual conference and explained that there was water protecting us from being exposed to another dangerous substance, asbestos.  We were told water covers all of the asbestos that is left at BF Goodrich. One of our volunteers without our knowledge took a walk around that site -and came back with a flat light-weight fiber-covered item stuffed into a baggie.

DEQ was called immediately asking for the man in charge of asbestos sites in Oklahoma familiar with BFG, but he had retired and the new guy didn't know about the site, would look it up and get back with us. Our volunteer has left the state, but the site is here and a tempting place to take a walk about.

From our knowledge the only way left to be exposed to asbestos was to fall into the uncovered flooded basements, swim down a couple of levels grab some stuck to something, pry it off and bring it out of the water and dry it out. We remain concerned about the potential to cause harm left as it is.  The current owner left the state,  pays the taxes on the property to avoid the $10,000 a day fines that should be accumulating with DEQ.

There ought to be a way to be able to protect the public, clean up the site, deal with the benzene plume and rename the street after the other long standing building: Will Rogers, named after the man who never met the man who left that mess or the company that abandoned the town.

Waterkeeper Alliance asked all of their members to do a Clean Up in their watersheds in September. We listed it as an option for the Conference last week,  A Walk to Tar Creek and Clean Up, but no one signed up for it. We were going to walk to the creek that runs through the NEO campus right to the spot Jason Miller loves and not clean up the creek. Because number 1, we don't have the multiple millions it would take Number 2, we are regular  people and this is not a regular cleanup, this is a superfund site contaminated with heavy metals that are hazardous to people and obviously the environment. This will take a federal agency with big bucks to fund this, an agency and a program within it made special to handle this.

Even if we wanted to do a "regular cleanup" along the creek banks, pulling out debris and trash, should we? Every item would be covered with the superfund site metals and get all over us as we lift it and turn it to bag it. And where should the bag go? It would basically be toxic waste. Put it in the "regular" trash pickup?

How do we clean this place up? with power washers to the debris covered rocks? What about the fish eggs, the start of new life by the ones already taking up residences in our creek? Do we humans destroy other life to make our space look like we think "good" is?

We didn't have to explain this by the creek last week because no one signed up for the walk and cleanup. But imagine this creek gets her REAL CLEANUP and the metals are dealt with by the EPA through the Superfund Program created to be funded by fees placed on companies that manufacture substances that can pollute. So while we are imagining, we would include Congress re-authorizing that provision in the law so it is funded enough to do this cleanup with those fees and not be done with taxpayer funding from US.

THEN, we use the fire circle, Jason Miller brings his guitar, we have the cleanup and spend some time along the Tar Creek old timers remember singing the old songs and the news ones like the Tar Creek Anthem written by Jim Stricklan.

 This week brought some time to rediscover our Community Garden and a young woman in it getting  a couple of our home grown tomatoes who exclaimed they were the best birthday gift she had ever had.

She was a happy young woman vibrant active and as we pulled tomatoes and talked in the last light of the day, she told me I had been the woman who knocked on her door last year and found her beat up. But she got out of that relationship got a new life, a job and was totally unrecognizable now with her brand new life and tomatoes.

We can take the time to knock on a door, we can ask the big question, are you alright? Thousands of woman received help through the Community Crisis Center led by DeeDee Cox. Think of all the brand new lives she has been able to start.

I am hoping she in her retirement and they all get a garden going to share what they grow with the folks who wander by, and doing so ask those questions, are you alright? are you safe? Do you need help?

Our conference is available on the LEAD Agency Facebook page. Catch up and watch Channel 8 for the expansion of chicken houses in northeast Oklahoma series. Craig and Ottawa need to be concerned.
We care about water and all our efforts are needed to protect it. We require it for life.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
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We had many speakers at the 20th National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek but it was the "Ted Talk" that did what our conferences were designed to do. Twenty years ago our federal and state agencies did not communicate with each other about our environmental issues. Our conferences brought citizens together with the agencies and hoped they would begin discussions. A few years later EPA announced their Memoranda of Understanding allowing but actually mandated agencies to work together. This year the public got to see what that looks like.

First Lori Yearout, epidemiologist with the Oklahoma State Department of Health revealed bad news:  the number of lead poisoned children in state designated Tar Creek zip codes is DOUBLE the percentage of lead poisoned children in the state and even higher in 2015 and 2016. Our kids are still being poisoned. If you have not had your yard tested, do it now, do it for your neighbors' kids and your own. More calls, more funding comes to get more done, call 1-800-522-0206 to have your yard tested. Our kids are lead poisoned TWICE the STATE OF OKLAHOMA's average.

What else can we do? Dr. Emily Moody from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City told us the very best thing we can do is wet mop. That would include wet dusting as well. Fine particles in OUR dust can contain lead and other harmful metals and you don't want to scatter them, you want to capture them so they will not be inhaled or land on items that go into your mouth or your child's. Dr. Moody explained no matter our age, we want to limit our exposure to lead, eat healthy foods and get this, lower our stressors.  

Back to Ted. Ted Schlueter with the Oklahoma Area Indian Health Service revealed startling news. He had tested wells of tribal members and was shocked to find lead in a private water well 3 times higher than the standard acceptable by EPA for municipal wells. He was able to find funding to connect some homes to rural water but he had found another one and knew all of the tribal wells in the northeast Ottawa County should be tested.
He presented tables, Google maps, addresses, amounts of lead in each well and then showed the Google map of the other tribal homes that still needed to be checked. It got quiet and then the magic of pulling us all together as one happened.

First the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality Project Manager spoke up and asked some questions, then Tim Kent with the Quapaw Tribe said a sister county in our Tri-State Mining District had connected ALL private wells in their county to rural water so no one was using a private water well in the Boone aquifer and EPA was able to do that and that there ought to be a way for EPA to do this work for Ottawa County.

Ted had showed the Google map indicating where the household was with the high levels of lead in the well water. LEAD Agency passed on PUR water filters for the homeowner to use in the interim to provide safe drinking water to the household. PUR donated 50 filters this year to help our community.  

Water connects us and our hope is that we protect our people by providing good water, but we have to be watchful to protect this drinking water source as we know there are intrusions of bad water to the Roubidoux that still need to be found and corrected.

We connected back to an earlier session on the expansion of poultry farms in northeast Oklahoma, all of which will be pulling massive amounts of water from the Roubidoux, this precious resource, this lake below this region we are counting on to be there as the water resource for our future.

1994 was a pivotal year. President Clinton signed Executive Order requiring fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies. Our keynote speaker Charles Lee was a key player in the environmental justice movement and we like to believe our conferences have been aimed at making sure environmental justice was included on our agendas.

In a 1994 letter from Don Acherman to EPA on display in my office he documented his concern that 34% of Indian children were found to be lead poisoned by the Indian Clinic in Miami. This letter caused EPA to respond with follow-up testing random kids proving children in our mining towns and Miami were too. EPA responded targeting high access areas first where children played then began yard remediation that is still in effect now for all of Ottawa County to protect children from lead poisoning.  All these years later, IHS got EPA's attention again with shocking numbers that will have to be responded to. Don Acherman and Ted Schlueter worked for the same agency, in the same position doing the same kind of work. Both spoke out seeking to share information to bring awareness to a public health emergency both deserve our gratitude.

If you missed the conference you will be able to see it and Michael Woodruff's skills on LEAD Agency's facebook page.

Respectfully Submitted with hope all are provided Safe Drinking Water,
Rebecca Jim

At a house near Tar Creek last week, I rang the doorbell only once not knowing if anyone would answer, as many people are gone during the day.  I stood and waited when I finally heard the question, who's there? from the other side of the door. I answered with my name only to hear from the inside, "Rebecca Jim, the infamous woman?!"
The woman opened the door and welcomed me inside. We stood and talked nearly an hour and she had read my columns and quoted one of them to me. It is really an honor to have the opportunity to share thoughts, experiences and really to be allowed to know someone new.  

A professor of Geology and her colleague from Emporia State University were bringing two students to recreate a USGS study completed in 2008 by William Andrews. He had been interested in learning more about the historic metal loading of the stream banks along Tar Creek. They hoped to learn what had happened in the ten years since his study was completed and with her permission the academic team would be able to walk to the creek on her property to collect samples and she agreed.

But she wanted to know more about the Man on the Log who had been in a previous column and where his place was and looking out  the window getting my bearings, he was really only a few blocks from her home. I told her she needed to have a log, too. Imagine all the folks along the creek could become Tar Creek Watchers! She like many of us feed the birds, but birds can be an indicator species, like the "canaries in the coal mines" of old. Two recent studies of the birds of Tar Creek will be discussed at this year's conference on the 2nd day and our pollution can harm our birds, come find out how.

The researchers came that day and were working the other side of the creek when the 3 volunteers and I found them. Dr. Schulmeister began immediately teaching about soil and the metals they would find just as my phone rang, there in the wilderness along the creek. It was Sharon Learner who is a journalist researching the connection between exposure to lead and criminal behavior. I stepped away to talk with her, found a big rock and checked for snakes before sitting on it. The soil lesson was continuing, everyone engaged either teaching or learning, just as the frog leaped by 3 feet high and reaching wayout with his frog arms after each jump. She was jumping for her life because a SNAKE was pursuing her aggressively with his head extended a foot off the ground, LIKE A COBRA. I hollered "SNAKE" because the frog was leaping toward the soil lesson. It took two more "SNAKES!" before they heard me and scattered, with allowed the frog to get away and the snake to give up.

Dr. Schulmeister will be speaking at our conference next Tuesday as one of the educators who have been using the Tar Creek Superfund site as her outdoor classroom for years. Sharon Learner will be in the audience and is interested in meeting people who have or have relatives who want to help her better understand the relationship between lead and criminal or aggressive behavior. Ms Learner has met numerous death row inmates who had nothing else in common but the fact they grew up in places near Superfund Sites, like ours that had lead as the "contaminate of concern" EPA had identified for cleanup.

Community Science is a new term, replacing Citizen Science and Luz Guel, the Community Engagement coordinator at  the Mount Sinai Transdisciplinary Center on Early Environmental Exposures in New York City will be addressing us Wednesday right before noon. We are all about collaborating with health professionals who know how to get a message out there so people find it interesting and act on it. This type of help is welcome from all sources.
Each year we wonder what will be on the cover of the Tar Creek Conference Program. This year both the front and the back images are woodcut prints from Dawn Hill's Miami High School art students, Trinity Smith's Stinky Fish and Fish Surviving by Tashauna Miles.

We think of the cover as our Winter Count image, the event each year that marks it in our collective memory of the "thing" that happened that year. We believe these young people nailed it, with the dead fish we saw in Tar Creek last summer and the image on the back: our hope for healthy fish in the future.

You can get your copy at the 20th National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek next week September 25-26 at NEO in the Ballroom. Pick it up, stay and learn, become engaged or enraged, have some time with infamous people, state officials and activists. For more information and a schedule of events check www.leadagency.org.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

I am really proud to be a member of the Waterkeeper Alliance serving as the Tar Creekkeeper for our very own small stream, damaged as she is, she is still ours, running from just inside Kansas until she meets and flows directly into the Neosho River, bringing all her heavy metals, every day.

The Clean Water Act passed in 1972 was made to protect this stream and other flowing waters throughout the country from pollutants that until then had not been regulated. This Act was set to make all our waters cleaner, but with time powers with influence  have whittled away some of the strength of this Act. We all need clean water and we need the folks that know how to fight for it. The Waterkeeper Alliance is one of those forces and they joined with another powerhouse, EarthJustice to speak up in a big way this week AND I and LEAD Agency's Grand Riverkeeper are standing with them for water.

Clean water, we all need it, we all deserve it and boy as the old proverb says, we are going to miss it when the well runs dry. Wells just counties away from us are going dry already and the reason is more wells dug deeper and running full blast are lowering the water levels in the aquifers they pull water from. A dry well is bad news and the end of an era for homeowners who have been pulling from it for generations. What has changed? What is happening? More water is being pulled out by the already numerous large poultry facilities and with the new expanding 100 houses coming in,  our country neighbors in counties nearby are organizing to protect their water. This can be us since 3 facilities with 300,000 chickens have applied for permits from the Department of Agriculture, 3 miles from Miami, OK. So the issue is ours and about to be. We need to learn more about the aquifers below us and the how quickly they can be depleted and how we will deal with that.

These are our issues and we will cover them at the upcoming 20th National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek. Daniel Estrin is the General Counsel for the Waterkeeper Alliance and he will be on deck the second morning of the conference to outline why and how we are buckled up to fight for clean water. This week we joined a lawsuit against those who want to make it easier to pollute without repercussions.

The Clean Water Act has had amendments through the years that have made it weaker and the last administration rebooted it to protect the Waters of the United States, for us, for our use and future use. This created an uproar amongst those who believed water was already being protected TOO much. Many states including ours sued the EPA to basically make it more legal to pollute. EPA, under Scott Pruitt who had been one of the States Attorney General who had sued the EPA himself to wind those regulations back, then sat down with his former AGs and lessened our water's protection, but not enough for them. The legal fight continues. Now, LEAD Agency, the Waterkeeper Alliance and EarthJustice are on EPA's side trying to KEEP Clean Water alive in the courts.

The new weaker rules the States including ours are fighting for will make polluting our water much easier for industry and for agriculture. If you think back to this summer when our Tar Creek turned black, the Clean Water Act mandated attention, it caused every agency federal and state to come investigate and find the source and MAKE it stop. That bad water flowed into a stream bed that was dry at the time, and the mess flowed into another lay of the land that was dry at the time and then entered our Tar Creek. New rules would say that is not polluting. Do you want that? If you are the Man on the Log do you want that? If you are the kids discovering a creek running that close to your house that you could sneak out to swim in it and be back before you were missed. Or what if you saw those fish and went the next day and found only dead ones. Clean Water Act needs to be stronger, not weaker. We all need clean water and we are going to have to fight for it. But boy is it worth fighting for.

A bunch of this story will be discussed at the 20th National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek. We will learn from J-M Farms how shocked they were that they were the source of the bad water that killed fish in Tar Creek. You will learn from those who were charged with the investigation what they discovered and from the Secretary of Agriculture, James Reece who heads the agency with the regulatory authority to make sure cleanup occurred. This will be followed by the efforts and changes that have been made by the company to insure the agency and us that it will not happen again. The public needs to know and we are providing this opportunity for you.

Register early for the conference at www.leadagency.org or call our office 918-542-9399. You won't have to wait in line. You won't want to miss a moment.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted without Distractions ~ Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 

My Cherokee grandmother got an allotment. Her parents did, too. Members of the Cherokee Nation who were born before Oklahoma became a state and were living in their Nation at the magic moment got pieces of the quilt cut from the Cherokee land in Indian Territory and very few of those squares are left intact.
Land that had been owned by all members of the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory was wacked apart with the slivers given to single members to make each one a land owner, a property owner, a privileged citizen, with a pathway to prosperity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectful of Water  ~  Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

Not all teas are to my liking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is right is wrong what was orange turned black.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Black water killed the fish we didn't even know were there. Every agency associated with the protection of water and our environment responded to the call of the dead fish.

Every summer morning by 6:30 a man greets the day, much as Cherokees have since time began, by going to water. His water is Tar Creek. He has created a paradise on his property, mowing and trimming around the trees he and his wife have planted from his back door, all the way to the creek. On the bank he has secured a log with... log-chains so it won't wash away when the gully washers come, as they do. He finds time to sit on that log and reflect on his youth when this spot was his fishing hole, and sometimes swimming hole.

"Sitting on a log" in Cherokee sounds like George Washington. Tsail, a Cherokee man who rebelled against removal to Indian Territory hid with his family in the hills in the old lands. When the negotiator found him and told him if he and his male relatives would give themselves up, other holdouts would be allowed to stay in the homelands. He asked that his name not be remembered, but that moment should be when "sitting on the log" changed lives and saved Cherokee heritage. You might never have heard of Tsail, but if you have Cherokee relatives, you may like me have George Washington grandfathers, great grandfathers and uncles.

This Tar Creek neighbor was the one who noticed the fish that morning. He was shocked, all those little fish were dead along the banks, floating in black water. Just days earlier he and his wife had noticed the fish eggs along the vegetation growing in the water.

J-M Farms will restore the creek to how it was before the discharge was discovered. I wonder what that means. Will they be scrubbing those black rocks? Will they manicure those water plants and remove what discolored them? Will they be repopulating the creek with thousands of little fish?

I like fish and was amazed to see so many mostly 2 inch, some smaller, a few 4 and 5 inches long lying along their piece of paradise, but also at every access point downstream. Some were draped over small rocks, as if taking a nap. Some were in bunches along the bank with raccoon footprints in the mud indicating easy picking for our fish loving mammals. One fisherman told me he had been catching the little guys for bait for his limb lines.

Another resident had told me just a couple of weeks ago about the kids of summer taking their fishing poles to Tar Creek just 1/2 mile from the log secured in paradise.

Like I said earlier, all the agencies that care about water quality and the environment came to investigate this fish-kill. They walked the water back to the source when another agency was called in to find the cause. The responsibility for enforcement changed from water protectors to the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture. They ought to care about good water, too, but more often they are the farmer's best friend, making sure the farmer gets treated with respect and sometimes with more respect than the land or the water that is needed to make land productive.

J-M Farms took responsibility for the discharge explaining in their press release that a broken coupling allowed a collection water transfer pipe to leak into a tributary. I found the tributary and days after the fish kill there was still black water flowing down it to Tar Creek.

I have asked DEQ to find the water samples they took and analyze for health hazards because it is summer and kids are going to the creek with fishing poles and swimming suits. There was silence on the phone when I said that. No one believed anyone was using the creek.  But thanks to our eyes on the prize citizens, we know that had been happening.

EPA has spent some big money getting ready to fix Tar Creek, they have been working up to it for over thirty years. The University of Oklahoma's Commerce passive water  treatment systems have reduced some metals in the creek already.  EPA's plan started at the headwaters of Tar Creek in Kansas and has now crossed into Oklahoma. They are working their way, clearing and removing chat from the creek and along the banks so NONE can enter it again, they are on the way with LOTS to do on the Oklahoma side in the four miles before the major mine water discharges enter on Road 40. The mine water will have to be addressed. The plan is to cleanup all the way to the train trestle at TWIN BRIDGES to improve our Grand Lake.

All that to say, J-M Farms needs to fix their issues, because we have a restoration project that has been in the making for almost the entire lifespan of Superfund and we want it completed, Tar Creek restored and usable. A lot of money will be spent to make this happen, the people deserve to use the creek that runs past park, college campus and neighborhoods.  And those little fishes need a place to thrive and that black water needs not be part of the story.

Grateful for the man on the log

 Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

http://www.joplinglobe.com/news/local_news/oklahoma-agencies-investigating-spill-fish-kill-in-tar-creek/article_5f061166-6b31-5718-a6f5-4d4b4a8f70ba.html
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/oklahoma/articles/2018-06-26/farms-sewage-spill-causes-fish-kill-in-oklahoma-creek
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/this-is-a-tragedy-effluent-spill-from-farm-causes-fish/article_fe539be1-6f2f-5627-97a4-62d1ddca8fe2.html
http://www.miamiok.com/news/20180625/j-m-spill-into-tar-creek-results-in-large-fish-kill---cleanup-underway

People from around the world gathered around the table at LEAD Agency Tuesday. The Tulsa Global Alliance brought 13 people to learn more about alternative fuels, fossil fuels and mining. Every story has a beginning and the story they heard began with our state's history. Tribes from all over the United States were sent to Indian Territory and left while their homelands became new homes for the spreading America.

Ottawa County's tribes received slivers of land, other nations received larger swaths of land. All of our lands were deemed worthless and we were set here to be apart from the rest of the growing country. But times change and what was without worth changed, too.

There were no fences or walls around our territory, we were protected by treaties, written on paper, we found unenforced as what we had became of value to our American neighbors. This is a personal story for me, as all history can become personal.

The lands of the Cherokee Nation were partly wooded hills, but much of it was tall grass prairie, so tall the horse was not seen as a man rode through it. It was perfect for cattle and the Cherokee Nation allowed cattlemen with herds to cross their tribal lands for fees on their way to trains for market. Other non-Indians entered the Cherokee Nation boundaries to perform essential jobs. My dad's father came into the Cherokee Nation as a physician working for the tribe vaccinating tribal citizens north of the river. He met a Cherokee woman and married and was able to gain access to land for cattle on tribal lands. She was his ticket into the tribe and our rich grass lands. A number of years later she passed away, and my grandfather quickly found another Cherokee woman to marry and was able to continue to operate in the Cherokee Nation. She was my grandmother.

Women were desired that way, not to say there was not true love involved in her case or others. Other tribal women were tickets into wealth which lead me to tell the visitors about the Quapaw tribe's relations, the Osage. Some Osage women married non-Indians and were murdered for the wealth made from oil and gas found on their worthless land. Some of those murders were solved by the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and discussed in book circle a few days later.

These visitors drove through our Superfund site. They saw those orange colored water, our mine waste piles and learned about the Quapaw who was the richest woman in the world from the ores beneath her "worthless land." As we passed by the mine waste left on her land, those from Egypt, Tunisia, and the Palestinian Territories gasped as they saw what looked like their desert lands.

Our U.S. Government lost track of her wealth and much held in trust from countless other tribal people. Her family still waits for restitution, for things to be made right. But just like the land and our Tar Creek, we all wait for it all to be made right.

Lead and zinc left towns subject to cave-in. It left children lead poisoned and still being poisoned from that toxic waste. The continued hunt for oil and gas in this state through hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and the wastewater injection wells are causing earthquakes and damages to get the last dregs of fossil fuels before we all have to turn to those alternative energy sources. They had come to America to learn more about alternative fuels and our fossil fuels and mining. What we tried to show them was the other side of extraction, that industry and developers would not.

Extraction brought jobs and for some great wealth, but the remains of wasted land is left for those who follow. And ultimately will cost as much to clean up as was made. Damages done to the environment and to human health are the costs not yet calculated.

A day later 1Million Cups, Miami OK learned about our Door Mat effort. We have funding for 40 door mats for homes, but would like to make sure every home had one. Door mats? They were created to let you walk all over them. And by doing so, remove dirt or what comes with it. Door mats protect human health by being that border crossing from outside to inside. Tracked in dirt gets pulverized and particles get smaller and are more easily inhaled or ingested by us and our children.

That evening I walked around our block to invite all our neighbors to enjoy our first ever fundraiser at our June Garden Party. Walking up our ramp, reflecting on our global visitors'  concern about our dust and anticipating the rest of the Garden Parties every third Thursday through September, as our garden grows so will the parties and the food we offer. On that walk around the block, it was pleasing to see many neighbors already have mats! We hadn't thought to hope that people could buy their own! Or as I suggested at the 1Million Cups, we offer all new neighbors a door mat AND a pie like the ones made specially by Jordan Barlow. Who wouldn't love a pie? and who doesn't need a mat? Think Global, Act Local.

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim
 
 

In our lives there are times when we are exactly where we were meant to be. It happened to me last Friday night when Bobby Kennedy, Jr. told the Waterkeepers assembled at our annual conference about his time. He was 14 fifty years ago and was with his father, Robert F. Kennedy when he died as a result of an assassin's bullet after winning the California presidential primary.

I want to share with you in part what I heard him say. He reflected on a time when he was 11, after his uncle President John F. Kennedy had been killed, and his family went to Europe for a memorial at Normandy in France and traveled on to Poland, a communist country with a total news blackout of their visit. They brought toys to deliver to an orphanage and the government had removed all the children before they arrived. But word of mouth, as they were leaving 250,000 people had gathered to try to see his dad. The countrymen cried as they sang the banned Polish song and literally lifted and carried their car through the streets.

His uncle and his father aspired to protect our national security with a generous hand and the kind face of America. Bobby considered an objective way to measure Kennedy popularity abroad would be to count the number of people and thousands of schools, bridges, hospitals or stadiums in every capitol in the world named after them.

Bobby went on remembering the train ride across the states bringing his dad to Arlington Cemetery, passing two million people who came to stand by the tracks as the train passed, hippies in tye-dye, priests, black militants with their fists raised and poor people. He went on to reflect the change that happened 4 years later, when so many of the white voters cast theirs for George Wallace. He continued that it had occurred to him that every nation has a darker side and a lighter side. His father appealed to the lighter side and hoped people would find the hero inside of us and rise and transcend to the larger ideas of the broader community and propagate democracy.

As a founder and president of the Waterkeeper Alliance he explained that good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy and that we must behave responsibly for the future generations, save our earth's assets and cease our pollution based prosperity. He said our children are going to pay for our joy ride.

He grew up surrounded by extended family and often near water and nature and believes we need that link between wilderness and nature, reflecting most people live in cities and most cities were build near rivers. We need to protect our waterways and our rights to be spiritually renewed out on our rivers.

Let democracy flow again through nature, find spiritual renewal and open the wilderness so people have access. Eliminate the pollution and allow people to catch that fish and experience that excitement.

I'm going to take this little piece of creation, the little stretch of river and I'm going to make sure this is here for our children.

This, he said, is a moral choice. And I am choosing it.

And quite humbly was acknowledged for latching onto that little piece of creation, the little stretch of Tar Creek with one of the few awards the Waterkeeper Alliance presents, the Terry Backer Award. Earl Hatley, our Grand Riverkeeper and I both were recognized at the end of the conference and were really shocked by it. Many of the people in the room had much bigger programs, like the Mobile Baykeeper, and the hundreds of wide and long rivers around the country and actually around the world, including the Lake Victoria Waterkeeper, the largest lake in Africa.

There are a few things I have learned about Bobby Kennedy, Jr. He will speak out and the listeners will be moved by what he says and how he states it. He is blunt about polluters, "fat cats taking a free ride." But speaking is hard for him as he has a rare voice condition called spasmodic dysphonia. If you ever listened to NPR you might have heard Diane Rhem's program, who also has this affect her speech. Bobby mixes spiritual messages in with basic history as he illustrated when making us aware that in 1600 England it was a capital crime to burn coal. But that it has always been illegal to pollute, it is simply immoral.   

As the Waterkeepers retreated to their watershed, I went on to Dallas to the heart of the EPA Region 6 Environmental Justice Forum and was empowered by the people who spoke there about how lonely places in New Mexico can come together to get clean drinkable water for their desert communities and how a community took on an air polluter, proved the air was tainted and got the industry to provide the real time air monitoring. They learned that odor was not just a bad smell, it had a first and last name and a standard that could be measured because people had known a long time that the odor was more than a nuisance. Perhaps we need an air-keeper that might latch onto this little piece of creation and choose it.

Respecting the High Ground ~ Rebecca Jim

The evening began with a welcome from a member of the Tuscarora Indian Nation. He spoke the traditional names of the waters we were surrounded by and he described the miracle of us gathering as we were together and much like the message Richard Zane Smith gave at a Tar Creek Conference years ago to draw our minds together as one.

Right near the edge of the country with the great lakes and the awesome power of Niagara Falls, where the “thunders live,” I got to hear Jill Jedlicka the Buffalo Niagra Waterkeeper speak. She was asked to tell a story that might make us cry, and her story came close to doing it for me. She spoke of Stan Spisiak, a man I had never heard of, but now will never forget, her uncle.

Stan was born in 1916, fifteenth child of sixteen, son of Polish immigrants. He grew up near a small tributary about 10 miles from the mouth of the Buffalo River. As a fisherman he knew that river and saw it change as it was loaded from unregulated sewer systems and industrial waste and deemed dead by the 1960’s.

The speaker remembered hearing stories of the times Stan would come home beat up because he was speaking out for the environment, for the rivers he loved to fish. But in an industrial city, the home of the once powerful Bethlehem Steel Corporation and the thousands it employed, speaking out could be hazardous to your health, as he often found out.

He spoke out about his whole watershed, the Buffalo, Niagara and Lake Erie for decades and made it better, receiving the “Water Conservationist of the Year” award from the National Wildlife Foundation in 1966. It was there that he met Claudia Alta Taylor, known to America as Lady Bird Johnson, a lifelong advocate of beautifying our country’s cities and highways, who was known by her motto, “Where flowers bloom, so does hope.” Stan invited her to tour his watershed and when she came, she brought her husband, Lyndon Johnson, then President of the United States, New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller and others.

During that visit Stan showed the president a bucket of sludge from the Buffalo River and LBJ told him simply, “Don't worry. I'll take care of it.” And he did when two weeks later President Johnson signed an Executive Order banning open-water placement of polluted dredged sediment in Lake Erie, a restriction still enforced today. The Army Corps of Engineers then built Confined Disposal Facilities throughout the Great Lakes to hold polluted sediment dredged from the waters.

One man made a difference by speaking out to a person who had the power to change policies. We have to remember the power each of us hold, to speak out about our watershed and keep saying we want it better. You too could be instrumental in changing our national environmental policy.

Forty-six years ago the Clean Water Act was enacted with goals of eliminating releases of high amounts of toxic substances into water and eliminating additional water pollution. The Clean Water Act, Section 404, gives the Army Corps of Engineers the jurisdiction over discharge of dredged or fill material in the waters of the United States. The Clean Water Act might be used more efficiently if we nudged persons in power to use those powers.

I came to the annual Waterkeeper Alliance Conference in Buffalo, New York and will share information on the federal policy that has controlled the actions on cleanup at the Tar Creek Superfund Site and other superfund sites around the country. I came to find the place that birthed the need for it, Love Canal.

William T. Love came to the Niagara Falls area in the 1890’s with the vision of a huge city powered by hydropower created by the water from a canal he began construction of that would send water through his city. Part of the canal was built, but not the city since locals refused to allow him to divert the water from the rivers. The city of Niagara Falls bought that property in 1920, used it to store chemical waste, sold it to Hooker chemical company which used it until it was full in 1953. It was capped with clay and covered, sold back to the city for $1 and a school and neighborhood of 100 homes built upon it.

Chemicals surfaced, children got sick. And a mother named Lois Gibbs organized neighbors and got national attention which resulted with the creation of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, known as the ‘Superfund’ law. It would collect taxes from gas and chemical corporations to be used directly to clean up any sites similar to the Love Canal.

This worked until Congress failed to re-authorize the “polluter pays fees” in 1995. The Superfund now requires much of our taxes to do her work.

So here at the Waterkeeper Alliance Conference this is a message I will leave. Put the FUND back in Superfund, and tell Congress to make Superfund Great Again.

This place birthed environmental activists who inspired policies we still use today. Being in the presence of over 300 fellow Waterkeepers attending together, with our minds drawn together as one is indescribable.

Respectfully Shuffling  ~ Rebecca Jim
 
"Shuffle Off to Buffalo" is a song written by Al Dubin and Harry Warren

One summer years ago a young woman came as a Quaker Witness for Tar Creek. She was so moved by her experiences here, she returned year after year to help us at our annual conference. I flew out to California to go to her wedding that would be held at Asilomar.

Asilomar's rich history dates back to its origins as a YWCA Leadership Camp built in 1913. Known as Monterey Peninsula's "Refuge by the Sea," the state park is located on 107 acres of state beach and conference grounds, within the quaint and scenic town of Pacific Grove.

What I experienced during that wedding ceremony was profound. I hadn't studied and did not know what would happen there at Asilomar and had not prepared myself. It was gentle. But I learned how loud silence is when a room full of people with connections with the bride and groom joined them in saying nothing for an untimed period, all focusing on the couple and their hopes and wishes, blessings on their lives about to begin together. My head was full and yet we all sat waiting until finally someone stood and expressed their thoughts for them and sat back down, as we waited yet again until the next person was moved to speak for them. This went on in timeless space until no more people spoke then the couple spoke to each other. And it was done.

As Sarah Dessen, author of Just Listen might have said, “Silence was so freaking loud.”

Back before the Bicentennial, while taking classes at NSU in counseling, I remember having awakened one morning suddenly from a deep sleep aghast that I had lost my voice and therefore my career in education, then realized, as a counselor, my role would be more the listener than the speaker and knew I had chosen this occupation well. It was only a dream, I woke to tell the dream.
It's been 3 days without a voice for real now. the old "give it a rest," hasn't worked yet , but there is always tomorrow.
There is a humbleness that settles in when you scramble to find someone, anyone to answer your phone and be you. To speak for you when you are unable. It happened this week and the callers heard me in lots of different ways, as a 5 year old girl and several men of differing ages.

That's what I have been doing since retirement, I have been speaking up for the voiceless. The land and the water impacted by the toxins in the Tar Creek Superfund Site, as well as the children born and yet unborn. Seeking a clean and safe environment.

I am looking always for ways to give youth a voice and to train them to know that what they say is valuable and actually vital.

Audre Lorde had been a prolific writer, who moved me when she said, "I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? She continued with, "I began to ask each time: What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth? Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.

Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you, interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end."
(That's something I would have said!)

And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will lose some friends..., and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”

The slogan mounted on the Homeland Security website encourages us to break our silences. They say, "every day is different than your neighbor’s—filled with the moments that make it uniquely yours. So if you see something you know shouldn't be there—or someone's behavior that doesn't seem quite right—say something. Because only you know what’s supposed to be in your everyday. Informed, alert communities play a critical role in keeping our nation safe. "If You See Something, Say Something®" engages the public in protecting our homeland through awareness–building, partnerships, and other outreach."

Silence is golden. Sometimes not so much. There will be times you need to speak, times you need to speak up and those other times when you realize when rallied together voices are powerful and profoundly beautiful.

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim
 

Geese are monogamous, living in permanent pairs throughout the year. Out of nowhere the proud parents and their goslings began marching across Highway 10 in the fog in front of me. They were at the gawky hairy tall stage still featherless. I stopped just in time to avoid hitting them, pulled to the side of the road to flash my lights to oncoming traffic since one of the goslings had run back off the road.  He was just barely missed by the big double cab truck but his second attempt in the fog, the little guy made it! 

As the Tar Creekkeeper and partly due to LEAD Agency's Grand Lake Mercury Study relationships were built with fishermen and women who eat local fish and love our rivers and especially our Grand Lake. If they see anyone messing with our waters and her water quality, they let us know and quickly.
 
One of these fisherman called about stuff being shoveled into the lake this week. After hearing his description, I called 1-800-522-0206 the DEQ Hotline to make a complaint, not an anonymous complaint but one with my name on it so DEQ will send a letter with the details, what they found and what were the results for the action on the person or company who was found to be responsible.
 
I headed to Grove to "have a gander" at the actions cited in the incidence report my name was on. The Sailboat bridge had been resurfaced with an overlay and the material that had not stuck was left by the side of the roadway. When the car got onto the bridge, Emerson Taylor, University of Arkansas graduate summer interning with LEAD, as a grand example of his generation, lowered his window and began recording the exchange with the men on the bridge while watching shovel after shovel of the substance being flung over the railings.
 
I yelled at them to stop doing it, the rare and absurd sound in my ears, was sort of like "Sa Sa" in Cherokee, the word for goose and if you have ever upset one, you may have heard that sound as they sort of hiss at you in a menacing manner, but the men really YELLED back and flagged us away as they continued their work. We saw the mass of stuff they had before them to remove and went to the bottom of the bridge to the company trucks with flashing lights, but found no supervisors to engage.

According to a post by a local insurance agent the company received complaints the substance sprayed on passing vehicles crossing the bridge during the application. Call 913 402 5326, reference claim # CBLo812 if a check on your paint and windshields reveals epoxy overspray. It feels like a very hard non-sticky tree-sap and won't  wash away, needing specialized detailing to remove it.

What's so bad about shoveling that material into the lake? What is the concern? The fisherman told me that morning that he eats the fish from that spot and that was why he was concerned.

I will know if there were consequences to the company for loading the lake with the residue left from their work on the bridge. You might imagine I am hopeful that the company's "goose is cooked" with some consequence from either the DEQ or the Lake Patrol. Surely we can't all go to the bridge and fling whatevers over without consequence. Wouldn't we need a permit? Did the company have a permit to discharge into the lake?

They were told by DEQ to stop and load everything and haul it away. But the fisherman called back later. They had gotten a wheelbarrow to make it easier to dump instead.

I called DEQ again and the Lake Patrol 918-256-0911. They returned to ask if I was willing to testify about seeing the flingers if their officer didn't get there in time to witness himself. I said of course. Wouldn't you want to have a chance to confront a wrong doer? Well, there is a bit of fear in saying yes. They were really loud YELLERS and they welded a quick shovel. But I said yes and yes again when asked if I could identify them in court.

The gaggle of geese got away, as we would want. And perhaps the company will get away with their lake discharge. But this evening the fisherman's wife told me she had contacted the game warden to be alert to dead birds who may experience consequences from the shoveled material that was flung from the bridge. And in a couple of weeks, I will receive a letter in the mail to find out what came from the complaint.

Miami High School students lined up to watch flashing lights on police cars coming down Central Avenue and behind them a yellow school bus, loaded with students heading to the Special Olympics in Stillwater. The student body was out there waving them on! We have come a long way in acceptance and I think a lot of that comes from good leadership, with a salute to Mrs. Lisa Munson on one of her last days as MHS principal, before all her graduates and herself fling out of here. Job Well Done!

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

There is a photo at my house that came to mind when all the good news came one day this week. It is a picture of Cato, my son’s dad when he was a child and his grandfather, an older Navajo man wearing a beautiful turquoise necklace, the type with lots of big stones. When I first saw that picture over 40 years ago, I asked to know more about it. Two little boys, were standing in front of a Hogan, Cato, wearing a cowboy hat was on a horse while their grandfather Dan Jim stood with them, all looking at the camera.

The photo brought back a memory of the time, when Cato asked his grandfather where he got that necklace. The grandfather had been in the Hogan singing a “give me something song,” he explained, and suddenly some strangers knocked on the door and presented him with the necklace. On hearing this, he was quiet for a while before asking, “Grandfather, could you teach me that song?”

I felt like someone had sung that song for LEAD Agency this week!

Last fall we began to look for the Lead Care II instrument and testing kits we felt would arrive any day. Dr. Robert O. Wright who we know for the MATCH Study is now at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City and had donated it to LEAD Agency so we would be able to assist in helping residents know if they have a current exposure to lead.

The box came this week and the day it arrived, we called the Ottawa County Health Department to tell Keesha Bunch and Amanda Burnett the news and left a message for Dr. Shirley Chesnut at the Northeast Tribal Health System to let her know, too.

The Lead Care II instrument can use 2 drops of blood and in 3 minutes give a result.
It is nice to know, or perhaps not NICE, but important to know, if your test shows you have lead in your blood. That means for the general public, you are currently receiving an exposure to lead, and you can look around your environment, find the source and REMOVE it so you will not be exposed anymore. Knowing allows you to DO something about it, for yourself or for a child of your own.

Lead poisoning can affect the central nervous system, kidneys, and blood-forming organs. Lead exposure is associated with learning and behavior problems and even reduced income in adulthood.

The same day we opened that box, I got a call from Bob Gelso, a Miami High School woodshop instructor. He called to let us know he had made a set of cornhole regulation sized game boards for us to use as a means of entertainment, but also as a way to engage folks and have a chance to discuss the things that matter to us all: clean water, clean air and knowing which and how much FISH to eat.

The other thing that happened that day was also a gift. We really have nothing more important to give than our time and sharing with others what we know. Jim Shine who was one of the many Harvard researchers who spent so much time in Ottawa County during the years of the Children’s Center and our current intern,

Emerson Taylor who is a recent graduate of the University of Arkansas spent some their valuable time working through the process of planning a pilot project we want to do to understand more about what we are tracking in our back or front doors. It starts with the questions, how will we do it? What will be measured? The length of the project and how many units?

Not all news was good that day. I learned early in the morning Albert Kelly had resigned from his position at EPA in charge of Superfund. In his official position, he gave out his cell phone number to the environmental activists he met. I got the nerve and called and sure enough he answered the phone to listen to more perspectives on Tar Creek.
Mr. Kelly had been a banker who got banned from banking. And his friend Scott Pruitt, who seems to be dismantling EPA gave him the job at the agency. Mr. Kelly was receiving a lot of criticism in the media for his past but was working to regain face while head of Superfund, all while improving EPA's reputation in communities that had lost hope. He texted me a message late in the day and I guess it was a give me something comment for Tar Creek:  "would like to be part of the solution" was what he wrote.

Hum a few bars of that song, stop by and lend a hand in the garden as we prepare it for the vegetables  Frisbie’s will donate when the children are ready to plant, drop off some books for the Little Free Library or find one you were dying to read, then share it again.  Your time and effort is more valuable than you know and every time you show up,

I can hear a bit of that song in the wind.

Gratefully Submitted

Lead shot out of a gun can kill. But lead causes another danger. A real danger. It has been linked for decades to criminal behavior in some who have been exposed.

I have been thinking of criminal behavior lately, starting with a call from an investigator in a federal defender's office inquiring about a former student of mine who is on appeal for a capitol murder conviction. I remember him well, even after all these years.

The investigator was working on his appeal, hoping to save him from the death sentence he received to reduce it to life in prison. The investigator has come to Ottawa County several times and tracked down his school records and learned more about the boy's school behavior from interviews.

AND discovered he had grown up near the largest superfund site in the country and one EPA had designated lead as the "contaminate of concern" for our site. The investigator was working on other murder conviction appeals, and had found others had grown up near other superfund sites where lead was their contaminate of concern, too.

So many Ottawa County children were lead poisoned in the mid 1990's EPA began working to reduce those numbers by removing chat piles, remediating yards and playgrounds that were contaminated with lead. They are still spending money on these efforts because the EPA now says there is “no demonstrated safe concentration of lead in blood.”

Lead does most of its damage to the brain by mimicking calcium. Inside the brain, calcium triggers nerve firings, releases neurotransmitters, and activates proteins important for brain development, memory formation, and learning. Lead can seriously and permanently reduce IQ. It can change the way brain cells communicate and grow and can affect the dopamine system which controls the executive functions: judgment, reward and impulse behavior, relating to aggression.

Lead increases the odds that kids will develop ADHD, making it difficult to focus their attention in classes. Some exhibit disruptive behavior, make poor social choices and with these, some may later demonstrate criminal behavior.

This metal causes physical damage to the developing brain that persists into adulthood. It can do a number on our brains. And sometimes those affected do a number on others.

This week, the announcement of the arrest of a suspect in the murders of the 2 girls taken from a Welch residence in 1999 seems to be solved at last. But their last days were spent in the heart of our superfund site, before they were killed and left somewhere not yet found. A few years later only two blocks away Harvard placed the air monitor to collect dust that was loaded with lead and other heavy metals I changed weekly for 61 weeks. It is sobering to think killers had been so close, but cold chilling to know there were young girls hurt and sentenced to die by them.

There are a lot of reasons to prevent lead poisoning, but  protecting  children  from torture is now on my list. I have no way of knowing if any of the 3 people assumed to have committed murder were lead poisoned as children.

But we do know that lead has been linked to criminal behavior in the research and our superfund site is loaded with lead, and there in the middle of it these girls suffered. And it makes me furious this happened.

We know this STUFF we know as chat is loaded with lead is still out there, piled up, blowing in the wind, sold and hauled away for safe uses by anybody wanting a load of it with the money to take to other communities and roadways from here to yonder. 

600 acres of the superfund site has been cleared off and tons of the material separated to either build the newest mountain in Oklahoma or sold for the good of the roads we travel. But there are TONS more and miles of this stuff and our new status on the EPA's latest list of top superfund sites could mean action, like immediately for all the yards in the county. It has only brought funding for more acres, and we are grateful, but anxious, would more describe my feelings, like ONLY THIS MUCH? why not the whole thing, if we are so bad, why can't we get it all done?  When is done happening?

Not another child should be lead poisoned.  As long as that stuff is out there for the taking, the climbing, the sledding, the exploring will continue, and more goes home in the shoes that are worn, even more tracked in from our yards by each member of the family and each of the dogs and cats that come and go during the day, more blown in the wind. Hopefully the dust will not be worn home on the clothes of the folks doing the work on those acres, or operating the sites selling chat, so babies are safe giving  a "daddy's home" hug.

We are dealing with dangerous stuff, stuff that can make some people dangerous criminals and others victims.
My sincerest regrets for the loss of the lives of Ashley Freeman and Lauria Bible who were just kids on the road to the rest of their lives when they were taken.

Respectfully in Sorrow ~ Rebecca Jim

For me, every day is Earth Day, and for LEAD Agency every time the phone rings at our office, we learn another aspect of what that could mean.

As the Tar Creekkeeper, water is life. But lately I have been thinking what on earth we can do about our air.
Folks in Alabama are dealing with the human waste from New York City being hauled there and land filled. They say it "smells like death." Few regulations and cheap land prices and a great need for New York City to find a refuge for their waste came together for their community.

Sometimes communities make choices, industries, sometimes individuals make them.
We make choices in own homes, and may find when installing brand new kitchen cabinets some of  which have been found to emit toxic PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls).

I wasn't the only person thinking about air, there were an abundance of articles on air published this week revealing:
More than 95 per cent of the world’s population are breathing dangerously polluted air, with those in developing countries at considerably greater risk, facing a double whammy of breathing unsafe air both inside the home and out.

Total air pollution was responsible for 6.1 million deaths in 2016, with ambient (outdoor) air pollution being the largest contributor, accounting for 4.1 million deaths, according to a large-scale study by the Health Effects Institute.
 “Air pollution takes a huge personal toll worldwide, making it difficult to breathe for those with respiratory disease, sending the young and old to hospital, missing school and work, and contributing to early death” said Bob O’Keefe, Vice President of HEI.

“Exposure to air pollution, not just through the workplace but through other channels, such as during early childhood or the in utero stage, could have lasting long-term consequences on the labor market productivity — the economic productivity of basically the next generation,” says Rossin-Slater.

The air our mothers breathe is important.
Inhalation of metals may be particularly toxic because metals can be transported directly to the brain by breathing them. LEAD Agency partnered with Harvard with the MATCH Study to understand the impact on our mothers and their babies exposed to metals. Our air monitors in Quapaw, Picher and Miami measured PM 2.5 and PM 10 for 61 weeks. We discovered resuspension of chat, previously deposited on paved and unpaved roads, may be a more important transport mechanism at the Quapaw and Miami sites.

It is important to note the size of any particulates can cause harm, not limited to the type of material it is. A number of studies look at what air pollution means for education with slower cognitive development in school.

When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Air Act of 1970, established air quality standards that are supposed to take into account health and economic assessments of pollutants, business and agriculture were generally opposed to regulations and many continue to be opposed.

In some of the larger cities in the country, the weatherman reports the weather, but also reports on the air quality. Poor air quality would indicate high levels of tiny pollution particles known as PM 2.5 which can be tied to spikes in emergency department visits for heart- and lung-related illnesses and stroke, a California study suggests. Smaller towns like Miami do not have a system to collect and produce alerts when we are having a "bad air day."

Last year, Sefi Roth, assistant professor of environmental economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, in an analysis of relevant studies, summarized some possible explanations for why air pollution may affect academic performance and ultimately “human capital formation,” defined as the skills, knowledge and experience accumulated by an individual.

First, the brain uses a lot of oxygen and may get less of it when a person is breathing in polluted air. Second, air pollution also appears to affect the development of the brain itself in young children, although the full range of impacts are not fully understood. Third, individuals experiencing physical symptoms associated with air pollution, from eye irritation to asthma attacks, may simply not function as well or even miss school altogether. Ultimately, these disruptions could alter a person’s entire career path.

In a separate study by a team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, researchers found that people with lung disease are more likely than those with heart diseases to be aware of the risks they face during poor air quality alerts.

“Targeted public health messages about air quality might raise awareness about alerts and motivate changes in behavior among those at risk during periods of unhealthy air quality,” said Maria Mirabelli of the CDC’s Asthma and Community Health Branch.

This same researcher suggested that we be aware of air quality alerts. I am suggesting we begin testing our air so we might begin giving those alerts and develop strategies to reduce air pollution from all sources in our county.

Earth Day for LEAD Agency will be celebrated in Tulsa at the Guthrie Green on Sunday afternoon while Friday will be spent at the Wyandotte Nation's Environmental Festival. But as you know you can celebrate Earth Day every day. And each of those days are filled with the air we breathe.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim