Cars had triangle shaped windows for the front seat that could be opened separately by the driver or the passenger. The "vent" window could direct cool air in and of course for kids in the back seat, could direct the front seat smokers' cigarette smoke out of the car.

My dad received an award from his employer for driving a million miles without an accident. Those triangular windows resulted in hearing loss in his left ear. My voice range during his audio exam was exactly the range he failed, knowing this as a witness to the exam. But the hearing loss got him what we called his Blues in the Night check from the Veterans Affairs 50 years after he got out of the Army and they caught up with him when he went in for the hearing test. Why did we call it that?

"My Momma done told me...." echoed throughout the camp he was mustering out of. From behind him, he turned to listen to the lone voice belting out the song and was marked deaf for not hearing the commands given in his quick hearing exam. My daddy worked for Shell Pipeline as an electrician and his territory was large. He covered eastern New Mexico, west Texas and the panhandle of the state. He drove for 35 years in company cars before air conditioning was standard and depended on that little vent window to direct air for some comfort and to draw some of his cigarette smoke out of the vehicle.

We believe it was the noise and air pressure that caused his hearing loss. But the Veterans Administration thought it had been caused by the war so he began receiving a small check for his disability each month, until moving to follow employment, the VA lost track of him. All the while his compensation piled up in his account. After we forced him to go for the hearing exam so he could be fitted for hearing aids and give us relief from his debilitating hearing loss in his later years. We got to communicate with him again and he got those lost years of compensation in what we called his "Blues in the Night" check.

Shell Pipeline gave out service awards, longer service the better quality.
Tie tacks were the thing for men and he received several, each in the shape of what else? a shell. Shell's logo is a shell. The original company actually sold sea shells and never forgot their origins.

I got one of the last awards he received. This one hung from a golden bow and could be pinned on a garment. Marked with the date 1963 and his initials, RCF which were also mine and my brother's initials. I have treasured it, but have actually never worn it. Me with a diamond pin attached to a bow? Then through the years I have learned more about fossil fuels and how using these fuels for energy around the world is actually causing the changes we are experiencing with our climate. Our earth's future, and our own is tied up in a bow with fossil fuels. As an environmental activist, could I wear it?

The big oil companies have had a great ride, made a lot of money for their stockholders and put a lot of people to work extracting oil and gas all around the world. Use of fossil fuels throughout the last century and into this one has put a lot of daddies to work, but the damages continue to mount to humans and our environment from our use, our overuse of them.

Only one fossil fuel has a nickname, that being Clean Coal. Sure pick up any size clump of coal with a white glove on and that glove will no longer be white. The coal industry had a great public relations guy to come up with that phrase! Coal is dirty to handle, but also dirty to burn causing green house gases that get trapped in our atmosphere and actually change it, dirty and unsafe for the miners working to extract it from deep in the ground. Many, too many continue to develop a condition that affects their lungs and causes many to die before they reach 50 years of age. If the coal industry worked cleaner, many of their lives could be saved. That is not the end of the dirty deal coal gives us. When it is burned, the smoke is carried dropping the heavy metals embedded in the coal far and near, adding to the loading of mercury in our oceans, lakes and ponds, contaminating our fish.

Fossil fuel has made extracting companies rich, but they are beginning to see the future and the future will be renewable energy sources like wind and sun. There will be other ways to generate energy and these guys will find it including using waves and gravity.

Losses to our health and the environment and lives have occurred under these energy extractors' watch. In the years from 2008 through 2017, 1,566 workers perished trying to extract oil and gas in America, that is about as many U.S. troops died fighting in Afghanistan during that period.

One of the other companies is figuring out how to use algae to make energy. We are making way too much algae, because we are allowing the factory farms to pollute our waters, it is as if they will be partnering with another polluting industry to clean up both messes and continue making money.

Shell is investing in Green Energy, low carbon emissions and looking at the wind.
My dad could have told Shell years ago that wind would be the new power, power to produce energy and powerful enough to reduce hearing for sure.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

My brother and I got to experience The Santa Claus Ranch only once and it was probably when I found out Santa Claus wasn't real and there are many ways to give.

My family left Big Spring, Texas to spend the holidays with relatives the year there was so much snow it seemed like the kind of winter people had in the movies.

We arrived at Uncle Doc and Aunt Sylvia's one mile east of Welch and drove under the gateway with The Santa Claus Ranch emblazoned on it. My Uncle Doc was Dr. J.O. Bradshaw, Sr. and he married his nurse, Sylvia Bradshaw, who was a Bradshaw before she became a Bradshaw, and Sylvia was my mother's sister.

So we were family and as such were put right to work getting ready for the visitors who would arrive each night to visit Santa. It was sort of an assembly line, filling individual paper sacks with an orange or apple, nuts that would have to be shelled and different types of that old fashion hard candy only available during the holidays.  We had no idea what would happen once it got dark. Lights all over the trees, the Live Manger, the crew of full sized metal reindeer with the one in the front decked out with a red light bulb lighting up his nose. They lined up behind the sleigh with the stuffed Santa sitting on the seat of the sleigh in front of the picture window waiting for a child to come sit on his lap. My Uncle Doc had a microphone set up in the living room so he could be Santa's voice for each child when they came to sit and talk with Santa. Can you imagine? mid 1950's how modern!

We had so many people lined up to come, it was like a tourist attraction out there! He had loud speakers and Christmas music playing, but my brother remembered the nuns came one night and actually sang.

But add to this, snow! It was magical and special for us, certainly much different than the kind of Christmas we would have had that year in Texas.

Not 18 months ago, my brother, Clark Frayser came to Miami and he and I went to the Dobson Memorial Center and there in the basement, was the very same Santa's sleigh. No reindeer, but the bright red sleigh. He and I could not resist, we climbed up on the seat, sitting in the same sleigh we had sat in as children and had dear Larry Roberts take our picture. Memories. Larry became part of ours.

I don't remember if "Santa" brought us any gifts that year, but Santa's ranch left memories for us and for many who came. I hope you all find ways to create the memories that will sustain you as our planet warms and fewer and fewer people will experience those deep snow filled holidays.

The following Christmas caused me to tell a lie. Big Spring, Texas is a town divided by "the tracks." We attended the only Catholic Church in town which happened to have been across the tracks. When I went back to Big Spring for my high school reunion, I had to go see that church, it was built out of brown sand stone, still had the beautiful stained glass windows, but out in front was a FOR SALE sign. What is that about? What other bunch of Catholics would want to buy it, that wouldn't already just prefer to continue using the one they had? That church is where we met the family who lived across the tracks and had the little girl who would become another Christmas memory. They were poor and spoke little English, and she and I were brown and immediate friends.

After the holidays we went back to school. I lied when our teacher asked each of us what we got for Christmas. What I would have gotten was a doll I really had wanted, but the family we had visited lived in a home in my town with dirt floors! And that little girl my age got my present, the doll, it was the thing I could do and a lie I will never forget and never felt guilty for telling. I look back and wonder if it really had been a lie, Mrs. Boling asked what I got for Christmas and what I got was to give my gift to someone who would love her more than me.

That lesson comes back this time of year, how gifting can be things, or how it can become the thing that makes life sweeter. My friend Jim Shine sent me a set of poetry books written by Mary Oliver, but the message he inscribed in the New and Selected Poems, Volume One was to refer to page 94 with the question that ended the poem on that page: "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

Do your part if you are using lights, burn LED's and turn them off and lower your thermostat when you go to bed tonight. And plan to wake up in the morning and figure out what you are going to do with your one wild and precious life.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 
 

This morning a flock of geese got mad.

They were disturbed by a pickup truck that approached too quickly. I heard them 1/2 a mile away. Hollering.

They were rerunning the bean field, finding what the combine had left behind. When I arrived at the pond in the field adjacent to them, not surprisingly there was evidence they had been there, too. But not as much evidence as the beavers had left. OH MY GOODNESS.

Beavers had been working hard making tunnels through the dam, enough so, they are bypassing the pipe set in to regulate the pond level. They had built a home over the top of the stand pipe, so much so, there was soil enough on it to grow grass, and strong enough to STAND upon. It is funny to imagine how beavers have the ability to take down real trees using their teeth. It made me feel inadequate with my useless teeth incapable of such effort. But beavers have to develop their craft.

This pond had evidence it is a training camp for young beavers. The pups, if they may be called that had their own smaller version of a sort of demonstration dam, made from smaller parts of trees and branches, partially built, as well as a small wetland still in the development stages. At the other pond, which because of the beaver work there, I have gotten a lake. They have expanded the surface water there rising the water level a couple of feet. It is enough to make one shake one's head. If you are in need of developing a wetland on your property, this team is available to take the challenge.

The Department of Agriculture meeting was held in Oklahoma City in their headquarters near the Capitol on the 11th to decide on the Emergency Rules for Poultry Feeding Operations. That meeting began at 10 o'clock and at 4 minutes till, I got one of the last seats available in the room. Many of you must have submitted your comments making sure our voices were heard and we were heard! The board voted NOT to approve the rules but did vote to continue the suspension of approving any new applications until the end of May 2019. We cannot go to sleep. We must work to get our legislators to make decisions that will be protective of our land, our water and our public health. It will be hard, we have to put our minds together as one and keep pushing.

Our new EPA is also finding ways to protect BIG AG. Comments are due on the 14th on the exemption they are going to give Agriculture on reporting air emissions from animal waste at farms so they never have to report air emissions that are hazardous, like hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, smells you know. This change would include emissions from animal waste that is mixed or commingled with bedding, compost, feed, soil, or any other material typically found with such waste. This means it would NEVER be reported, as if it had ever been measured and reported here at all. This would be a great benefit to our air emitters but also to the new poultry feeding operations.

On the same day the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture Board voted to continue the suspension of approving new poultry feeding operations, the EPA announced  a new definition for "Waters of the United States."  Last summer when J-M Farms had the release that killed the fish we didn't know were in Tar Creek and the wood ducks disappeared, the black water went into a dry weather draw or what could be called a ditch, that then flowed into Tar Creek. Because of the Clean Water Act every agency that dealt with water and fish kills responded as soon as it was reported. The new Clean Water Act would not kick in since the proposed change would limit protections only to wetlands and streams that are “physically and meaningfully connected” to larger “traditional navigable” bodies of water. With the new changes citizens would also lose our right to sue the polluter to protect a waterway. Your comments will be needed soon on this.

We got a reprieve with one issue, only to face a new challenges, right?

Another challenge is BF Goodrich. Since the Department of Agriculture meeting ended so quickly, while in Oklahoma City, I went to the Department of Environmental Quality and requested the documents they had on BF Goodrich. Hundreds of documents have arrived by email. We are reading each, taking notes, and noting questions. Former workers are needed to explain how the plant operated.

There are so many questions and there are folks here that can help make more sense out of it. We want the site cleaned up, let's make sure the investigators know where else to look. We could use your help, call LEAD Agency at 918-542-9399 or come with information or help us read these files and make sense of them.

With all these challenges we have to ask, when are we going to raise our voices like the geese can and let it be known we are mad? Oklahoma City is going to have to hear us say, "We are not going to take it anymore."

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

We should laugh more, reach out and find a way to help someone you might not know, fill your day with learning and putting what you learn into action.

And quickly determine a day is just not long enough. These are my days. Many filled with facts that cannot be changed, no matter how positive a person's attitude may be and how sure the change can occur in this lifetime.

There have been times this year that have found me knocking on the door of strangers and leaving having made a friend. It happened again this week and I wish you this experience and these results. We don't put ourselves out there much anymore, as we hurry too quickly home to our familiar walls and ways.

Big Chicken kept me scrambling and struggling with how on earth to share information and how to challenge others to act on the chance we have to speak up, or write down our thoughts and get them turned in by December 10th. This led me here to share some thoughts and ask you for help. Imagine I am knocking on your door to tell you: We found out 3 weeks ago from the Secretary of Agriculture, James Reese that he would work with his board to establish some Emergency Rules to strengthen the weak rules we have now on where new poultry facilities can be built in relation to neighbors, private or public wells, highways, public schools and city limits. These proposed rules have been released and we need to celebrate the beginning of the process but the rules will not be as protective of our environment, our water and our health as we need them to be. So??

WE TELL THEM right now, do it later and you will forget, since as you know we fill our days to the brim, wedge this moment into your day to send your comment on The Emergency Rule for New or expanding poultry feeding operations and how close they can be to the following:

(1 ) Occupied residences:(A)More than 30,000 birds shall be ¼ mile; and (B)  30,000 or fewer birds shall be 1000 feet.
(C) All distances between occupied residences and poultry feeding operations shall be measured from the closest corner of the walls of the occupied residence to the closest point of the poultry feeding operation, excluding land application sites;
(2)  Public school shall be ½ mile;
(3)  Incorporated city limits shall be ½ mile;
(4)  Public highways shall be 150 feet;
(5)  Property line shall be 150 feet;
(6)  Streams as identified on a current USGS 7.5 minute topographic map shall be 200 feet;
(7)  Private wells not owned or used for the poultry feeding operation shall be 100 feet;
(8)  Public wells shall be 500 feet; and
(9)  The 100-year flood plain as designated by FEMA

Read it all on the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Food website.

Submit comments about the proposed rule until 8:00 a.m. December 10 to andrea.bair@ag.ok.gov.

In your mind imagine your house in the country suddenly with a new neighbor with lots of chickens living in houses that are 600 feet long... buildings as long as 2 football fields, but six of them in a row, each full of as many as 50,000 chickens. Help us out on this. Have an attitude, want your well protected? want the value of your home diminished? How close to the city limits? is one half mile enough? Is 200 feet from a stream going to protect that stream? Show the Department of Agriculture we are not asleep, show your country cousins we stand with them. We SHOULD do this.

December 11 is another BIG day for the Department of Agriculture, decision day on the Emergency Rules and the public can attend that meeting in Oklahoma City. Are you saying back at me, "You SHOULD attend that meeting!" I think we all SHOULD.

But back to what we hope to all be able to do during the holiday season: we should laugh more. Two nights ago I read an email that had come in and as I read it that is exactly what happened. I was laughing out loud and now just thinking about it makes me smile. It was a message from Lauren Pelaia and her 2 friends who are theatrical types in New York City.

They have been studying and learning ALL about Picher, Oklahoma and our issues, this place and they are writing a MUSICAL. Now that is what we need! The serious work of environmental damages and hard times might be hard to rhyme, but boy do we have characters who could be represented in a musical! Musicals are rarely sad and serious through and through. They deal with issues but they SING about them, lots of times ALL TOGETHER.

We could benefit from being together more, imagine that we burst into song and maybe even DANCED! I was laughing because I could not believe they had discovered my weakness, my love for musicals. We have to help these folks tell our stories and we have to hope they will include the Picher Parade and how we moved on over to the Quapaw Parade and then later to the Miami Parade.

I smiled all Saturday, so many people lined up, and SO MANY PEOPLE IN THE PARADES. There has to be a song about them at least there SHOULD be.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Ken Wagner came to Miami OK last February on what would have been my mother's 100th birthday. He was sent by Albert Kelly who was another one of then EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt's senior advisors at EPA headquarters. Ken Wagner has been chosen to be Oklahoma's Secretary of Energy and the Environment come January.
 
When Mr. Wagner came in February LEAD filled the 2 hours he and Erin Chancellor spent with us with people who spoke of the issues citizens face in the Tar Creek Superfund site. As many as we could schedule got to meet him, and in this environmentally challenged county in Oklahoma, won't it be in our best interest to know he knows us, had sat with us and listened to our stories, our points of view, our fears and our hopes for the future.
 
Take some time, write a card to our Ken Wagner. We will stamp your welcome home or congratulation cards to him if you drop them by before mid-January. Won't it be great if he had a stack of them on his desk when he cracked the door open and sat himself down in his Oklahoma City office?
 
We are going to need a friend in state government who has been seen to have the ability to sit and listen. What made me think he did connect with us?  It was after listening to our Ottawa County Health Department nurse and lead prevention specialist and the mother of a lead poisoned 2 year old child with developmental delays who had lost his ability to speak whole words  and is now speaking only the first syllable of the words he used to know.
 
Before Ken Wagner left us he asked to know the name of that 2-year old lead poisoned child he met at the table with his mother. Mr. Wagner may not remember any of the rest of our names, but that child's, but he met us, sat and listened.
 
Elections have consequences and we have got to put our hopes in the hands of the folks with the keys to power, that they will use that power to protect our citizens, our environment and our precious little ones.
 
Now we have to hope that our new Governor will hand pick someone with heart, someone who knows Ottawa County, loved northeast Oklahoma, fishes our rivers and swims in Grand Lake and LIKES US to be head of Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Food.
 
As we all sat together with Secretary Jim Reese, our current head of ODAFF recently at the Afton Senior Citizen Center, lined up on the front row were the Grand Lake Water Protectors and many others who will be affected by the lack of regulations our state has put on the expanding poultry industry.
 
Every person who spoke had the attention of Mr. Reese, who admitted the Department of Ag had been "caught off guard" with over 200 requests for permits for new larger than life barns that flooded the agency over the last 2 years. What we saw was a person in a position listening and himself faced with the fact our state, our people and our water is sitting out here unprotected from this invasion.
 
But for the next month, he has the keys, and as he listened, I had hope he would use what power he has to cease, stall or in some way inhibit the expansion. I have that hope because people came, spoke up, shared their feelings and filled every chair in that facility, and were treated with respect. That is the least we can ever hope for, but the bigger hope is he will take that back and do what he can now in his remaining days. The other hope is the person who fills that seat next might be chosen carefully.
 
I grew up in West Texas, but my dad was from Vinita, had land in Craig County and knew when he retired he would return to live. I remember his 2 brothers taking turns calling him on the single phone in the hallway, telling him to hurry up and move back because all their friends were "dying like flies" and they needed his help attending all the funerals.
 
I am at the same age he was when he got those calls, and it is happening to me now, too, people dying like flies. But my regrets lie more for the fact many of those dying remind me that we must be an affected people, lately I am losing former students and even the children of former students. What affects us? our habits, our choices, but the wider environment we can do little to control, but if it could be making us sick, we must do what we can to make those who could improve it, DO IT.
 
We can learn from these senior officials the art of listening. We can reach out this season, let another person into your circle. Go to parades, breathe cold air deeply, enjoy the life you have, fight for another day even better than this one.
 
LEAD will be entering the parades this year, watch for the Jeep with the kayaks on top and the message: We Want Clean Water! That's what we want for Christmas!
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim
 

You might have met her. If you experienced damages from the 2007 flood in Miami, or if you had lived in Picher and had damages from the tornado that hit almost a year later, you might have had to deal with FEMA. Joan Lewin was here, working with FEMA, helping us get through the disasters that had hit Ottawa County, too quickly.

Last week the news coverage of the Camp Fire that had burned down the town, of Paradise, California, didn't mention Joan Lewin lived there and that disaster had found her this time. She lost her town, her home, but got out with her dog and her son, when many were lost, burnt to death in the fire, a fire so hot, dental records could not be used to identify bodies and cadaver dogs are over stimulated by what they are encountering as they do their gruesome work searching for remains.

Joan Lewin waited 2 days before posting on Facebook she was ready to get to the work she knew how to do, help people in crisis find their new lives.

As we experience Thanksgiving, what can we be thankful for? We need to be thankful that there are Joan Lewins in the world, people who get their breath after tragedy and dive in to find ways to serve others in the ways they know how to do. Keggy Roark did it after the Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City. He knew how to make some of the best barbeque you might ever be lucky enough to consume. He simply closed down all his local interests and took his equipment and started cooking barbeque for the workers there at the site in OKC.

We have much to be thankful for. When we were hurting but also numb from loss, FEMA helped bring us to our new normal by providing the assistance they could. They also helped survivors find a new source of frustration and perhaps an agency to focus it and their anger. Starting over is never easy and  red-tape helped us figure out, starting over would be hard and personally costly. The U.S. government provides assistance but not a full-fledge do over.

Our new normal is now being experienced by thousands of survivors of the largest fires in California history. Joan Lewin’s hometown is gone, a city twice the size of Miami, OK with over 70 dead in the flames or the smoke, and a thousand more still missing. Their FEMA office has the usual service representatives, Social Security, Veterans Affairs, housing, loans, but at the FEMA office for the survivors of the Camp Fire, DNA swabs are being taken to better be able to identify the remains that are otherwise unrecognizable.

During the FEMA sessions we had in Ottawa County in 2007-8, I got to serve as a counselor through Grand Lake Mental Health, walking neighborhoods and listening, offering what listening eases and sharing information, since facts and services can be tangible service, too. During those times, I got to know Joan Lewin.
 
It was later that year, she picked me up in Sacramento, California and we drove to Chico for a Sustainability Conference hosted by California State University, Chico. We were scheduled to speak together for a session entitled, ‘Learning from the Tar Creek Superfund Site: Land Restoration and Community Recovery after Natural and Man-Made Disasters that contaminate the land and water—and how you can help your own community recover."
 
Yes, it was Joan Lewin who helped me understand the other disaster we had and continue to face is the man-made disaster left by mining companies after the lead and zinc played out here leaving us the toxic mess we are enduring.
The Oxford Dictionary has announced TOXIC as their 2018 word of the year, since toxic "seems to reflect a growing sense of how extreme, and at times radioactive, we feel aspects of modern life have become,” Oxford released in a statement recently.

The Tar Creek Superfund site and use of the word toxic perhaps helped propel the word to be chosen, as the choice is made by the number of searches for its meaning on the Oxford website.

Joan drove me through her Paradise, since it was only 12 miles from Chico, our destination. Earlier that same year, there had been fires that burnt the hillsides and were evident as we drove through what remained of the forest that November on the curving roads. I can visualize how driving those roads with thousands of people fleeing from this fire clogged the escape route, seen on the news, lined with the cars that did not make it.

Chico, sitting 12 miles away is now a tent city with thousands of the former residents of Paradise in tents, campers, wondering what on earth is next. Grief would be heavy there, and I am sure the walking counselors have been deployed and hard at work, listening to the horrifying stories of escaping and the fears and sorrow for those who they fear did not.

But what else did Joan post? Of the help they are receiving, the kindnesses that abound.

Soon she will be speaking of the New Normal she and her survivors will now seek, the one we have already found.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

You might not have known this about me, but I am an optimist. It is a hard thing to carry off, optimism in a world full of toxins and their polluters. It is absolutely awesome the power of the people when they band together and raise their voices for the greater good. That is how change happens, that is how the bald eagle is no longer endangered, that is how smog is a thing we don't have to talk about anymore.

There are times when just a few voices can do magic, but to stop the invasion in the county of the mega chicken houses coming to the horizon near you sucking up the water your children could have counted on for their generation, this is not a time to be silent. One set of 6 mega houses will be near what might have used as a huge tourism draw to see the Ribbon Road and can change the esthetics of the Oklahoma they might have wanted to see "where the wind comes sweeping down the plains" when the site and the possible smell hits our tourists, our countless Route 66 bicyclists and European travelers with their convertibles and the packs of brand new motorcycles who pass through here may hurry on by.

Protect what you have while you can. Speak out and loudly, together if you can and it will sound like Ron Stowell's Chorus Class: pure beauty. If you did that as a community and demanded clean air, clean water, you might get them. But I will promise you it is easy to lose when you are already loosing by accepting what you already have. It is amazing what can happen and has been shown to happen when the gears start working here.

How did the Coleman Theater get restored? How did the Quapaw Nation get the first contract to cleanup a superfund site, their own? How did the towns of Picher and Cardin get a federal buy-out? Power to the people. I rest my case. We can win them all. BF Goodrich could be first made safe and then cleaned up, the lead levels in our children can be zero like other communities around the country, the infiltration of mega-poultry houses can be stopped now. We don't have to let corporate goals be empowered by our local or state leaders and your silent acceptance.

The term fence-line neighbors defines a group of your country friends who are calling themselves Grand Lake Water Protectors who will be sitting on the front row at a meeting Monday evening Nov.19 at 6:30 p.m. in Afton at the Senior Citizens' Center in order to ask questions of Jim Reese, with the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry about the mega-chicken house expansion coming to Ottawa County and about to be their fence-line neighbor. They could use your help, attend that meeting and the ones that follow as this group grows their power to protect our future.

Nettie Detherage organized the first meetings, pulling in the Cherokee Nation, the county commissioners and GRDA and now she is bringing us together in Afton for this opportunity to speak with the man who signs the permits for these facilities. There will be more meetings and they will need your support.

A man who identified himself as Peter called last week just as Lois Lively and I were attaching the shower curtain rings onto the banners Academy students had created demanding cleanup of the BF Goodrich site. He asked if he could get copies of all the documents we had concerning BF Goodrich. It was one of those moments you might have had when you actually look at the phone in disbelief that that question could have been asked at a more remarkable moment.

Before answering I asked, "who are you with?" He was the attorney representing both BF Goodrich and Michelin Tire Companies, while we were on the floor attaching messages we very much hoped he would be able to see because he was coming to Miami this week. We practiced putting the banners up on the fence, got photos and saved the banners for reuse.

Wouldn't it have been great if he was coming to let us know those companies had decided to offer our community closure, compensation and a trail to reparations? to listen to the people who were made sick from exposures, those who live over the benzene plume, those who have buried relatives who had worked at the plant and given their lives for the livelihood the work provided their families. He could consider the lost property values and the utter mess that does nothing to inspire the youth of the community who go to school just yards from the abandoned, demolished mess it currently is.

The attorney did not want to consider the "pond" north of the plant where all the liquids from the plant were discharged  or the "dump" because DEQ had closed it years ago with clay and BFG's benzene is simply "mineral spirits." He dismissed every concern any citizen would have listed but apologized for coming a day early because he had forgotten he had to be in court AGAINST OUR FRIENDS representing the companies the following day.
That visit was disappointing. My spirits dampened by corporate America, but as Friedrich Nietzsche said, "Music heals all forms of misery."

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

We might have thought of BF Goodrich as the rich man who built a plant that put your daddies to work and made sure a lot of their children got to get educations so they never had to work a dirty job like they did. That happened, but BFG built other plants just like ours in other places near rivers, made messes that got left behind and eyesored their neighborhoods, too. But the sites are also landmarks like Akron, Ohio where they were forced to remove the upper parts of the iconic smokestacks since the bricks were no longer stable. 

The Toxics Release Inventory had not been invented when our BF Goodrich plant was operating, but the his sister site in Tuscaloosa, Alabama listed #s released into the atmosphere last year, letting us imagine how many tons of emissions belched out of ours all those years of operation. Many families who lived in the neighborhood remember the carbon black if they did laundry and hung it out to dry, or had a car they doted over. But anyone who was in Miami remembered that smell. Where there is smell there are emissions and we must have been recipients of a lot of what came out.

One sister site in Calvert City, Kentucky is a superfund site and the site in California is damaged, too. The site in Thomaston, Georgia had what we have, "liquid" and asbestos and it was deemed a removal only site, which sounds like a quick and easy-fix  for those Contaminants of Concern which are determined to be concentrated and may cause harm to humans if exposed.

Benjamin Franklin Goodrich made it big with rubber and when Akron, Ohio residents raised $13,600 dollars to encourage him to choose their site, he made it the Rubber Capital of the World for a time. He made real money when he made tires that could be inflated with air, air is cheaper than rubber, first for bicycles, then for cars.

The City of Miami supplied the land for our BF Goodrich plant. And the City waits patiently for the land to be returned to it. With renewed ownership the city could pursue cleanup through a Brownfields program EPA offers, a way to make wasted land reusable. But ownership has been hard to come from out of state owners who hold firm to titles. But the guy with the cape in this story is a humble official who works for EPA and has worked in our county years back on the Tar Creek Superfund site. He knows us. He knows we have issues and that this is an environmental justice site, a place where it has been piled higher and deeper on us and our health and wealth has suffered from our exposure and damaged unusable lands.

Manufacturing plants like to be built near rivers, generally so their products can ship easily but I wonder if it might also be easier for discharges to go unnoticed into water. But a much easier way might be to let it seep into the ground, in our case creating a plume of benzene some 8 to 12 feet below the surface under part of the abandoned plant and stretching into the neighborhood receiving some treatment and monitored periodically. At the Goodrich site in Kentucky it was required to pump and treat contaminated groundwater to prevent its discharge to their river, that would be their Tennessee River.

Say lead, think Tar Creek Superfund site and chat piles, but the BF Goodrich plant in Tuscaloosa up until 2010  was admitting they were emitting lead in their air emissions which also included 109,277 pounds of other chemicals according to the Toxics Release Inventory.

We know there are health concerns with our Goodrich site, asbestos and the benzene, but is that all there really is? Has the site really been assessed fully? We want asbestos and benzene removed, the debris cleared off, the deep pits secured. But what about the rest of the site? the oozing discolored water, the dumps many workers say are north of the site, and off site closer to the river, our Neosho.

If our caped EPA man is coming he will need to convince our PRP's, our real Potentially Responsible Parties to come and do what is right, to enter into an agreement for clean up for that piece of land and return it repaired to the city who gave it 75 years ago. That would be one of the honorable things that could be done to help this community end this relationship on the good faith it began.

In a 2016 Joplin Globe story the Dobson Memorial Center hosted a get-together for BF Goodrich former workers 30 years since the plant closed, there is a photo of 3 former workers inside the fence with one holding a brick. We know you served your families well, dear former workers, don't cross those fences and take souvenirs anymore, the gates are posted with warnings about the asbestos, not to enter without a respirator. Let's let the man with our future in his hands take it from here. Be ready to show him where the dumps are, let me know if you are willing.

Miami Academy students and their faculty are broadcasting our hope, "Get IT Done, ASAP" with banners, letters and much more will follow.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

My son drove me and Martin Lively to Bonne Terre, Missouri to see the lead mine which is open for tourists and we got to be them one recent afternoon. I rode in the back seat reading Union Busting in the Tri-State, The Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri Metal Workers’ Strike of 1935, by George G. Suggs, Jr., a book my son had bought for 10 cents at a book sale in the library in the town Will Rogers was born near.

Reading the book got me in the mood for the venture to Bonne Terre and provided appropriate questions to ask upon arrival about the history of the mine and their experience as a superfund site. The guide denied any need for a strike at their mine, as the miners were paid living wages. Garrett Couch, a resident of Bonne Terre had told me about the mine last summer and how perplexed he was that “buy-out” was never an option for their city built on top of their mine, with much of the city undermined as Picher and Cardin had been.

As we entered we saw what our miners might have seen when they arrived to work. We experienced the wonder of the space, the moisture of a deep lead mine whose upper level is used for tours  while lower levels are flooded with clear water used by scuba divers. Even Jacques Cousteau spent 5 days there exploring. Lead was found not too far below the surface in the town, but several things were different than the mining in our Tri-State District. In Bonne Terre, had a fellow running the mine, who wanted to live there. What we saw beneath the surface were the random pillars in the mined caverns, but they were in their traditional shapes, not carved and chiseled to create subsidence risk. We also learned the wages provided a living for the miners, well enough they were able to purchase livable homes in their town just above the lead mine they hollowed out beneath.

At this mine, they walked in and they walked out to their main street. But it was still a lead mine and much like us, became a superfund site. Their home's yards were contaminated with lead and remediated like many of ours have been and still need to be. But their town is undermined, a town of 7,000 people. Buyout didn't come up as an option for them because no study was done to predict the subsidence risk, so cleanup happened and the chat they had in yards and playgrounds became a huge mound right in town that grass doesn't thrive on, but a cover of rocks, clay and some soil cover it all. It is a chat pile you cannot miss made of the waste from their mine.

My face felt wet like a mist that forms slowly on a windshield. The miners would have had hard hats and would not have felt the drips coming from the roof of the mine that we felt hit our uncovered heads suddenly as the rain water filtered through that stone ceiling above us.

As we walked through the man-made caverns their work was evident everywhere, shovels left leaning here and there. But up high in the rooms scaffolding was left strapped near the roof and guy wires pounded to the pillars for miners to work. They would have heard the sound of the attack made by man to the earth, the very structure of the earth beneath their homes.

We always heard of the random pillar technique used in the Tri-state district mining field. But at Bonne Terre, we saw the pillars are big like legs of monster elephants, but they were much closer together than I imagined, as if they cared about the land above their heads, or the company cared about the men's lives below. We felt small in those rooms we wandered through and felt sensations of true awe to see the earth's ribs showing all around us. Local mining lore tells when a new “room” was blasted open and light hit it, the newly exposed faces of the minerals and metals shone like a fairyland. Our guide had heard about the Tri-State District and Picher’s mines and the unique specimens of metals and minerals which have ended up on display in museums around the country.

Honorable hard working men spent their youth and their health in those mines and in our local mines.  When our mines played out, many moved on to factory labor with the BF Goodrich Tire plant in Miami. They labored there and were followed by their sons who carried on that tradition just as sons had followed fathers to the mines. Today many may live in the neighborhood near the abandoned plant and see it in ruins and live with fear of the benzene that lies beneath and the asbestos that has been left behind in the deep and in the power house might still find ways to harm their health.

Bonne Terre is proof a superfund site could be cleaned up. Ours will take longer because of its size. 
BF Goodrich isn’t a superfund site but it's a mess that needs a cleanup that is long overdue. Say it like you mean it, make it Bonne Terre, Good soil.

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