Since I became LEAD Agency's Tar Creekkeeper, recognized by the Waterkeeper Alliance for being her best advocate, I have struggled to get my vessel from one place to the next. Hiking it up and onto my Jeep since you might not have noticed, my height has made this a challenge, until yesterday.

There in my barn are the last remaining square bales from hay we baled back after the 2007 ice storm. They have lost their prime and have dried out to be so light as to allow the smallest of people to lift them with one hand. And as such are the perfect step stool to use to stand upon to lift that kayak up and on for traveling.

People don't value square bales like they used to. Boys earned their first real money during summers of the past by working the hay fields, lifting those fresh, heavy bales up and onto a truck. They got stronger by doing it and used it as prep for the fall's football season. Technology has changed and tractors lift and carry those bales that teams of football players would have difficulty getting huddled around to move.

But the remnants have become my new method of mounting kayaks to service.

This week these also are assisting in gathering samples for the scientific research Wellesley College is conducting here in the Tar Creek Superfund site and where her contaminants come to reside. The value to us all is that others coming with questions may provide answers we had not known to ask.

Dan Brabander has a long history at this site, having accompanied teams of researchers in the 2000’s who looked both at human health but also the substances lying in our environment that we know impact our health. He, as others who have worked here, we have learned, come to never forget us. You, by the way, in the amazing way you are you, have been part of the reason, too. When a community is open to meeting strangers and providing information, greetings on the sidewalk, casual conversations at a café. You are remembered. And our site gnaws at them, too. Respecting us impounds their need to come back to wrestle with their universities, colleges, foundations to fund work that can ease our load of toxins and help us have an environment that seasons bring joys to enjoy.

So this week, Dan has brought his team of female students: Iris Cessna, Alice Dricker, and Leslie Monzon and a former student, Claire Hayhow, who took her own vacation time from a job at the Silent Spring Foundation with actually another former researcher at our site. They are investigating for us the things that are required for life on this planet. Air, water and soil. They are exploring how we measure what and how much and how big particulates are that hang in the air we breathe. Samples are being taken at wetlands near chat piles, both of the plants that are thriving in them, but the sediment beneath and the water they release into our creeks. What about the orange staining on the trees we are now so used to seeing we don’t even see it anymore? They are XRF-ing it in the field checking for the levels of metals that reside ON our trees.

A fleet of vessels join us this morning as we lift off at Riverview Park with the Grand Riverkeeper boat, the Tar Creekkeeper kayaks, the 3-woman canoe, with Paige Hankins at the helm took off to take a core sample of the channel bar where Tar Creek meets the Neosho. Dan was with other researchers in those early years of this century and took a similar core there and brought it back to our other LEAD Agency office and laid it out on the floor of that building. It looked like a tiger-tail, with orange and black stripes, solid and tube like. And we are off to collect its sister this morning. With the cool morning, the rare coolness this morning, we hope to continue down to Twin Bridges to find the next one where the Neosho meets the Spring. I have heard it called almost a dike that is forming that may be helping to flood us in those high rain events. If we find it and can core it, Dan and his team can tell us what it consists of, and perhaps much more.

We are launching and would love for you to join us in future launches as we explore and try to better understand what lies beneath us, what we float upon, what our soils hold and what we are breathing.

In the meantime, be kind to strangers, they come back to find the answers to what harms us.

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

It has begun. A real summer. Like the ones we remember, those hot and drier days that barely cool even deep in the night. These are the days we get through once we get the rhythm going. Starting early, drinking much more WATER and seeking every bit of shade. Our cars dive into patches of shade even if we know the shade will move during the day. We discover the cooling value of trees again and vow to plant more when the ground is not hard as concrete as it is now.

We watch the weather reports for the relative humidity because it is how hot we know it will feel when we are out in it, while always listening for the words announcing the dreaded microcystin or commonly known as blue green algae (BGA) with its distinct color and texture.

It was detected July 6 on Grand Lake in the Ketchum cove.  The BGA bloom could be seen extending from near the Hammerhead Marina boat ramp eastward toward Colony Cove according to GRDA. I wonder if it might have also been seen during our 4th holiday but the announcement saved for day after reporting to SAVE the lake tourism from the mass exodus the lake experienced when it occurred right before a previous July 4th weekend. THAT notice was handled by the state health department because is it a health emergency requiring immediate action. BUT all things can become political?

Yes, the responsibility of both detecting and making the public announcements were removed from the health department. But if you search those words on the Oklahoma Department of Health site you will find a great deal of information on health and environmental effects and impacts. You just might not find it in time. The state of Oklahoma blew its responsibility to protect us.

Pay attention this substance has color that grabs you. It is mind-blowing color and a texture you must not engage, don't drive a boat through it, even the spray is dangerous when air borne and inhaled. Your Senator Inhofe dove himself into it a few years ago and caused a holiday shut down and the state of Oklahoma figured out how to keep their lakes open for business in case it happened again. And it has. Maybe that is part of the reason he wants the lake deeper? Thinking delusion is the solution?

The other thing that has happened this week all over the United States, carried out by the Waterkeeper Alliance was the largest most extensive PFAS monitoring study ever conducted in this country to analyze samples taken simultaneously in surface waters. LEAD Agency's  Grand Riverkeeper, Martin Lively and the Tar Creekkeeper, Rebecca Jim, both walked and boated to collect their samples for the study. So what is PFAS and why would we want to know if it can be detected in our waterbodies?

We know about bacteria and even what color it can be, but PFAS Per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent organic contaminants that are pervasive in our lives and end up in water supplies in the US. They are mobile and make their way to drinking water resources, our rivers and lakes.

This stuff is everywhere. You feel them every time you handle a receipt from a cash purchase, and those grease-resistant papers, fast food containers/wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, pizza boxes, and candy wrappers are coated with PFAS.

The complex chemistry used in producing these compounds makes detecting them difficult, and parceling out this and that to see what health impacts they are producing in us is still a developing story. But they are persistent and they will be with us and in us. What Waterkeepers are going to provide is information to our watersheds that, "we too are at risk" the PFAS are here, or wouldn't it be a gift to find they are not here?

This area, our people have enough KNOWN contaminants to deal with, we don't need more. What can you do to reduce your exposures in one of the largest superfund sites in the country?

Make sure you have had your yard tested now by DEQ for lead, easy with a phone call to 800-522-0206. Get your children 6 years old and younger tested for lead poisoning. Wet dust inside your home. Give the pregnant women a break and vacuum for them. Check the fish consumption guides for the number of local fish you can eat a month due to lead and mercury. Gather blackberries along somebody else's creek not our Tar Creek. Keep your kids at the splash pad and the big pool at Riverview and out of Tar Creek for yet another summer.

Lots of don'ts. Do honor water as life, use it to keep you cool and hydrated. Find the shade and share what you can.

Respectfully submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 

As an environmental activist, my life has focus on air, water and soil. Each are gifts from the Creator. All elements we need for survival. To these I add the element of work for, with it we are connected to these, often immersed, sometimes impacted in ways we learn to live with, and for some our lives shortened because of our relationship.

When I wake up in the morning, hearing the birds, feeling a gentle breeze, walking out in the yard, knowing the soil beneath my feet has never been plowed, mined or in some way disturbed, no chemicals added or lying in a perched aquifer below lingering for decades. I take a breath, deeply understanding in what I inhale has no heavy metals, no styrene, no excessive molds, smelling only the fragrances of the wildflowers currently in bloom or on these warm days the delight of the pines reminding me of summers in the Black Hills or Rocky Mountains.

These privileges experienced every single day of my life get me up and put me in a good way to head to work to fight to make a wounded place and her people get just one morning wake up knowing their lives might also be free of man-made harms.

As Maryann Hurtt would say in her poem The Tar Creek Monster, "I didn't always look this way." My life's work, first as Indian Counselor for the Miami secondary schools and since then as executive director for the only non-profit organization in northeast Oklahoma dealing with environmental issues you may have seen me age before your eyes.

It has all been honorable work. Knowing we and the many others and the agencies who stepped in to address childhood lead poisoning, we have collectively reduced the number of children who are poisoned in their very own yards, school playgrounds and parks because we paid attention and pushed as a crowd for it.

Now, I am calling more of you back into play and asking you to want a different morning for them and yourselves. I want you to know what it is like to breath clean air, have safe soils in your yards and have work that is safe. And water running down Tar Creek safe enough you will encourage your kids to join you wadding in it these hot summer days.

No, you probably didn't wake up this morning thinking this was the day you would become an environmental activist, but you could give it a try.

You can dangle your feet in it by adding your name on the WE HAVE FLOODED ENOUGH WE WON'T TAKE IT ANYMORE signs you will see around town (if you haven't already!); you can drop by the LEAD Agency office and come in, make some buttons to wear DON'T FLOOD US; you can sign a letter asking federal agencies to get their act together and work for US (we can provide the letter). What else? If you like being outside, join a Clean up on Tar Creek or with a fellow activist at Riverview Park.

We are developing a STREAM TEAM, join it and we will be taking Tar Creek's "temperature" once a month. Be a Lay-Health Advisor, teaching your friends how to protect their children from lead poisoning. What about using your own skills to help us develop these materials with these messages. We need scientists, biologists and map makers, but also artists, poets, musicians to make all this hard, scary stuff ease into our lives a bit more gently.

You can be an environmental activist right there in your own home. You can call DEQ and get your yard tested for lead for free and made right if it needs it for free, then you can wake up like me knowing that part that place is safe. Maybe you remember KINGS X from your childhood. Your yard can be it. And you can make sure of it. Start small, go full blast. Give it a try, this place needs a whole bunch of us doing this work if we want to make sure the work gets done.

Keep your eyes open, notice your surroundings. Observe differences. Memorize the Hotline for DEQ 800-522-0206. The cool part of that is you can do it anonymously. BUT if you want to know what you saw, what happened to the who that was responsible, you can give your name and address and you will get a letter telling you.

Let's get this collective goal. It is not wrong to want what I have been waking up to all these years. Clean air, soil and water. I am privileged by where I live and to have the honor to work in a place with people who deserve a clean environment.

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

There are take aways.
There are impressions.
There are moments.
There was silence.
The anticipated rage wasn't there.
The implication is then neither was hope.
The fight has almost been whipped out of the public.
The belief in right over wrong didn't come to that meeting.
But it must be found.  Defeat is not an option.
Miami is in the fight of its life.
And everyone must choose a side and become active participants in this fight.
There are wrongs and absolutely every single person has been wronged by the dam caused flooding that occurs here even if not a drop of water found its way into your house or business.
The floods here have changed this community into a cowed and beat set of victims.
Not only does the town flood, but it gets Toxic Flooded when our superfund named creek does part of the flooding.
And then there is BF Goodrich and that other problem of having a reputation of sometimes just being down right stinky.

This is a public that feels defeated and is just riding this all out in hopes it will just fix itself.
The belief of being a winner, and having a happy, safe, dry place to raise kids has diminished.
Public pride is at its lowest.

And I saw that, no, actually I heard it. I heard it with the absence of rage for the most part that occurred at the Town Hall on flooding that Friday night.

The anticipated flood of people to standup and queue for the public participation segment and the rules to regulate the rowdy crowd were over-kill because the silence was almost deafening and the long pregnant pauses between those who did stand to speak an opinion or to ask a question I am sure surprised those on the stage. Several mustered themselves to the edge of the stage and spoke but the word that became the moment that rings in my head and will not stop is minor. The woman who passionately stated her flood was not MINOR and ended stating a determination to be out there in front with the team fighting.

Representatives of the tribes most impacted by the flooding sat near the front of the audience with a pointed question and comment from the most downstream tribe.

Not present with us was the Senior Australian of the year, Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, who has said of her people "we are river people." Aren't we river people too? My people today she explained recognize and experience in quietness the great Life-Giving Spirit, God’s presence.

She explained that her ancestors understood their environment and use silence to become replenished which then brings them to be resilient. The silence you may have been exhibiting has prepared you to be able to take on what comes next. You are ready. We all are.

Also sitting at the back of the Coleman was the vice-president of LEAD Agency, Grace Goodeagle, our own elder stateswoman and former Chairwoman of the Quapaw Tribe, knowing deeply the connection we each feel to our environment and how when it is harmed, we are all harmed.

Dam caused flooding. These words proved what that crowd knew to be happening but the repetition of that phrase and the mantra that became, persists in my mind.

It ought to become a song and our message blaring on the radio as the city buckles into the fight for its life.

The life guards came to that meeting. Almost legendary Larry Bork actually stood before the public and clearly told us all who was to blame. We were right. We have been right all along. But right can't win by itself. Right needs a good lawyer and Miami and the 456 plaintiffs have a good one. Jan. 2022 D.C. Circuit’s remand stating, “…the evidence that Pensacola Dam’s operation has caused the flooding in the City is powerful.” This definitely demonstrates even the courts know right from wrong.
 
Get on board. Clear your throat. Write those songs. Get on the same page. There is a fight and you must win. You have been right all along to feel rage. We are all on the same page. Page and rage do rhyme.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

The book I hadn't written had a chapter that ended only yesterday. Themed as a love story, compiled by the chapters of couples who lived by and with Tar Creek running through their lives. The titles of each chapter bring back to me the lives of people who allowed me to understand the deep and lasting loves for each other that intimately in some way tied their lives to what we have come to know as Tar Creek or her superfund site.

What day was it, when I first met Wanda Couch?

There was a need to put aside fears of inadequacy and walk up to the audacious set of double doors and knock. Having no answer, I knocked a number of times but did not pound before I heard off in the distance the padding of feet on a hard smooth surface. As the footsteps got closer to the door, a woman's voice asked who was there. I replied with my name. A woman repeated my name, adding only, "the infamous woman."

She opened the door and it was like meeting a person I had longed to know but never had.

I explained to her what had brought me to her door. William Andrews who had been working with USGS in the 1990's had done some testing in Tar Creek very close to her current property line and students from Emporia State University wanted to do a follow-up study at that same site and they were requesting permission and I was there asking Wanda for those students and she said yes.
And today while at the Farmer's Market, another friend called to give me the news that she had passed away the day before. It was like the lights went out all over town. Surely, you all felt it, a light with such passion and love of life, when it is relinquished we will find the world is truly different.

We had a poster on our table entitled: We flooded enough, we won't take it anymore. The page was not fully filled out leaving room for yet more signatures when moments after that phone call, a pair of women stopped to read it and paused when reading Wanda's name and perhaps cautiously pointed out that she had died only the day before, to inform me if I hadn't known. They joined in signing and their names and all the others we have gathered over the last 2 years will be on display, you can bet at the Town Hall.

Wanda named me the "Infamous Woman" never knowing that the title would end up being woven into a song sung off-Broadway by the young playwright and song writers who came to meet her and enjoy the exuberant joy she shared with them.

To me she was the epitome of cool. And what I was later allowed to know was how long and how deeply she was loved, by her daughters and by her husband Jim who had built her a palace over looking that free flowing stream.

The 24th annual Tar Creek Conference will be held this year in October. The first one that was held brought speakers from around the country so we deemed it a National Conference and that has been its designation all these years. One of the speakers who was invited came from the Harvard School of Public Health and we anticipated his topic would be lead poisoning and the long term effects both to children and to the adults they grow up to be. But that is not what he talked about. He was looking at new research that was being conducted about the relationship of heavy metals, like the ones we have in abundance here in the Tar Creek Superfund Site: lead, manganese, iron and their relationship with conditions that manifest in the older adults, in particular, Parkinson's disease, which can also be hereditary.

This evening, with the news of Wanda Couch's death, I longed to find the long lost notes from Dr. Robert Wright's presentation, there at the NEO auditorium, explaining as a researcher the cold facts of the progression of that disease and feeling he was totally missing the boat with us and OUR people. Parkinson's? Who gets that here?

We left it on the list when LEAD Agency conducted a health survey with 587 households in Miami and the mining towns north of Miami in Ottawa County. We didn't expect to find Parkinson's. But we did.

There are serious issues that we cannot ignore. What lies in our dust, what flows down our creek, what floods our yards, fields and homes is not only water, but contains metals we need to pay attention to.

Though these chapters are not yet put to paper I hope they will come to inspire us to seek and not settle for a lesser, perhaps easier life, but to follow those true loves and show the world these relationships are real and inspire future generations to keep looking for real love as it can exist, I have had the pleasure to know this to be true.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 
 
 

The ground is saturated and the gardens lay waiting to dry out and be what they were planned to be.
Maybe we all hope to be what we were planned to be. What is that? I wasn’t ever meant to be a Boss or run a non-profit.

I wanted to be an artist. So what makes us change our path? And stay on that path for the decades we tread? I learned that listening was a gift so counseling came easy and became my life's first career. Speaking up and out was hard but necessary, for wrongs cannot be addressed without acknowledgement and this community, this corner of northeast Oklahoma had plenty of wrongs shout-worthy. Which is how LEAD Agency came to exist.

And that is why a post on a Facebook announcing a Town Hall got my attention this week.

We all got invited to the one the City officials are hosting on June 10 for those interested in the flooding issues in and round the City of Miami. Town Halls are the way people get to meet people in power and share ideas and voice concerns and ask the questions that lay with us. This is the opportunity marked on my calendar.

For nearly 2 decades the City has been in a fight of its life. It isn't cheap to win. It takes getting the legal team and keeping them for the long haul. NO MATTER WHAT. It means paying the big bucks to have the scientists needed to muscle through the technical material presented over the last few years during the relicensing procedure and be able to dispute their work. The City got both legal and technical experts to fight for Miami and it cost money. The way I see it, pay up or fail. And they have done it. City council meetings followed by the next, have requests for payment amounts that must be scary for a council member to see. The City gets this chance. That's it.

And at the Town Hall meeting we will get to meet their lawyers and the scientists and hear what has happened, what they have learned and ask questions. That's how a Town Hall works. They are there for us. It is our turn. 

I am excited the City has called for one and hope this will be the first of many to come.

This week the Department of Environmental Quality announced they are going to begin the process to remediate the benzene on the south side of the former BF Goodrich plant. I called both the DEQ and the lawyers who represent Michelin’s interests asking for a Town Hall to alert and educate us all on the process that will be used here. People should have the right to know what is happening and how their safety is being protected during the process, more so than just in a press release.

The procedure they will be using has a name and an abbreviation: multi-phase extraction/air sparging MPE/AS remediation system. Through the years at our annual Tar Creek Conferences BF Goodrich has been on our agenda and this system was discussed as a method that was being considered and now it seems it has been chosen.  

"MPE involves the pumping, extraction, and treatment of both ground water and subsurface soil vapor which contain mineral spirits and benzene.  Air sparging, which is the injection of air, will provide oxygen to the subsurface to promote the removal of mineral spirits and benzene and enhance biodegradation of the ground water plume."

I will be calling the City to ask if they might put in a word to DEQ about their hosting a Town Hall on air sparging for us. A citizen who is informed can begin to deal with the uncertainties. What could be more unsettling than knowing there is benzene beneath the ground? Maybe the uncertainty of the safety of removing it.

As May ends with these colder nights, the heaters in our homes have been kicking on. For me those sounds are the sound of the Blackberry Winter. Coming just as the blackberry vines are loaded with blossoms, cold wet windy weather can knock some of the blossoms off so the vines aren't overloaded. Until the Town Hall on June 10, the ground will be drying out, new beds constructed, raised beds filled and planted and my thoughts go to body armor and where 18 year olds go to buy it and why on earth they would need it.

Growing up in Texas, Uvalde was never a town I visited or one our local high school played against in football. But it’s brown skinned kids are part of your visual memory now. Body Armor. Now that is a thing Congress could settle in on isn’t it? What law abiding citizen needs body armor? Why is it even for sale?

Last days of school have been the memories we all hold dear. Seeing the people in your classes for the last time. Here is hoping there will be a lot of Town Halls this summer about this issue in our country.
 
 

Think about the art generated with Tar Creek over the last decades.

 You will find her in plays, musicals, songs, poetry, essays, stories and then we leap to photography, still, drone, movies move on to 2 dimensional and you will find at the LEAD Agency a covey of fish. Thousands of “Tar Creek Fish” fill boxes at our office, all created by our children, using their imagination to depict a Tar Creek fish, when for decades there have been none to pose, and sharing their hopes for what a Tar Creek fish with clean healthy water might then look like. Each with a name of the artist who is probably a neighbor of yours, if not one of your very own creations.

Art is in our lives, we are surrounded by the “made” art and what grows simply right outside your door. The trees, the blades of grass, the murals our downtown dons, and on the oddly stained misplaced color on the bridges along our creek. Tar Creek quickly put her “mark” on those newly constructed bridges, so you might not forget that as her waters may now LOOK better thanks for the most part of the massive amounts of the iron pulled out by the passive water treatment systems that our friend Bob Nairn has constructed in Commerce, our water flowing through Miami is still dangerously loaded with the remaining metals you will not find discoloring her. We learned from Dr. Nick Shepherd’s work: what you don’t see as our Tar Creek looks better is deceptive because the cadmium hides and there is a lot of it  flowing through here, fooling our children into believing it is high time to swim in THEIR CREEK.

So that brings us to the big ART happening here, it is in the art of deep thinking, those who are doing the scientific research, the heavy lifting, learning the what's and when's and what happens ifs. There is an art in it, surely. People are so drawn to do it here. We attract sort of the those who can’t do art, can in fact help us in that other way, they can look for the fix we need and exactly how to make it happen.

How we got this way, how the metals mix and how they end up in those blades of grass and in the blackberries growing along the banks, and way into our flooded neighborhoods and her expanding floodplain. Why wouldn’t we want to know this? Not only to better define our own healthy boundaries, but also to advocate for our own selves for the RIGHT to clean water and a healthy eco-system.

2 weeks ago I saw our Tar Creek’s mark, her colors unfolded on a once white sheet in the Gund Hall on the Harvard College campus. For all the world to see, it was like the stark reality of her “slip” showing in public actually jarred me. Her colors hung there like the Shroud of Turin. But there it hung and with it the art of discovering the POWER of seeing it revealed to a much wider audience.

That brings us to Magic.  Magic City (the book store in Tulsa). An evening discussion with myself, a writer, a filmmaker and a researcher. Almost like one of those jokes about the 3 who go into a bar, right? But that evening was a discussion of the integration of these expressions and how by hitting all of the senses on Tar Creek, might be the way to integrate and move us to solutions.

That room was filled with artists of all sorts. None more special than one of my very own artist brothers, Tim Frayser, a pod-caster, science-fiction writer and cartoonist, who after retirement finds being the conductor for the train at the Tulsa Zoo a part-time of a life-time. The Tulsa Artist Fellowship sponsored event featured Kathryn Savage and her new book Groundglass. She graciously invited the mixed trio to share the space with her. The researcher Laurel C. Smith an associate professor of geography has found the funding and the graduate students to assist collecting oral histories from you and your community members, while Loren Waters blew us away with her modesty as her film mastery became clear in the one minute wow we viewed.

That old saying, 'It takes a village?' I really think for us ART is the track that will bring us together and help us settle up with science and using both sides of our collective brains rearrange those letters to form a TAR Creek we can share safely once again.

Respectfully Submitted

~ Rebecca Jim

Several years ago when my son first went into law, he practiced with Henry Ware in a firm they called Indian Country Lawyers, taking cases ALL over Indian Country. It was during that time I first went to work with him. The day began in a Tribal Court, proceeded to Juvenile Court and then raced to a state court in Oklahoma County to file papers in yet another case. Raced summed up the efforts and the speed it took to get from one part of this state to the next jurisdiction.

This week I took another turn and went to work with him again. He is now partners at Route 66 Attorneys and, you got it, there is some road racing involved there too. I sat in as he took notes from first one client and then the next, while holding the line for the court clerk in another county to find the records he needed for a court appearance later in the day.

He took another call from a friend of ours who had moved out of state who was referring him onto a wrongful death case.

But before I left him for the day, I took him to find the new home for the Craig County Genealogy Society. It used to be in the heart of the Vinita Public Library. They outgrew the space and needed the freedom to collaborate and work through the copious volumes of the Craig County history. They are now at 201 1/2 North Wilson in Vinita, above the Burckhalter-Highsmith Funeral Home.

I always knew there was an upstairs apartment there, at least since my grandmother died, since the previous owner and my dad had grown up together, and when we were coming to town, they offered us the use of the apartment while we were in town for the funeral. As it turned out, we didn’t use it and stayed with relatives instead. But I had always wondered what it must have been like.

I can tell you that now. Up those steep dark stairs, down the hall, through a screen door into the unused kitchen, cross through a couple of unused rooms, follow the voices until you arrive at pedestal with the sign-in sheet and the Society is gathered around 2 long tables forming a square in the middle of the room. The action is happening even as we enter. The 3 women are working on individual projects. The box fan is blowing warm air on the hottest May day we have had yet.

My son entered, signed in and is recognized by Connie Schoefield who has known him since first grade. He stands and announces why he has come. He has come with questions about Baby Emmett Salkil. And the room changed. All eyes were wide open. As an attorney, he had been contacted by a person living in Alabama looking to find proof of his Cherokee ancestry.

These 3 women had been looking for relatives for this baby for decades. He was a 3 month old baby when his mother died, followed 3 days later by his father in the 1918 Influenza, the pandemic our ancestors faced one hundred years ago. With both on their deathbeds asking that the baby's grandmother NOT get the baby.

There were extensive stories in the Vinita newspapers at the time. Who would take baby Emmett? Mrs. Turbow, president of United Charities of Vinita took the baby and the Vinita community provided all the baby clothes AND a buggy were donated, showing what a caring place it was. Baby stayed there for 10 weeks and then the notice came in the papers that Baby Emmett was adopted.

The adoptive parents and Emmett moved and then the adoptive father died and the adoptive mother remarried and Emmett got a second new last name.

And it was the grandson who sought only to find through this tangled trail the proof of his Indian heritage.

As an Indian Counselor in Miami Schools for 25 years and before that 2 years in Sapulpa Schools, I helped countless parents struggle with filling out their child's 504 forms to be eligible to qualify for the Indian Education programs in those school districts. Most, did it easily as they had their Indian cards in their back pockets, or could easily find theirs stashed away in a safe place at home. Others, those who struggled had been handed down the stories of Indian heritage but had not had the money or opportunity to find the documents that made their Indian-ness official enough to submit to tribal enrollment offices. I recognized the importance of belonging because I saw it in these children's eyes and in the eyes of their parents. For most, it was not for any future financial benefit, it was simply to know that they belonged. I hadn't ever considered the longing a community could have, as a deep longing to know where the children went that "got away."

The women Connie, Mary Oakley, and Cathy quickly found the "chapter and verse" on baby Emmett and that his family land had the first oil well in Oklahoma in 1889.

They had placed a long  needed gravestone in the Vinita Fairview Cemetery and included his story in their Cemetery Walks. And now the women were saying, "The seeds that they had planted had borne fruit."

My son and I had never heard such joy from grown adults. Jubilant. ARMS IN THE AIR HAPPY that baby Emmett had been claimed. He had done adoptions with the Indian Child Welfare Act, and had seen the joy of adoption. This was the other end of that, the joy of connecting a whole community back to the one who got away.

For me, it was the best day ever for a take your mom to work day!

Respectfully Submitted,

Rebecca Jim

 Just as Baby Emmett was never forgotten, my hope is that each of the one million people who have been lost to COVID-19 in the US alone will not be forgotten. And thank those who have taken the effort to remember if only a few thousand, so far. The grief is enough to be shared by us all.

It is a short walk, an historic walk across Harvard Square with the red brick dormitories saved for Freshmen which must each year ground those students in that place in ways they will never forget or regret.

But on the week of finals there is a stillness a seriousness in the air. While in Cambridge, I stayed at the Irving House Bed and Breakfast on the 3rd floor and walked the 600 feet to Gund Hall for the final review of the designs so many of you inspired. When the dozen landscape graduate architect students took us on during their visit just 6 weeks ago, they were paying attention.

I know this because you were quoted and your issues and ideas lit up the screens in the posters, drawings, maps and visual renditions they each have created illustrated shown and discussed for their Ottawa County Remade designs.

When the critics had said their last comments. It went to their professor to sum the day's and semester studio's efforts and as overwhelmed as we all were -- he simply said the students had truly used a sense of grace as they engaged with place and people and through this they and he had found their way to a sense of calm at the end of this experience.

There was no historical anger towards those who created our site's mess and the urgency to solve our problems was approached in such a way to simply guide us to cleanup - restoring place and our relationship and kinship with water in what are achievable steps.

There were phrases that resonated with me and I believe will with you.  Try:

Accessibility to water

Revitalizing our Downstream home

The Role of Water

The degree of wetness

Rekindling our kinship with place and water

Issues of great concern were brought forward with steps to mitigate and have climate equity deal with our flood infrastructure while also increasing the holding capacity and to better understand our shallow water table.

Addressing our food insecurity while growing not only food but clean dirt.

They found ways to give us walk-ability and deal with our public space deficit. Neglected Lytle Creek was brought forward and the concept of flood water controlled by wide usable levee systems that could enlarge the campus of our NEO College.

And Dear Rachel took on a proposal to both know and regain trust with the land and create a space for our children to have their own fish hatchery of sorts and grow and repopulate a currently depleted fish species while slowing down water in catchments and reduce flood risk in one of our Ottawa County towns.

We all anticipated the day, but the pace and the competence of the students, the questions posed to them by professional landscape architects did not stymie any one of the students but stretched them to think bigger, think detail in some cases and for a few wish they had 8 more weeks to keep the design details pouring out. 

These designs will be contained in a book the Harvard Graduate School of Design will publish. We will invite their professor Niall Kirkwood to come in the Fall to the next Tar Creek Conference and will be adding the student work to our www.leadagency.org website. We are not hording these plans, we hope to gift the ideas to entities to install them or what they will inspire will become part of the future landscape we will enjoy living beside.

The challenge comes back to us. We need to imagine what our, your Ottawa County could be, how we deal with our "wetness" and enjoy a future, where neighborhoods will be built, how we bring the land back into the relationship that brought these generations here not so long ago.

Dream like Justin and Riley did of what the "new" mound culture might look, how re-wilding our lands with bison and other animals we are drawn back to.

Prowl like I did. Explore spaces like the Gund built for student work, structured like gymnasium seating but spacious enough for workstations open 24 hours a day to create in an atmosphere filled with the creative minds of designers and artists whose work will be the parks, monuments, structures built in the decades to come.

And in their basement library, in a random book edited by the man who brought his students to our county,  a quote from a former president that could inspire you, too, to want spaces, lands, places .... "so our children grow up next to parks not poison."

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

We raise our own.

Tar Creek has been part of Nick Shepherd's life since before he could legally drive a car.

He competed in high school with his Tar Creek science fair projects. The first year, I was walking through the exhibits and saw his and heard him describe his work came back to me Wednesday morning. The same passion, excitement to share his findings had never left or diminished.  That Nick was still there. He wowed us again.

LEAD Agency invited that Miami High School student to bring his science fair project to one of the National Tar Creek Conferences held at the Miami Civic Center and that is where he and Bob Nairn met for the first time. And it was Bob Nairn who introduced him as he prepared to defend his PhD dissertation, "Development of Ecological Engineering Solutions to Mine Water Biogeochemistry and Hydrology Challenges.”

After graduating MHS, Nick has continually attended the University of Oklahoma, working with Nairn on the Passive Water Treatment systems in Commerce, OK on the Mayer Ranch and the site across the road by Commerce High School. He again developed his own research projects which have all been to the benefit of Tar Creek.

His, yours, our Tar Creek. He was born to it and has spend his youth and now into adulthood looking at that orange water, capturing, filtering, analyzing it for toxic metals. He has devised fish catchment and identified species, counting before they reached the passive treatment systems and celebrating the numbers and species that could be found in the cleaner water. All that before they entered the still damaged water in Tar Creek.

So why wouldn't he want to begin looking at why the rest of Tar Creek couldn't be addressed? The answers are daunting and because of his work, EPA has a guideline with charts, numbers and colored boxes on mine maps showing exactly where the next phase of the EPA work must go. The gaping holes in the ground, mine shafts, collapsed features and the multitude of boreholes let RAINWATER enter the ground and recharge, refilling the Boone Aquifer to the brim and the water while there changed to carry with it the metals of concern: lead and cadmium as it comes back and out at the surface. These wounds to the earth are the source and must be addressed or nothing the EPA, the Quapaw Tribe or DEQ does will allow Tar Creek to heal.

There, he said it. AND he did it with time for a few questions from the public, all under an hour.

Tar Creek's young'un has earned his right to wear and be addressed as Dr. Nicholas L. Shepherd for the rest of his life. He certainly gained it righteously. Hours he had stood in that bad water, hours more walking the site, even more crunching numbers and I would believe being astonished at them. For years I have quoted Bob Nairn with the fact that one million gallons of mine water is discharged into Tar Creek at the place we call Douthat. Now, I can quote Dr. Shepherd, at 1440 gallons per second it is actually 1,530,720 gallons per regular day with the exceptions after rain events when that number will exceed a 58 Million gallons a day and more because his weir couldn't measure the excess.  Move all the chat out of the flood-way and there is only a 10% chance the fish will have a healthy stream in years to come.

Our downstreamers: praise your own. And understand even more from what Nick has learned. You don't see as much orange because the passive water treatments in Commerce that his mentor Dr. Robert Nairn has created are catching LOTS OF IRON and removing it before it reaches the city limits of Miami, OK. But watch out for what is in that water flowing by: the lead and the cadmium. I was astonished by the CADMIUM numbers he revealed and believe it should be added as a metal of concern for any yards, parks, farmland that is flooded by Tar Creek from this moment into the future until the work is done to reduce it. Federal and state agency representatives heard his presentation and have been given notice by our homegrown full-fledged scientist.

The reminder I gave to the volunteers at LEAD & NEO's Earth Day Clean up at Tar Creek held true, each must be mindful of what is on their shoes when they leave,  not to walk blatantly into their homes and track these poisons inside to harm the "little ones." Or themselves. These metals can be hazardous to health, they certainly are dangerous to the environment and bio attempting to find a home.

Congratulations Dr. Shepherd, none of us are prouder of you than your mother! And none more grateful than your Tar Creek.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

We have our own well known refugee and she is actually connected to two World Wars.

The lead and zinc mined out just north of us we all are proud to say, "won both wars." But look at what was left behind and the money it is costing for the cleanup and the restoration of the land and watershed. Those metals were essential elements, valued for the effort to end all wars. And our Tar Creek who still continues to bleed, is the last remaining casualty of war.

They didn't kill her, but ensured that the damage would be long lasting, staining the bridges she flows under and every sock of every child who has tromped through those waters for the last 43 years come November. The neighborhoods, parks, front and back yards get her sediments loaded with those precious metals deposited on them when her flood waters reach out beyond her banks, putting any child living there at risk. At risk for simply being, playing and walking those cute little feet back into the house where their baby brother crawls.

These legacy mining sites are not rare. The challenge is upon you to find a site like ours that has been cleaned up. The companies know how to make money but they are not committed to the "cleanup after yourself" mentality we instill in kindergartners. They just can't make any money that way.

Essential elements as the answer to the Climate Crisis is the dream these dirty mining companies have been longing to have announced. Half of our country is at risk for the superfund sites of the future because beneath the ground lie these rare earth metals that will power us out of the fossil fuel phase of the modern world and will take us into the "clean" energy life we hope will save the planet.

But at what risk? We had to learn the riches only make the rich richer and leave the mess for the locals to learn to deal with. For us, we learned to love the mining district for the jobs they produced, with the chat piles a source material used in countless ways, saving our cities and county tax payer money when used as cheap gravel. We valued those mountain of mine waste for the recreation they provided, cheap fun, sand dunes, to climb and slide down. We loved the rugged features on the landscape they became and have regret as OUR chat piles come down, while some loved the bit of money they earned with each ton hauled to the distributors.

We only learned later what the company men probably knew already. They regretted they didn't have the technology to remove the REST of the metals from the chat. They knew it was loaded, but didn't think it cost effective to work those piles again, when they could walk away and hope they got their bankruptcy papers turned in before the poisoning effects were discovered.

In a song written and performed by EPA's Bill Honker on an Earth Day 22 years ago in Dallas, Texas, these lyrics in the chorus: 
                                A Mining town knows all too well that the mining costs go on
                                And you never see the final bill till the mining company's gone
                                The things the miners left behind tell a tale we won't forget
                                A few may profit from the mines, but many pay the debt.

What have we earned? Lost I.Q. devalues each individual, but steals also the potential of communities because our people are our collective future. Each of us exposed to our lead carry it in every organ of the body. The other precious metals in bed with lead, are known to attack our bodies in other unique ways. Costing many years of life-expectancy.

But what have we learned? We are the forefront of the push to mine. We can speak up. NO MORE TAR CREEKS. Value the clean water running through your communities and the landscape of rolling hills, plains or valleys. Speak up to journalists about the legacy mining has given you.

The announcement we received this week that Tar Creek made American Rivers' Most Endangered Rivers Top Ten, for the second year in a row! Mining did this. It took this vital stream, this valued creek and has no plans to return it to us.

The players with power have failed us.

They have failed to protect our lives, our potential, and our property. The connection is clear. What flows down Tar Creek, that load of metals every day for 43 years goes somewhere. It ends up in our Grand Lake o' the Cherokees in the sediment and in many of our fish species. That lake backs up in flood events and Tar Creek lays her heavy metal load on us flooding our homes and destroying property.

These players need to find a big table, pull up a chair and stay long enough to mesh out the formal Memorandum of Understanding to work together for US. You can help us make this table setting event happen.

Contact.
 
EPA, FERC, Army Corps of Engineers and GRDA and demand it.

Our little refugee from the last wars longs to run clean for you again.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

I never been to Spain ...  but I been to Oklahoma ~ Three Dog Night

I have never been to Columbia either, so when the Tulsa Global Alliance contacted me to have a conversation with  one of this year's US State Department's  International Women of Courage award winners:  Josefina Zuniga, the first step for me was to Google her and her country.

The award honors 12 women each year who have "demonstrated extraordinary courage, strength and leadership in improving the lives of others and their communities." After reading about the range of the work these women do, I had enough time to catch my breath before tuning into the conversation, not with all twelve women, thank goodness, just the Columbian woman who with her words, I believe has changed my life.

Josefina began by introducing herself as a woman, a woman who had been like many of her peers ashamed of her black skin and her kinky, curly hair in a culture that devalued impoverished people and place she grew up. Her country is rich from mining some of the most precious stones found in the finest jewelry stores in the world, but in her district with twelve pristine rivers that flow to the warm waters of the Pacific had not been "developed" and the Black and Indigenous living there remained poor and neglected. But they were rich in the knowledge of the jungle that surrounded them, and neglected meant they had retained their cultures and languages. She says the jungle is their head and water is their heart and within the jungle home is the responsibility to maintain the resources for all humanity.

This woman began to value her own self, her color, her hair and removed her own stigmas and no longer saw poverty as making her or the others victims. She had her own personal revolution. And this led her to encourage these revolutions in additional people. The new generations feel loved with their equality insured.  "We will plant our seeds in the future as we take on the present," she said.

She became a social activist and life was her own resource. The model of life she developed brought her to the place where her soul feels at peace."I am determined by water." Aren't we all determined by water?

As she became centered, she turned then to create a model, a common good model and the shared vision that would be required for the residents to claim their home as a national treasure of unspoiled resources, keep it that way and bring people to experience being immersed there. She began by bringing journalists and found that they were her home's best allies. Using hope, faith and optimism she brought Eco-tourism to her jungle, understanding its auto-management was the correct vision of their environment. As hosts, accommodating visitors to deal with their fears of the "dangers" and helping each to see the beauty of the diversity of their home. Tourism is dominated now with positive new stories as they introduce ways to bring the public to treasure their home. There is power in telling the good news and inviting visitors to surf, whale watch or help release baby turtles to the sea!             
                                  
This woman came to care for her own essence, helped others find theirs and saved her jungle homeland from corporate development, giving visitors the opportunity to see undisturbed nature and to find the Pacific coast a perfect place to see whales and their young undisturbed. Her life is a personal celebration, and her "Changed Hand" organization has changed hearts and minds of the impoverished and may have helped the Colombian President Iván Duque announce Columbia will be planting 180 million trees to restore acres of degraded land in a campaign known as Sembraton.

I was able to tell her, I was a woman with parts of our treasured home wounded. As they came together to promote their home to others, we will have to band together to fight to have our Tar Creek restored. The Superfund site completed will benefit us all because we, like Josefina we are determined by water. She woke up to value herself and the jungle treasure with clean rivers and generations will continue to protect that essence by sharing it. She has learned from Tar Creek, they must be diligent to protect the pristine.

The good news, the power of Tar Creek's "tourism" has continued to bring scientists and activists, federal, state agencies and tribes together to find solutions. Teachers have used our site as the largest outdoor classroom, inspiring students for decades to pursue answers. Having an Endangered River status for a SECOND year running through town is our wake up call.

And people who never been to Oklahoma, sort of have - learned to value home.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Not everyone can put together a book of poetry about a place. It takes time and relationships with the land, the water, the individuals who have lived lives and had the courage to give a piece of their own history to the random visitor who happens to venture into their space.
 
This week we sat enraptured by the stories and the poems read aloud by such a poet. Our first public event held at our office after all this time had limited seating with unlimited numbers of people who would be able to watch on Facebook where it is stored in a video Michael Woodruff recorded for us.
 
Once Upon a Tar Creek ~ Mining for Voices can be found at Chapters, the Miami Tribal Museum Gift Shop and of course on Amazon. Through these personae poems the years of research show the deep understanding Maryann has gained by taking the time to walk among us and listen. She says they are based, at least loosely on actual events, people, places, creatures, and I would add with just enough of a twist of imagination to let them work properly in your mouth when read aloud.
 
There will be selections that you will carry with you or groups of words you will recall much later.
The line in one poem that gets my son every time is:
 
I didn't always look this way.  It almost always makes me laugh, but the phrase also takes me to Tar Creek.
 
After all these years, you would have to say the same about Tar Creek. She didn't always look this way, but she sure has for the last 43 years. Every day with nothing yet done that has worked to stop the bleeding. But out there on Road 40 where the bridge crosses Tar Creek and the mine water gushes out of the ground, flowing into a damaged creek, mixes beneath your feet, or your car's wheels, and once blended heads on to the Neosho River.
 
Those metals from the mines flow in that water and went right into the story I wove together at the Noon's Lion Club meeting in Vinita this week. It is easy to connect those folks to our issues because right there on the table in front of them were their glasses of water, straight out of the tap, straight out of Grand Lake, where all that Tar Creek water ends up. And very easily into the fish they serve at the big Fish Fries held as fundraisers all around the lake.
 
Beginning with the simple statement of who I am, how I am tied to Vinita, where my Daddy grew up and where I live right now, on the edge of Mill Creek, I simply start with water and how we cannot survive without it, then pivot to dust and how they do not worry about dust there, not like we do in Ottawa County, it is stark to speak to people who do not worry about water, have no care about their children being lead poisoned, never knew anyone who wondered if their town would cave in at any moment. Superfund sounds like "fun" to them. They are so close to us, our neighboring county, but have no clue about the threat of the next rain storm becoming the flood of the century and the residue left behind by our Tar Creek, treasures of those heavy metals traced along the front and back yards and gardens and playgrounds.
 
It was like describing a horror story to a luncheon. Our lives are heavy. Reality is hard truth. So I switched it up and moved on to fish, who doesn't like a fish story, right? But then the fish are impacted too, even the ones they catch have our lead in them AND the mercury.
 
As an environmental activist, sometimes you know it is time to shut down even the fish stories, when one of those in the know asked, what about our farm ponds?

Did you ever hear that old story... "Slowly I turn, step by step",,, that gets repeated when someone says THE WORD that triggers more story? Yes, the farm ponds, that is a really sad story, my very own pond and many more like it, the fish in our ponds had more mercury than the lake or the rivers. They were shocked. One man looked at me with his mouth wide open, staring at me for having said that. I explained, ponds are trapped water, what mercury is deposited cannot escape and pretty much stays there accumulating both in the water and in the fish.
 
We started with water, so I ended with the great value in rain barrels, I had to lighten the load on them, right?
 
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

You, your words, your life experiences and your unique view of the place where you live are and have always mattered, but have too seldom been captured.

I remember once as a little girl before seat belts, traveling in the car with my parents and older brother Clark who as you might have imagined, even as a child had been a "talker." He had fallen suddenly silent in sleep. Hearing the silence Daddy simply asked me to take a turn and tell them a story. I bellied up to the back of the front seat standing tall and clearly began, "Once a time...." and then felt speechless. I simply had not had a turn in so long, I no longer knew my story or any story to tell.

Maryann Hurtt has roots in Ottawa County and though a Wisconsin resident has been a constant visitor and I will say a good listener for most of her life. She has captured our voices and our stories and published the finest volume of poetry you will have to hear read aloud to appreciate fully. She will be reading a selection of her work April 5 in the front room at the LEAD Agency and whether you walk in the door to hear her or not you will be able to hear her since your Michael Woodriff will be streaming her presentation. So get ready, set some time and have some snacks ready to watch by Facebook or nest into your reserved seat.

Maryann is not the only writer who will be walking our streets this year, she is not the only one asking you to tell your own story or to give an opinion but she is the vanguard of the league. They in reality started with the group of landscape design students who came not to speak but to listen so as to create the designs for the future we collectively long to have be here for the generations not yet imagined. Then followed by the tall journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis, a Brit writing a book on what was left behind, our mine waste and how it was stored, used and perhaps has harmed us.

He got hooked on the waste stream with how the China connection broke the stream and the "dream" that plastic can be recycled.

The next journalist coming will want to visit with you about the health issues we live with, or sadly what we are dying of. When you live in a superfund site for a number of years, 5 years was the number Dr. John Neuberger found to be pivotal here, when our unique set of toxins can begin to cause diagnosable diseases.

We are not a unique place, there are hundreds of small cities strung across America, but when you begin to list OUR challenges, the reason this place and our people peaks curiosity and interest of readers starts to make sense. The check list would start with superfund site, stained water, tribes, tornado, floods, buyouts, resilience, Route 66, and hey, what about those spoonbills?

All types of journalists have flocked here over the last few decades and while they are here they discover the Coleman Theater, experience a hometown football game, go to the Ku-Ku, find the Dobson Museum and genuinely get captured by us and the kindness they find here. But because of the distractions, often we are not asked, but how do you feel about this? Is it right or just to have Tar Creek run through this place and not be the joyous and safe playground for the grand kids to go to in the heat of the summer? Or do you worry when it rains that this might be the "big one?" Or more direly, are any of your health conditions linked to the toxic exposures that may linger here?

I see you at Red Cedar Recycling Center, briefly as we deposit our sorted wastes. It can come up in a simple conversation because as an environmental activist, recycling is sort of, get it? "sort" of the gateway to activism.

Get ready, the journalists are coming. Listen also this summer for the knocks on the door. Answer the calls, or the emails and the surveys. Have a turn. Get your story ready. Your story. Your turn is coming. What have you experienced? How have you felt, what will you share? What I have learned by writing these stories, humbly, that they are being read and hopefully instilling in you the understanding you, are part of the story.

You are the change you expect to happen. It begins with you and speaking up and out when you are asked to tell your story. As my son says, "Everybody gets a turn."

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Is that something like, "Act your age?"

No, ACT50 is Waterkeeper Alliance's collective celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act. LEAD Agency's Tar Creekkeeper and Grand Riverkeeper programs will be participating and conducting actions this year you will be invited to join. For there is nothing more important to you and to all of us than water. And we deserve clean water.

The year before I was born the Federal Water Pollution Control Act was enacted.

Then after EPA was established in 1970 during what has been called the "American environmental movement" with President Nixon saying the, "70's must be the years when American pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its water and our living environment. It is literally now or never."

Congress passed a significantly reorganized and expanded it into the Clean Water Act by themselves with a rare 2/3 majority vote because President Nixon did not sign it when it came to him, he vetoed it.

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.”  ~ Edmund Muskie

It was very popular to be for clean water at that time because our water was seriously in danger with sewage, trash, oil, and even rivers catching on fire. "The object of the act is to restore and maintain the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the Nation's waters." - NRDC

This era also brought us the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act.

Our Clean Water Act will be 50 years old this year and so will my son, who was born just 2 months earlier. The Act has never been fully implemented and has never been as protective as is needed. The CWA made it unlawful to discharge any pollutant from a point source into navigable waters, unless issued a permit, but it allows these permits that do pollute our water.

ACT50 is a collective call for governments, Waterkeepers, and people like you to unite in the fight for clean water. Working together, ga-du-gi, as we say in Cherokee, can ensure that water is drinkable, fishable, and swimmable by enforcing laws, holding polluters accountable, and empowering citizens.

There are ongoing and emerging threats to the health of American waterways and with provisions in this law governments and organizations like the Waterkeeper Alliance and LEAD Agency can take action, but we need citizens paying attention and the Act gives them legal standing  to advocate for their own waterways.

This Clean Water Act actually has been watered down through the years by the very Congress that enacted it and has never been fully implements as the original Congress had intended. But because of it pollution standards have been set and American waterways have had significant protection with restoration and cleanup of serious problems.

The incredible hope that was written into this Act was the goal to see all American waterways drinkable, fishable and swimmable by 1983. As we know that hasn't happened.

Some of that is our own fault. We must elect politicians who believe this is important to their constituents and to the country as a whole, and will protect water, which is our future, and not corporations who entice them to protect their interests instead.

But the other thing we have to do is understand we are the change. We as a people made Congress take on the challenge to protect water. And for us here at Tar Creek we have to make them follow the law. The discharge going into Tar Creek for now 42 years, over 15,000 days is a violation of the Clean Water Act. A permit was never issued. You will be hearing more about this year, as it is my very own ACT50 action and you joining this effort can make that discharge be addressed as the law proposed those years ago.

Myself as Tar Creekkeeper and Martin Lively, our Grand Riverkeeper will be speaking out on clean water throughout this celebratory year and call you to join us as we ACT50.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 
 

“You cannot do kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.” --Ralph Waldo Emerson

For a couple of years I have eaten every meal at home. Lots of people have done the same, staying safe from exposure to our very own world-wide pandemic. So when I was invited a couple of months ago to attend a potluck supper, I said, "sure." But truly not believing that type of gathering would ever really happen again, perhaps not in my lifetime.

As the weeks have passed, the vale has been lifting and the day arrived and I marched right in, as if nothing could have been more common than to go see what the folks who attended might have thought to bring to add to the long table for us all to share for dinner.

The invitation came formally to not only attend but also be the guest speaker. With it coming from both Sharon and Judge Douthitt, I knew agreeing to come would have been understood on both our parts. Since who could have turned them down?

Having not had a speaking engagement in so long, I simply picked up some of this and some of that from the LEAD Agency office and slipped it all into a bag, while also remembering to bring our membership application forms.

Along with the invitation was a slick brochure about the P.O.T.L.U.C.K. Society which meets monthly in Claremore. Think about the name which stands for: People Out to Learn Using Care and Kindness. Their mission statement: Bringing people together in heart and mind to love and support those in need, to educate all ages in both Native and American history, and to value one another's existence as sacred.

The challenge is there. Regular people put their heads together and created their own nonprofit 501c 3 charitable organization and have found ways to keep learning while also being kind.

Lots of time when talking about what LEAD Agency does and hopes to achieve for Tar Creek and our damaged environment, it is easy to be cynical, and critical about the slow nature of the cleanup, to express anger and doubt about the governmental agencies direction and question the speed of the work they are doing.

The challenge was to attempt to keep on message but to do that while using care and kindness. It got easier with the kind introduction Judge Douthitt gave me, easier again when looking over to see my long time friend, Sharon Douthitt, who had been teaching all those years ago with me at Will Rogers Junior High School. Jon had grown up in Cardin and had started school at the elementary school, Mineral Heights. His stories of his youth were filled with classic Picher-isms, saying that describing his hometown to his college classmates was often hard to do. How swimming in sinkholes and sliding down chat piles were common to him while always wondering how he made it when so many others did not.

What I was able to do, again as kindly as possible, was to explain how the difficulty teaching in our schools around here can be, how challenging to teachers, especially those new to the profession. When Sharon started teaching English to 7th graders, some were, probably at that time, perhaps 1/3 of her class might have been suffering from lead poisoning. Many exhibited learning disabilities, or acted out, found sitting still in their chairs even difficult, and staying focused all hour almost impossible. As I described the symptoms of lead poisoning, I was describing Sharon's English class. Generations of children have been lead poisoned in Ottawa County and that is exactly why EPA is spending millions of dollars every year to remove the source material so less of it will be able to poison any more children.

The POTLUCK Society was an inspiration and a challenge. LEAD Agency has taken on heralding our issues and will continue to do this. Actually we will be conducting surveys soon of the neighborhoods who have been flooded in the past. There are many, too many. But surely enough that they may, by connecting even find a need to form a wing to LEAD Agency or organize an entity to give voice to their great needs.

But think of how many others could band together and begin organizing societies to be together, thinking, learning, exploring the questions they have about life and how on earth we treat each other and the earth we all depend upon, walk upon, and the water that provides life to us all.

Man seeketh in society comfort, use, and protection.  FRANCIS BACON
 
Respectfully submitted,
Rebecca Jim
 

If you have ever been an educator, you know there is a joy seeing a student discover a thing, own it, claim it and then more deeply know it.

I saw some of that happen this week as 12 graduate students began to grasp this place. They had been studying maps, grafts and images for the last 5 weeks. They learned our average rain fall, soil types, aquifers and all the ways flood waters lay down around parts of this county and the lives the high water affects.

It is one thing to see the list of the tribes in Ottawa County but to see their lands from the state line down to the southern edge and the waters that lap and at times inundate us. These students came to know our ancestors were forced to leave homelands leaving the graves of their ancestors only to come here to mere slivers of property to begin again.

Who are these students and why are they here? Riley and Scarlet, Geli and Yubo, Jessica, Elliott, Oliver and Justin came with Chee-Ling, Rachel, Ying and Kun. While they have been here they have become a team, a tight bonded bunch of landscape architects setting about creating the designs for the future of this county. But why have they come? They are here because of a quirky selection process at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, that I would simply describe as random. Niall Kirkwood's vision last year Tar Creek Remade grew into this more expansive course: Ottawa County Remade, the audacious attempt for these 12 students to take on the future of the whole county!

In order to do this, it became my task to give them what they would need, and that with your help has been provided by the generosity of so many of you who have taken time to visit with them. They have met, sat down with, walked sidewalks, entered gardens, and farms, witnessed a water well testing, attended a city council meeting, entered a casino, eaten a KuKu burger, seen a chat pile and then another one. They have crossed all the bridges over Tar Creek and seen the mine water discharge come straight out of the ground with great, unending force. They have stood on one of the largest man-made structures in the county made totally out of discarded soil and mine waste.

They saw our landscape, from the prairies to the edges of the Ozarks and followed the Neosho to the Spring where they together form our Grand River. They walked with fishermen casting for shad at the very place that water took a fellow fisherman for keeps just a few days ago. These students learned from both the Wyandot and Quapaw Environmental staff the important roles they have in protecting our waters and our environment and with a bit more time they would have made the rounds to know even more of us.

They came to know of groundwater finding the surface in unnamed springs and the challenge it is to change and embrace the preciousness that water brings while standing back to see the lay of the stream beneath the surface. It is easy to focus on a place but after only these few days I was made to begin to understand the wider expanded view of the work landscape architects take on.

Niall Kirkwood's vision will come to life in 8 more weeks as these 12 students take back to Cambridge what they have seen, experienced and learned about this place and hone in their projects to turn their vision into projected projects. This is an educational experience, taking what they have learned in classrooms throughout their course of study, and bringing this into our real life settings where they can try on this creative responsibility, that will allow them to take their skills and logical know-how into their view of the way our land will lay and our waters flow.

They have gained confidence each day, as they also begin to know their days as students end soon and they will be taking on clients: cities and towns, tribal nations who need their skills to help them master and live more gently with the places they come to reside.

Their instructor has guided and stood as the role model throughout the course and demonstrated the power of the pen to paper they as landscape architects have and so easily can share with communities where they may spend their lives, seeing the homelands broadly as the canvas of their work. There are people who make a difference and the very best ones are those like Niall Kirkwood, who teach by example and inspire students to see the future.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

The lives of the people of this earth joined almost in total unity over the peril the people in Ukraine are experiencing each moment, as they face the dangers of war brought to them, for nothing less than believing in democracy and for their country, their homeland. Just a week ago children were playing and going to school, their parents were going to work. Their lives are changed and those who live through this are changing the world, bringing countries to stand in a way I have never seen in my lifetime. 

The United Nations were almost totally united. The national colors of Ukraine shine bright on the monuments of the greatest structures in most countries on this planet. Peace on earth, and the desire for it has grown and been a thing that even the hardest characters I know are sharing on social media.

 It saddens me to know there are people dying, people suffering through the cold, sheltering without food or water, hiding in bomb shelters, being protected from what they were built to protect them from. Huddled in basements, wondering if each moment is their last, when last week they were trying to figure out their shopping list. Regular people stayed to protect their homeland, are standing with arms in the air trying to stop, or slow down the armored tanks coming down the streets and roads of their towns and villages. The stories they will tell, or the many stories that can never be told by the dead  for the acts of courage that are occurring as we wonder when baseball season with get going or the price of a gallon of gas. There are lessons we can be learning. The value of life. The beauty a clear blue sky can bring. The peace of quiet.

I wish you that and more. I wish for the peace that ends all war. These acts of violence may invoke memories for those who have experience wars in our lifetime or for indigenous, native people who have historical trauma from the times we as tribal nations were those killed by invading forces on homelands we loved or made to leave in forced marches marked by graves and tears. No Facebook posts recorded what we endured. But our trails brought us to a new land, a fresh start, to a place with tall grass and clean water. Some of these lands held treasures and made men rich, but the lands that were left truly look  as if they too had been a war zone, not just the source of the bullets that won both of the World Wars we are now so close to finding ourselves in yet a Third World War .

We are tied emotionally with the past and the daily news is heart wrenching, and while we could be standing in the cold, shivering and wondering for what purpose, I found myself simply on zoom in another meeting. Anymore you can meet people in a zoom and begin to feel like you know them. I spent some hours with a fellow who used to be in charge of a section of a federal agency that is set up with the express purpose to deal with wounded places like we have, wronged by long gone, bad deeds, by actual people who were  good at making money and about as good as making messes for generations to come to clean up.

When people retire they take a lot of institutional knowledge with them, and because it's in their heads, they can walk right out carrying nothing but memories and perhaps regrets. There would be sites still left waiting on the guys who knew how and could have made lives longer and environments safer but who didn't get to do that work.

As you might know, I want to believe Tar Creek will get a fix way before your grandchildren get their first Social Security checks. So meeting a fellow with both know how and where it got done somewhere else and how, could help us muddle through a generation quicker on the fix we deserve.

In the meantime, I am wishing you time to reflect with me on the peace on earth I hope begins now, and that our piece of earth gets a few more possibilities made possible and gets some justice, too.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”- Albert Camus

There is much to be said about the generosity of strangers, but the gift of time, or a skill long developed which with ease is shared is not less appreciated when it comes from a colleague, a fellow you have sat beside in meetings for years not knowing the skills he might have to offer until he does quiet out of the blue ask to do a thing.

There is what might seem like a cascade of assistance landing on our laps per se at LEAD Agency lately. It is as if we had been discovered, or uncovered in some way from the neglect this place has experienced.

You have heard me almost YELL for help with my words flying off the pages of the Miami NewsRecord over the past years through the weekly column they so generously allow me to submit.

Then suddenly the phone starts ringing and people are offering APPLE stock, and bringing by classily framed and matted art prints as a raffle item, or their used Brita filters for us to recycle.

When you operate the only environmental justice organization in the tri-state district, usually what we get on the phone are questions about the stuff that harms us, where it is detected, what could be making us sick, why the fish aren't safe to eat yet, and maybe where the crappie are biting this time of year?

But when you have the best place in town for the Community Garden and it goes to sleep, and needs a haircut or a re-tuning, the first day working this season, a generous fellow Cherokee comes by and offers and then delivers the biggest sack of pecan hulls, almost as tall as himself for us to add to the soon to be showcase Garden of Miami.

There is a lot of hope in a garden. It starts with mending and tending the soil, and removing what has moved in and for a time kept the soil busy and aerated so it didn't compact as it might have.  But there hiding are the strawberry plants with the little starter ones, the Egyptian onions, the spider wart, the Shasta daisies and the butterfly bushes. I would say the garden has good bones and calls out for team mates to join in the remake, the redo that is going to be happening in the next few weeks.

This cold snap will pass and then March will come right in behind it and we will see you gather and ask you to look in the corners of your kitchen for those potatoes that are sprouting. Before too long it will be time to plant them. We have a potato box ready to take them and rows to plant if we have more than we need to wedge in the box. Wouldn't that be a great way to start a potato salad? by growing your own.

This evening in my in-box, no potato, but an attorney who had seen Jennifer Little's dramatic photography the University of the Pacific professor had taken of our site, who is volunteering legal assistance in the fights that need to be fought here at one of the largest environmental justice sites. We say yes. We have issues to choose from air to water.

The questions we have no answers to, lay there with us, we taunt them and dangle them as bait to tempt yet unknown sources to leap at them and bring us answers and justice to those who have been harmed and wronged here. Keep asking and wondering and putting the pieces together, the map, the connections can matter in the lifetime we share and those who will follow walking where we once stood and wondered.

Or do a thing.

There is always something that needs doing at the LEAD Agency. A story that needs to be told and captured in our Air, Water and Works Stories Project, a child that has to be told not YET in that creek by his house, a petition to sign, or a rally to rally around.

When my mother was in medical school in Kirksville, MO, one snowy day a fellow walking in front of her dropped a book in the snow, she picked it up for him and his response was to gift it to her for returning it to him.  It was The Prophet by the author Khalil Gibran, the much loved book still can be found in our family library.

It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

We give you this same opportunity. Give us your time, you are the gift.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

This week I got to show the wounds, the color of blood oozing out of the ground on each side of the road, streaming along the ditches, showing the colors we have learned to expect, but yet hope not to see.

Each time I have taken people to see those waters of our once beloved creek and step forward to look over the bridge, I long for pretty water to be flowing downstream away from us.

I was a late comer. She was tainted for fifteen years, she was a ruined teenager before I came to see her that way. I was a crosser, crossing over the bridges she ran beneath year after year, never pausing like I do now, to gaze beneath, nor stop to stand beside, to stoop to find a worry stone along the banks, or see the life that no longer lived in or along the edge as she passed/flowed along so casually most days.

Having grown up in west Texas in a town named for a spring, where water was precious, and later living in the Black Hills and the Rocky Mountains with streams so clean you could lean over and scoop a drink out of the same water the tastiest trout you ever steamed in the ashes of a fire were caught. Knowing and experiencing the rare joy fresh running water could bring, it is beyond me to understand how I blew the chance to know Tar Creek before her life was changed for what must feel like forever to her.

I came to work in Miami as the Indian Counselor in 1978, a year and a few months before the abandoned mine workings in the Picher Field which had been dug into the Boone Aquifer refilled with water because the pumps allowing the work had ceased to work. I had those months and a few more to go down for myself as a tourist in the mine people still talk about that was so close to Route 66. Missed opportunities. We all experience them, or actually we don't experience them at all, do we?

I read the newspapers when Tar Creek was a front page item, like a brutal murder makes the headlines for days on end. And big news, like the Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times and the Dallas Morning Sun. Tar Creek was slain and people with cameras and the best writers were here watching what looked like the life's blood flowing right out of her.

People cared and we knew what was wrong would be righted because we had a brand new agency, the Environmental Protection Agency and her new program the Superfund was going to fix our problems and make quick work of it, too. We believed until we stopped believing and stopped making the front pages and EPA slipped out and would never have come back, no matter how red and orange our Tar Creek wore in public, but our kids, maybe yours, for sure the kids on your block, no matter what town you lived in: Miami and north/ our kids were being lead poisoned and hey, that meant EPA had to get their butt back in here and start doing something about it.

There are no IQ transplants. Lead can reduce our abilities and harm every organ in our bodies. But lead poisoning is totally preventable. No vaccines are needed. We are the method that protects children, we do that by eliminating the source, removing lead from homes, from our environment, our front yards and backyards.

I got off track. Yesterday I gave my last Toxic Tour. We begin by crossing one of the many bridges obscuring our shame to the public,  turned north out of Miami and quickly found chat piles, sinkholes, remnants of our abandoned towns but the last stop is the bleed. The "eternal flow of evil" that began the year after I arrived gushes out of the aquifer and has spilled out hour after hour for over 42 years.

With me on this viewing was Thomas Linzey, an attorney with the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights who was the inspiration for the Proposed Miami Clean Water Protection Ordinance to provide rights of our residents to clean water and a healthy Tar Creek and for our creek to have her own rights to be protected. It was Thomas' first visit and the water he saw he had seen before at other injured sites around the country and around the world and is the reason for his years long work for water justice. He came to offer his services to our tribal leaders to assist them as he has many other tribes in adopting the Rights Nature deserves.

Mr. Linzey then ended with a statement jarring us with his clarity "the Right to clean water is not yet provided to us in our Bill of Rights nor even in the Clean Water Act."

He left the tribes the spark that might ignite Rights to Nature legislation, perhaps a movement could begin within these elected leaders to protect what we have while restoring what has been lost. Why not with a Bill of Rights for Nature?  

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim