Taking initiative means the ability to see something that needs to be done and deciding to do it out of your own free will without someone else telling you to do it.

Many people all over Miami, Oklahoma will be taking initiative. Every single person who picks up a pen, reads through the wordy document and signs an initiative petition that is currently being circulated as an eligible and registered city voter  will be demonstrating with their own free will-- doing the one thing not attempted before in the known history of the city. Citizens will be exercising the inherent right of the people of the City of Miami to make laws which recognize and expand criminal liability and environmental rights at the municipal level under the actual authority provided in the Oklahoma Constitution. Each will be responding to the title: A CITY OF MIAMI CLEAN WATER PROTECTION ORDINANCE to give what most believe to be a God-given right, the right to Clean water.

People all over the country have protested, marched and been jailed to stop the TransCanada's XL Pipeline. And this week the company gave it up on their own, they terminated the project. Also, this week EPA and Army Corps of Engineers took on making laws protecting the Waters of the US stronger, and the Arctic Refuge got rescued by Biden and the first ever Indigenous Secretary of the Interior.

We as a community have not fought the fight, have not been in the streets, gotten arrested for our Clean Water fight. We don't have to. All we have to do is sign a petition, asking as a Citizen of Miami, OK for Clean Water as a Right, your very own right. And the right for Tar Creek to be protected from added pollution. And for polluters to face fines and restitution to correct that damage be paid to the city for the victim, Tar Creek.

This ordinance cannot undo the damage Tar Creek has had with 42 years of a million gallons of acid mine water flowing through the city, some days much more is pouring out of the mines, at flood stage more of Tar Creek is spread vastly across the fields, parks and many residential yards. This ordinance does not charge or render blame on Tar Creek when that may occur.

With enough signatures on the petition, it will allow a special election to be held in the city, if the City Council does not on their own approve the ordinance. It could be easier for the City Counselors to do that with hundreds and thousands of registered voters saying, "Hey, clean water, I am for that" and demonstrating it with their signatures on the petitions we will walk into the meeting for them to see each time it might be on the agenda.

Sometimes taking initiative takes little energy, perhaps a call to a friend, an elbow nudge to a fellow standing next to you or someone sitting beside you in a pew, like before COVID made cozy abnormal.

What are the Rights of the People of the City of Miami  as stated in the ordinance?

The people of the City of Miami possess the right to clean water, which shall include the right to a healthy Tar Creek that is free from pollution, and the right to be free from activities or projects which violate that right.
 
What are the Rights of Tar Creek as stated in the ordinance?

Tar Creek possesses the rights to exist, regenerate, and flourish, which shall include the right to naturally recharge, the right to flow, the right to water quality necessary to provide habitat for native plants and animals, the right to provide clean water, the right to be free from pollution, and the right to restoration. Tar Creek shall also have the right to be free from activities or projects which violate those rights. The rights of the Creek secured within this Ordinance shall not be interpreted to confer liabilities, duties, obligations, or responsibilities on the Creek.

When Tar Creek is polluted, Tar Creek is harmed and becomes a victim with legal rights. “Tar Creek” as used within this Ordinance, shall include the Tar Creek ecosystem, which shall include, but not be limited to, tributaries of the Creek, and the Tar Creek watershed.
 
When I first read what rights Tar Creek has, it was like reading poetry. When reading the rights of the People in this ordinance, it reads like justice. Justice that can begin to be gained by the People of Miami, OK's long overdue claim to their Right to Clean Water.
 
Take some initiative.
 
Respectfully Submitted,
Rebecca Jim
 
 
 

We think of Nashville as the South, but San Miguel, Oaxaca, Mexico is really south. Two film makers came to capture the emotions felt for a wounded water by those hoping to stand for the environment, the other came because poetry brought poets to that water and to answer how that came to happen, how bad water can inspire.

If you can reach back to a time when you laid on your back and marveled at the sky and how quickly the clouds change and cover you in shade, the vastness of the sky above, or remember your first firefly, or the gift of holding a baby chick, the times you discovered the world around you, surrounded you and simply filled you with wonder.

A poem, a simple poem did that for me one afternoon as I listened to Angela Helmig read a poem in the setting it was written to depict. The flowing water seemed to rush by, but as she described a leaf on the water, I could see it and then as suddenly I could no longer see it. As her poem about water ends, I simply became that water.

There are magical places and one afternoon I heard a woman tell about when she was a little girl how her family would all go to Tar Creek to swim. I could see them there, I could see the joy water can bring in her eyes as she remembered.

I am the creek, we all are. We all can be. Those moments on the creek with Angela Helmig happened because Glenna Wallace had a vision. That vision was to capture the part of us that makes us Native, that thing that is our culture. Our culture is not our "Indian card" it is the stuff we do, what we make, how we do it, how we gather from our environment the pieces we need to use that our people were taught by their people to do. Culture is not always valued, but it is the stuff people study when our things are discovered  'neath some random earthen mound that sometimes stops the bulldozer long enough to remove a broken pot, a woven item, the things we left behind that told of what we did and who we might have been.

Glenna Wallace, Chief of the Eastern Shawnee believed our tribal cultures are alive and being lived by tribal people in Ottawa County, lived quietly by humble people, none seeking to be discovered, each carrying forward or finding anew the slivers of what our ancestors born to us. How do you capture those movements of the clouds you saw as a child? You seek out someone who can link the stories of place to people and that is how Chief Wallace came to draw Meredith Ludwig to believe in her dream. During the thirty years she taught at Crowder College, she had heard Meredith speak story to past, engagingly, because if you are capturing culture you have to have someone who doesn't try to put fireflies in a jar, but will muster other ways to gift the future with the talents that are present now.

With the structure of an ANA Grant, Cultural Tourism in a Nine Tribe County and a 3 year timeline in the midst of the COVID shutdown, Meredith has done it, and reached out to a lifelong friend Suzanne Carter to come with her video skills. It was these 2 women who valued Tar Creek this week and brought poetry to life there. First a Slam by Michael Scruggs, then hearing the true way words can change into art as Angela spoke of water in the  last words  In her poem,

Journey:
Carving destiny
Carry onward
Open to the sea
Become one with her
 
   Aloud, the words with the water flowing as it was, I too became one with the water and more committed to speak for Tar Creek and gather the people who speak for the creek. And Filo Gomez Martinez, the Ayuuk from Quetzaltepec, he heard and filmed misty-eyed grown men who long for justice and clean water.
 
The list is long, the tribes are all represented, each telling their stories and many artists like Patty Harjo-Shinn  tapped to demonstrate beading, quill work and birch bark basketry. What about Richard Zane Smith's pottery, and of course an inquisitive puppet, how to tap maple trees and make syrup, language, songs. These are our people and they are showing us and the world of tourists way into the future what culture looks like and who is living it.

When you have the vision like this, and the staff to engage and endear the reluctant talent living among us, fireflies don't even know they are captured, they are gently kept for those moments then released unharmed, yet leaving a legacy for the future, say it is for tourists. But it is for us, our grandchildren who will never know these fireflies, but they will see the culture in motion, hear it and learn the past is present for them.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

The Film Catchers made better with the help from Dana Jim, the apprentice Boom Operator.

Through the years I have learned a lot about lead. Our government has had to come out finally reporting there is just NO SAFE LEVEL of lead. Zero is safe, nothing.

Lead has changed the potential of lots of us. What we might have grown up to be and do is gone, but we are reducing the amounts we are exposed to. Our children will be better for it and their lives improved because of it. That is why EPA is still spending millions of dollars a year in this county, reducing the amount of lead our children will be exposed to in their lives.

But they are not working fast enough. The chat and the yards they are cleaning up have more than lead in them.  Our Tar Creek has more than lead in it.

Dig deeper. There is Arsenic. Manganese.

There is cadmium. I snuck in on a zoom mini-conference covering the relationship between cadmium and cardiovascular disease. By clicking the link I was sitting with a hundred health professionals, researchers and heart specialists, many who either treated patients with these conditions or others involved with the important research discoveries discussed that day revealing how the body deals with cadmium.

Our body needs some essential elements to function. We need calcium to build strong bones. But the sly heavy metal elements in our environment mimic what our body needs. For example: If exposed to lead, our body stores it, mistaking it for calcium and stores it in bones and in organs which can be damaged right away. When we don't have enough calcium, the body pulls it out of the bone into blood to circulate to vital organs, and if pregnant, can share lead with the fetus for the baby's bone development. I knew all that. Lead as an element, once in us it can stay and do great harm. That is why it is especially important to prevent lead exposure, so our bodies are not poisoned by it.

But what I learned about cadmium really bothered me. Our exposure to cadmium is relatively new. It was only discovered as part of zinc in the 1880's, and then only began to be put into product use in the 1930's. We need zinc to boost our immune system and metabolism function and help wounds to heal and insures your sense of taste and smell. What else? This conference went deeper with descriptions of how cadmium fools our bodies and mimics another essential element: zinc.  These two elements were found together when mined here in the Tri-State District.
 
I had looked at the ATSDR TOX Profiles years ago, finding the diseases known to be associated with each of the elements we know by living here we are exposed to and had learned that cadmium was linked to heart attacks and stroke. But lead got national attention. It became EPA's only Contaminant of Concern here, so did all of our focus, but our other elements remain concerning. Finally Congress and FDA are only now bringing forward proposed legislation, the Baby Food Safety Act, to cap the presence of inorganic arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury in baby food and cereal. So other harmful elements found here may gain their needed attention.
 
Dianne Le produced an image during the Harvard  University School of Design Studio, Tar Creek Remade which depicted children walking beside our Tar Creek and as that water flowed the symbols of these metals of concern, lead, arsenic, cadmium and manganese rested on the ripples( Mn-Cd-Pb-As). These elements float, flowing past us each day, but these metals flow through us as well. They are in Tar Creek's water, end up on soils when she leaves her banks. These elements of concern are in our air, when the dust from chat piles only a few miles away become airborne.
What if the water flowing through Miami no longer harbored the metals that can harm our lives, damage our hearts and kidneys, or become stored in our bones? Why can't we say we want it better?
Who wouldn't want clean air? And clean water.

Could our grandchildren's grandchildren wake to an elemental free water, no longer carrying heavy metals?

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” Robert F. Kennedy
 
Think about the legacy we can leave. Think of those tiny ripples we can create. We can speak for our water, in one voice, we can learn to love our Tar Creek. We can claim her. We can be her Water Protectors, whole families, whole neighborhoods can wear their "My Tar Creek" pins. Banners will go up in yards "hearting" this once disrespected free flowing stream. It is a powerful thought. Each person empowered to change the future, elementally. It is our time.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

For a semester each Monday morning at 7:00 and Thursday afternoon at 2:00, I have joined a class of 10 Harvard landscape architect students for over a hundred class hours in a process as they developed their projects to remake Tar Creek.

Having never attended any architecture class before, having no background to bring other than a true desire to have this place, this creek and our communities get a do-over, I humbly sat with Niall Kirkwood's class and participated in the process that was revealed this week.

Earl Hatley, LEAD Agency's Grand Riverkeeper joined in the sessions from Vermont while half of the students joined each week from their homes in China, since all the classes on the campus at Harvard have been remote this year.

We sat together and throughout the class sessions professional landscape architects joined to present their styles and to serve as critics for the student work as it progressed through the winter and into spring.

During the last moments of the class Earl had to ask the question we both had had and had failed to ask: how did the students decide what to take on, which of the issues at Tar Creek, and there are many, how did they select their project goal?

Earl suggested perhaps all of our issues were put in a hat and each student pulled one out? No, Niall said he "had not divvied them up but they each had decided on their own. and continued saying "this is not the end, it will carry on. Studios are driven by the students, freedom to promote their own ideas."

The class came about because of Niall's visit twenty years ago with 3 other Harvard professors. "The impression the people, the reception, the circle dance in the gymnasium, the Toxic Tour, Tar Creek, the chat piles and my now frayed t-shirt, the visual memories haunt me forever and are deep and centered in what I am interested in. This is only a start of how we will engage."

The student work began with Holly's "Weave the Unseen."  Her installation gives attention to the river (Tar Creek she calls our river) by beginning her project on 2nd street in the neighborhood by Roosevelt school and brings the community directly into the campus of NEO, which she mentioned was established in 1919 as the School of Mines.

Through a system of linked patches the unseen treats the water and brings people into a dialogue with the land and the eco-system to the edge of the creek in an area for contemplation, instruction, entertainment and cultural events.
Au Sun reminded us that the Quapaw were mound builders and are in the process of building new ones on their land mounding contaminated and unusable materials into structures that can resemble their past. Reshaping their land grouping piles with wisdom of wind direction will create microclimates, these sites become classrooms of evolving environment and reminders of past culture.  

The Healing Power of Vicky Wang took us to life after the chat piles, the regenerative form as the land becomes natural prairie, adding fruit trees and making agriculture a self-healing and growing future.

You have to allow others to see our place in their own way and Ms Zhang saw us a colorful, originally aesthetically striking and through her project how these colors will shift as our environment is cleansed.

Yokki took on Tar Creek herself using phyto-remedial planting and a wetland strategy using passive treatment and braiding river morphology to relieve the most urgent and contaminated stream and restore the dynamic and affected landscape once more to Tallgrass prairie preserve. But Diane just re-routs Tar Creek, creates a useable, enjoyable stream while mine-discharge is treated.

Dear Olivia took on the flooding while Jackie and Alykhan use technology to give Miami a whole new life.

Joyce took on the last but not least challenge. The sinkholes don't rank as solvable and are never reduced or considered as fixable by EPA, they receive zero funding.  Using her network of phytoremediation pods ON the sinkhole, the water would be treated and to be protective of humans, robots would manage the system. Pedestrian walkways allow visitors to safely view the work, that Mark Grigsby suggested must be constructed with lightweight materials since the ground is unstable near those sites. The studio was charged with excitement with the innovative project with Kurt Frantzen offering to submit a proposal in 6 month to Elon Musk for private funding to begin the project at once! As Joyce concluded she hoped through her work, "the landscape could become beloved."

I have long thought this place will only find the solutions and the reclamation deserved by establishing relationships with people with vision, skills and training and ultimately the power who will see this place but also see and experience us, each of us they encounter as people who matter, who have lives that matter and desires to live in places students like these can imagine.

We will always be grateful to Niall Kirkwood for remembering his experiences, the challenges we face, but mostly for remembering us and allowing us to meet his friend Kurt and his huge cadre of colleagues who so kindly guided these students with their projects throughout the semester. These students took on Tar Creek and with their projects Remade it all and gave hope where there has been none.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

This week brought the opportunity to speak at the virtual Intertribal Council's monthly meeting. I was as nervous as if I had to physically walk in the door. They each gain my respect for taking on the task to serve their tribe in such leadership roles and I always hope to show that respect while in their presence. Their agenda was long and what proceeded and followed my brief words came from both "outsiders" and locals with ideas and projects to share with this distinguished group.

Just yesterday I had picked up a copy of the 19th Bureau of Ethnology's Annual Report to Congress for 1897-98. The large green cloth bound volume was a throw-away from the Miami Public Library, found in their dumpster in the late 1990's and given to me by the fellow who jumped in and retrieved it.

Inside the book are the Myths of the Cherokee by James Mooney with photographs he had taken of places most Oklahoma Cherokees have never seen, not since our ancestors nearly 200 years ago had to leave experiencing the "enforced deportation" as that author described our removal. For me this occurred only four generations ago.

So while sitting with those Ottawa County tribal leaders, I was reflecting on all we collectively have embedded in our DNA, those experiences that brought each of our ancestors to be there together now and the resilience we must be demonstrating to the world by our continued existence. The three chiefs visible had relations who came to then Indian Territory as the Modoc from the state of California, having survived a War of Extermination, taken to first Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas and finally found a sliver of land with the Eastern Shawnee. The Ottawa from northern states then to Kansas and finally home with less than 14,000 acres. The Miami from the vowel states Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, deported to Kansas then again to Indian Territory to stay on 1,400 acres.

Great Nations. Peoples who had thrived for thousands of years were thrust together in this little county and have surprised the historians, the Indian Agents of the past and have thrived and rebuilt and have come to find the pride our very government tried to deport out of them.

My humble asks were for approval of the University of Arizona's Institutional Review Board for their student's work with LEAD Agency on collecting oral history we are calling Water and Work Stories.

The other subject was to alert them about the American Rivers' Endangered River status Tar Creek gained this month and the asks that are associated with that: the MOU we want GRDA, FERC and EPA to get them talking to each other to solve the big problems here; asking Congress to reauthorize the Polluters Pay feature of Superfund and to ask EPA to go back to the table and come up with the big fix for this site. I asked for them to ASK for these actions.

The words from Woody Guthrie's lyrics Deportees was inspired by a plane crash in the desert near Fresno, California that killed 28 farm workers being sent back to Mexico.

"All they will call you will be deportees"

Throughout my life, perhaps yours, we have been told we traveled, we experienced a Trail of Tears, we were relocated, but every one of the tribal leaders in the room I was not present in had relations who experienced forced deportations. We all had relatives who did not want to come to Indian Territory. We were forced and not one of us experienced that ourselves, but connect with it and relate to those Trail of Tears Stories.

But we were forcibly deported from homes, gardens, graves of our fathers, and from the mountain sites in the photos James Mooney took himself in 1888 standing in places our ancestors knew to be sacred, places we have never viewed ourselves.

We were never called deportees, but as I listen to the news this evening and tomorrow and the tomorrows that follow, the deportees in those stories, they look a lot like our people, our tribal people, lost in a strange land, just as our great greats must have felt, hearing unfamiliar language.

They are us. We are them. We just were never called deportees in the local newspapers or in the songs of that day.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Everyone is here on earth as an artist; to tell his particular story or sing her irreplaceable song; to leave a unique creative signature.  ~  Leonard Wolf

A river, even a creek can have a signature, and just as yours is distinctly yours, from space our flowing waters can illustrate to scientists how climate has affected their shapes and has controlled their elevational profiles. https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2019/09/16/Climate-signature-detected-in-Earths-rivers/1071568656154/
During the last year, I have stayed for the most part out on the prairie's edge at home  but answered the invitation from GRDA to attend a technical meeting in Claremore on the  Upstream Hydraulic Model as my first real outing.
 
Once in the room, one of the first announcements was the signup sheet being on the back table. But the back table was devoid of anything but the red ballpoint pen. The table needed signup sheets, and I sat ours up, covering the whole table. Nearly a thousand people have signed LEAD Agency's  "We've flooded enough. We won't take it anymore" signs. And all of these folks came with me to this meeting. Their fates and their hopes were visible with their names, one after another covering these cardboard covered proclamations with one boldly saying STOP the FLOODING placed uniquely in the center.  The pen stayed on the table, just in case another person would be moved to add their signature.

There never was another mention of the "sign-in sheet" from the meeting organizers, or another announcement to be sure  each of us had signed in.

During the lunch break, I left the meeting for a quiet room to join Women's Earth Alliance and Sierra Club's virtual event in honor of Earth Day 2021 called Who CARES? A conversation on Feminist Climate Action. They explained that "For millennia, women have been the bedrock of the “care economy”—nurturing families, laboring to better our societies, and stewarding the Earth and its precious resources. But as the climate emergency intensifies, so does the burden on our world’s women. Yet from these frontlines, women leaders are designing solutions from the ground up" so with a few other women environmental activists, we spoke. Our efforts dove-tail, our hopes one: A clean and safe environment. Indigenous women spoke with me, speaking for our sacred places, our damaged water, our hopes for reparations, reclamation and renewal of these throw-away places, like our very own Tar Creek. Women have taken on these roles, as activists, as scientists, as writers to see, learn, experience the earth around us and share in every way we find.
 
Just as recently I had received a package Kathryn Savage had sent with a book she hadn't written but would be similar to the one she is writing. Rising is the title by Elizabeth Rush with each section following the author's firsthand account of the real evidence the ocean's water is already rising, already 9 inches since 1880.
I am learning vocabulary as it is used to describe the physical changes happening to the environment the author encounters. Rampike is the name for ghost trees along the coastlines, where salt water is reaching the roots and the trees cannot relocate themselves, trapped in soil saturated by the sea, until salt takes their life and leaves them leaflessly marking shorelines.

Tidal marshes around the world too near the rising seas are rotting. These living marshes have been sequestering carbon for millennium but are now dying due to saltwater encroachment. These wetlands are beginning to stink, because they are rotting and releasing methane which is dangerous to our climate. As the ocean rises, those who loved those coastlines, loved the tree lined vistas, loved exploring the coastal wetlands surprised by the diversity of birds and other wildlife found there, will cease going there as those coastal treasures begin to die with saltwater from the rising sea reaching the roots of the plants, killing them and exposing the once sequestered carbon.

We are the middle of this country and those millions of coastal residents will be seeking the middle. We would welcome them, but first we must stand together to stop the power allowing our own waters to rise.

Those of us listening to the GRDA's presenters this week, in the room and virtually heard men speak about water rising, flowing, and flood frequency. We heard words that brought images: overbank, vertical datums, bridge geometries, timing a floodwave, and river miles. We learned that USGS speaks in water years. But there was not a word from them with any tinge of empathy for how that rising trapped water might enter a home, put a business under, ruin a crop in the field, or change the flow of commerce through an upstream town we heard of little consequence to an agency bent on improving the summers of large boat lovers.

"Whisper to the flashing water your real name, write your signature in the sand, and shout your identity to the sky until it answers to you in thunder.  ~  Christopher John Farley

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

The answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything else                                        
       -- Douglas Adams' classic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

There have been many numbers associated with Tar Creek and her Superfund Site. It has been years since we were listed first on EPA's National Priorities List as a hazardous site in 1983. But it is about to happen again. Our Tar Creek will be number one again any day. First in the hearts of many, first to be forgotten, but the first will be last as it has seemed to have become Tar Creek's fate to be last for a real cleanup through EPA's Superfund Program.

Miami has a long relationship with Tar Creek, having nestled next to and built up between both a river and a creek. But that relationship soured when she began to bleed orange and the fish ceased to live and flourish. Miami turned her back on her, drove over, ignored the stains on the trees along her banks, failed to complain to EPA about the orange stains on the new bridges. Forgot to mention at open meetings that their creek had literally been stolen from them, even though she never quit flowing through town.

Tar Creek was abandoned by the EPA because her superfund site was "complicated" and is one of what they call a "mega" site. But mega became a thing in the last administration, and as such should have gotten us the attention and the funding to "get her done." Although some funding came this way, it has not done a thing as yet to deal with this creek's issue, the mine water discharge sending one million gallons of water contaminated with heavy metals every day for get this: forty-two years, that is over 15,000 days.

EPA is sending money this way, I am grateful. Any resident in Ottawa County can have their yard tested for lead and if found, that funding will pay for that to be removed and clean soil to be brought to replace it. But I do worry when our Tar Creek leaves her banks and heads to  your cleaned yard, she will leave heavy metals as she recedes, because it is her nature. She is loaded and gets dosed up everyday, like clockwork.

Chat piles we have been familiar seeing are going down in size, and some completely removed and green fields can be found growing where EPA, and State of Oklahoma and Quapaw Nation's efforts are evident. But chat along Tar Creek's watershed bleeds and meets the mine discharge and brings that on downstream through fields and into Miami, through neighborhoods, sides up beside the NEO campus before ducking under the Steve Owens bridge and heading out of town.

There was a time Tar Creek had another name. If you lived in Cardin, you would have seen it on street signs as Tar River, reminiscent of the mining camp by that name, where its water was used in the mill and provided drinking water for residents.  The creek was “a lovely stream, banked with luxuriant foliage and with water as clear as glass.  Its banks are favorite resting and recreation places, the children of Tar River delighting in its refreshing beauty.” (source: Ed Keheley)

She floods there, too and for many years there was a tall marker along the road with numbers indicating feet, so you might know how deep that water was, as a deterrent to those who might think first before trying to drive through it.
Your first impression in Miami when looking at Tar Creek, many would think it looks better, not so orange, but that is because it is green which is another kind of problem. But if you stand back and notice the trees along the banks, that familiar color remains and is re-deposited every time the rains bring high water.

All this brings me back to numbers. Yes, were first and worst. But this year, is our year. This year we have the answer. This year we have hope. This year we still have a damaged creek, in fact we have a once endeared creek that has become endangered.

And this will bring us to action. Why? Because the answer is 42, the answer to not only the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything else that you may have read about in Douglass Adams' classic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But 42 is how many years we have put up with, and waited for what Ryan Lovell called that "eternal flow of evil" to stop. And this year, we are going to stand up as a community and say, "We are not going to take it anymore." The action starts with us. The action to speak up, stand up, to want this creek back, once and for all, and for good.

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

“Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother."
― Chief Seattle, Suquamish Chief

A quarter century ago there was a crisis in Ottawa County. There was a toxic plague settling in on our children, a totally preventable disease was infecting one out of eight of the children in Miami and in the other towns north of us the numbers were higher and higher still. A seemingly invisible poison was stealing I.Q. points from our young before they reached first grade.

The EPA descended on us and began doing the big things they could do right away to protect our children. They were digging up lead mining waste from school yards, playgrounds and parks. But it would be decades before they could remove all the waste that children were exposed to each day.

The dilemma of the great unmet need to protect children could not be met by the Health Department's efforts alone. Two years before LEAD Agency was born,  Cherokee Volunteer Society members at Miami High School were doing what they could do. What was that? Defeating lead poisoning by education. Yes, teaching moms all they could do in their own homes to reduce exposure to their kids, but the next step was making sure the littlest of children knew what they could do to save their very own futures. They could learn how to wash their little hands. These messages were told and Susan Waldron wore her "bee antennas" during blood lead testing sessions.

Oklahoma University researchers took another approach with a federally funded program they titled TEAL: Tribal Efforts Against Lead. They hoped to engage the tribes in the massive effort to lower lead levels in children and hired a research assistant, Sally WhiteCrow to get that done.

It didn't take Sally long to figure out the way she would engage the tribes and what they would be called. She based back to her own culture, being a member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation, with Quapaw heritage, she understood the basic respect elders claimed in those tribes and how strong the clan structure has been. Seeking and receiving support from her own elders, TEAL's lay health advisors would become known as Clanmothers.

Sally recruited elders from each of the nine tribes, and was surprised when men asked to be allowed to join and would take the name Clanfathers.  Over 40 members were trained to understand lead poisoning and how to prevent exposures to our young. Then they were tasked with teaching their families and their neighbors what they had learned.
Ms WhiteCrow grew the confidence of the Clanmothers and Clanfathers by challenging them to think bigger, widen their circles, present information at powwows and tribal gatherings. The shyest elders became outspoken, competent community educators. Then Sally widened the circle even more and set the elders out to the general public and off they went to the county fair, day cares and grade schools.
 
Sally told me years later, "It was a wonderful, wonderful project. It was certainly more than I ever expected. When I went in I was just looking for a job. But it became a way of life. I loved all those people we worked with."
 
After awhile these elders were going public and speaking out at the County Commission meetings and presenting resolutions. They sat down together to develop teaching materials, wrote letters to senators, governors, and to the EPA.

I know this because I could not turn Sally down. I wanted to be a Clanmother too. So for nearly ten years over forty tribal elders had another mother. We would all claim her as our own and to this day, those of us still living know we lost our other mother last week when Sally left us orphaned.  What else she left behind are children who were able to grow up healthier and more competent because their lead levels had been reduced by the actions these elders did to educate them and their families.

Midway through the TEAL Project Miami High School students published an anthology and Sally came to the book signing party held downtown at the bookstore. I asked her if she would share her thoughts about the environment with the students. She paused only a moment and said they should respect our earth as our mother since we have only one mother.
 
And last week I was reminded of her words: Only one mother.
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

Kids used to chose their backpacks. Remember that? The stores were full of different colors, styles, sizes. I remember all my life waiting for the school supplies to start showing up at the stores at the end of summer. Brand new stuff. That stuff would later be carried to school and stashed into my desk or locker. They were the symbols, things that got my brain cogged back into the mode to learn.

Without those props, or prompts, the colors, the ritual, can we continue to learn? I wondered, then this week, I signed myself and 3 others for an on-line 3 day course on Bio-retention. Which is a word a year ago had never entered my vocabulary. But after  LEAD Agency partnered with Anthropocene Alliance 's Higher Ground,     the nation's largest coalition of front line communities fighting for climate and environmental justice, we began to understand how flooding unities many who will never meet.

Individuals struggle with uncontrolled water. These individuals are organizing and have been sought out by Higher Ground's founder Harriet Festing. She has been enlisting us and as such helping us all know we are stronger together. You have all seen her work right there on Main Street, for she funded the billboard we hoped would help our senator not to flood us.

And it is through her efforts LEAD Agency will be receiving a Fish and Wildlife grant to fund a small local project to manage a bit of stormwater. And because of this, we believed it was necessary to began to learn not only the language but also to begin to better understand how on earth water can be managed at all.

And taking this course got me thinking more about the habits we began to form back when we got those brand new boxes of crayons  and pencils that were packed into the cigar box we had laying around the house, which also always made we wonder how did it get there since we didn't know anyone who smoked cigars, ever. Pivotal for me was learning to read, and knowing books were a portal to enjoy, and by reading learning became, "my game" which is a term my son used to describe his own interests of the day.

That habit got me wondering what made other people be lifelong learners, since I am sure there are others, and sure enough there are articles, all sorts of them listing the characteristics or the habits needed to become one, or to identify others around you that are.

First I had to understand what on earth a habit is and how you get one started. I learned it is a process, starting with a first step, even "ridiculously small" ones and reinforcing it, then repeating. Also defined as: “ongoing, voluntary, and self-motivated." Learners have discovered: "It’s about learning to know, learning to do, and learning to be." 

I am not sure how one cultivates the real backbone of learners: curiosity, but there it is lies on all these lists. Being open-minded and following it will keep one learning, and experimenting, taking actions that may lead to progress that helps you succeed or edge closer to a goal. 
 
Only one article listed a habit I won't say I was born to, but was exposed to early in life and therefore picked up young. That was the habit of using nice words, and showing gratitude sincerely. It was my Aunt Jewel who could pull out a compliment when NO ONE ELSE saw one possible and leave you believing it came from the heart. She saw things differently and taught it effortlessly. As such she demonstrated words matter, and what we say to others, even what we say to ourselves has power.

Can our words help our young, or our neighbors begin their journeys to learning, questioning, getting hooked for the first time, or reviving that part of us where we stored our dormant curiosity? Will our words encourage whole federal and state agencies to value us as real people so they seek ways to clean up our county, rid us of that legacy mining waste, mend our Tar Creek, and help our water provide safe habitat for fish we might want to consume?

What if each of us took time in this one precious day to begin new habits, start thinking of how we can stretch our minds and help one other to be that generous soul who can change the world.

What if? Why not?    

 
Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

Andrew Taylor Still established the College of Osteopathic Medicine in Kirksville, MO in 1892 based on his belief the practice of medicine could also include a system of drugless, manipulative medicine.

"Doctor Bea" graduated from that training and practiced medicine at the Bradshaw Hospital in Welch throughout World War II, then married and moved to Texas with my dad hung up her stethoscope, put on an apron and raised a family.

I was thinking about my mother in a different way today, having awakened dizzy. The room seemed to spin, like the old TV sets we used to have to get out of our chairs to adjust, confirming I was experiencing vertigo for real. It was miserable, but not scary since that rarely is life-threatening. The Mayo Clinic explains vertigo as your brain trying to sort out the confusion your brain, your inner ear, your eyes and sensory nerves are receiving.

This caused me to be unable to attend the funeral of a man my mother brought into the world when she was practicing medicine in Welch during the war. He must have been one of the first babies she delivered. She had been so pleased to be remembered as his doctor when we met him for the first time with his friend Ann, while picking up pears at his home.

There have been many endings to loved lives this year and many who are laid to rest with the families not surrounded by friends as in our recent past. Though much had been written about organ donation prior to the pandemic, it and whole body donation has gone quiet.

There are times the dead can share their essence to teach those who will take care of the living. Today it is simple to donate your whole body to The University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center Willed Body Program with forms you can find online. And there must have been a system earlier since my mother remembered hers so clearly. She was assigned a cadaver to learn the techniques surgeons needed to refine before they begin practice on their own live patients.

Each of her classmates had one, and each had 2 ears. The prize, the proof for the surgeon in the making was to remove each of the 3 bones in the ear flawlessly and to wear them on a necklace as proof. Sometimes my mother told me things and I believed them, but growing up with my dad, the "boofer" I did sometimes doubt even her stories of the past.

The bones are tiny and enable us to hear the train going by, but also the gentle breeze, or the soft breathing of a child while they sleep. The three tiny bones in the middle ear of all mammals are the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup. They work together so we have the ability to enjoy and make our way through the world safer and enjoy our surroundings all the more. I grew up in a house with AT Still looking over my shoulder. My mother had a bust of him and only decades later did I ask who it was, having always thought it to be some general, or philosopher.

I never saw her ear bone necklace, and I rather think it was the "boof" in the story especially since none of the research I have done since do they ever claim this happened. But there was a time a man came to my house and swore he had a whole necklace of ears in his car. I imagined lots of these little bones sort of clinking together as a person wearing it would hear.

But it wasn't that at all. It was a war-trophy he had gathered during the Viet Nam war, ears he has wacked off the dead. I was so traumatized at his recounting the item never came into my home and he was asked to leave. That kind of abuse and dismemberment must never be condoned. Never seen, the image has yet to leave my memory and my only hope was it some sort of uncalled for "boof."

But it is the vertigo I have been experiencing the last few days that brought to mind the precious and precise ways we are engineered. Our fine tuning must be the miracle, when just one little jigger of issue with one's inner ear can bring the whole system into a day's long effort to find one's "sea-legs."

Hoping to right the course soon, and that you, too have firm footing through all that follows for us.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

There is a valley in northern Georgia where the Cherokees discovered De Soto in 1540. Along the stream running through the valley was a canebrake which provided the traditional materials used in a week long retreat I attended taught by Cherokees who still lived in our traditional homelands.

As the Indian Counselor for Miami, and before that Sapulpa, learning native based skills would allow me to be able to pass learned skills forward to students.

Before "discovery" the tribes in the Southeast found all they needed to survive within their surroundings, they used what they had and they had a lot of rivercane (Arundinaria gigantea). It was grown, managed and encouraged because it could provide the weapons needed for war, for hunting, could be made into baskets and even used to make music!

Through the week, I cut rivercane and made a knife, arrows, a blowgun, and the darts topped with the down from thistles and the flute I never tuned up.

All those years ago, I have longed to have access to this magical material, but the stands of rivercane are rare we are told within the Cherokee Nation boundaries. But I have kept my eye out for it none the less. This week barely out of Vinita on the north side of the road what ???? Rivercane.  Nothing is as tall and appears as proud. 

I walked down the steep incline and up to the fence line. From here to yonder, thick, healthy, tall and the most awesome sight. So much had been there some had been brush-hogged down.

All those years ago, at the Rivercane Roundup,  I also learned to use cattails to make mats, but more fun, I learned how to make cattail duck decoys. There is a special thing about these cattail duck decoys, once they are made, they have attitudes, the way they hold their head, tilting it just so, gives each one a personality.

So naturally when I got back, I started immediately looking for both rivercane and cattails. Rivercane has been rare to find but back then, boy cattails were everywhere I looked! They were growing in a bar ditch right in front of the Miami High School, they were growing in Commerce near George Mayer's brick factory, where he had kept his horses until acid mine water started shooting up out of the ground and got his horses all spattered with orange water. And the other place cattails grew like crazy was in the Tar Creek Superfund site, all around the mine water discharging and flowing into Tar Creek.

All the cattails we would ever need, and so many people who wanted to learn how to make cattail duck decoys of their own. The Cherokee Volunteer Society members were cleaver, always thinking of ways to bring awareness of the issues faced here, and they had been thinking about having a Duck Race and had already gotten permission from some authority at Grand Lake to hold a Grand Race, with our standard yellow rubber ducks, each numbered before being released at that bridge on Douthit, where that mine water enters Tar Creek, each with the message:
" I came from Tar Creek How Far Did My Pollution Go? "
There would be a grand prize for the person whose duck went further. It would be so much fun!

BUT then what if we used the handmade cattail duck decoys? And we based people back to their culture by creating a craft our ancestors made, using materials they would have used. It wouldn't get any better! 

By then we had learned from Niall Kirkwood, the co-author of PHYTO that some plants were hyper-accumulators, and as such could actually take up heavy metals into the plant tissue, and as such could expose all our craftspeople to heavy metals if the cattails we used were contaminated.

We took samples from those 3 places that the cattails were growing in such quantities and sent them to the Harvard School of Public Health to have analyzed and waited. It wasn't long until we received the results, all of the sites' cattails were loaded with heavy metals, in all parts of the plants.

All these years we have waited to be able to use local cattails and teach this skill and let those personality plus ducks loose in a big race. We can't do it yet. These places still are contaminated, with the exception of the Miami High School cattails. When EPA remediated that area, the cattails never returned.

But it is time, and LEAD Agency is gearing up for a regular rubber duck race. We have all waited 42 years to be able to reclaim our Tar Creek. 42. According to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe, 42 "is the answer to everything." And it is our year to begin the RACE for cleanup.

We are going to be launching practice runs and time our ducks to see how fast they are from one bridge to the next. Go ahead and get your duck into shape, start trimming your time, figure out which duck operates in your advantage. Or sponsor a duck. You still  have time.

Ducks, on your mark....

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

"Grief is a wild animal that has no concept of time." Rain Phoenix

I dealt today with death. Not my family. But then perhaps in this life, the people I know and have known these decades are really my most extended family.

For the quarter century I served as Indian counselor for the Miami Public Schools, the students who came into my office, walked those halls of learning, became my kids. Their teachers were my friends, friends I sometimes had to cajole to understand the individuals who sat in their classrooms needed more than the education they provided, they needed to be valued as the real live persons they were with buckets of emotions stuffed inside those pockets that could leak out at the least provocation.

We came together to find the balance that could make learning important and possible. I always loved learning and found it odd when others were challenged to achieve. Having worked in school districts before coming to Miami, I had not encountered the challenge many of the students and of course our teachers faced here. When I arrived in Miami, the year Tar Creek turned orange, it was before there was a superfund program and certainly years before our own Tar Creek Superfund Site ever was listed on the National Priorities List as the most dangerous site in the nation. It would be 15 years later before EPA recognized the site was actually putting our children at risk of lead poisoning. And then it took a few years to get a plan established and to begin doing something about reducing lead exposure to our children.

Lead was making our children seem so different to me from the previous schools I had worked. The teachers in the Miami school district and in the neighboring towns had become the most challenged teachers and because they were, they became great teachers. They had to learn how to help children learn who were distracted, who had difficulty sequencing, who were found to have attention deficits and some who were visibly hyperactive. Some had learning difficulties that required special services, but our teachers toughed it out, so many of the children in 7th and 8th grade had never been referred for special services until they reached us.

Lead can cause irreversible neurological damage. It can cause ADD and ADHD, it can cause the loss of IQ. Our children were harmed. Not by anyone. But by the simple act of living this close to a superfund site with lead as the contaminant of concern. There was general thinking that THAT would only be happening at Picher, it could only be happening over THERE. But there was right here in Miami, Commerce, Quapaw school districts.

At the time EPA was alerted to be concerned about children being lead poisoned, children had already been lead poisoned for generations. National trends in lead poisoning put the national average at 2 percent of the children in the US were lead poisoned. But right here in Miami, 8 per cent of our children were found to be lead poisoned. And higher percentages in the other towns north of us.

EPA had drawn a box and Miami was not included in the "fix" they planned. It took clandestine actions by a newly formed LEAD Agency and high school students collecting soil samples from our school playgrounds and parks to get EPA to extend cleanup for our children.

As a counselor, I got to sit with these young people who struggled to learn and how debilitating it felt for them, how inadequate they felt about themselves when it was so hard to keep up with their friends in classwork. I saw what you saw with your own children or their friends when they wept with the loss of their own possibilities.  Not every child was affected intellectually by their exposure to lead, but lead can go to sleep in your body as it is stored in your bones, mistaken for calcium. Then pulled out by pregnant moms if the baby needs calcium, exposing that child to lead even before they are born. Or for our breast feeding moms whose body load of lead was passed on their children that way. We learned that this happened with our babies with the research done through the MATCH Project.

Knowing this has kept EPA here, working on cleaning up residential yards now throughout all of Ottawa County, digging up lead contaminated soils out of yards, parks, playgrounds. Places your children played are better now and safer. Not all of the parks have been done yet, and certainly not every resident has called the hotline to get their yard tested for lead yet. (1-800-522-0206)

I reconnected with a couple of the young people who became "my kids" and their heartaches today. Generations apart, but still in my heart, learning about the rest of their lives. The joys of marriage and grandchildren and then the devastating loss of a spouse by COVID19, who was also one of my "kids."  While another was a mother hurting with layers of grief.

There are all sorts of loss that result in feeling deep grief. I am feeling it and hoping if you are we hold each other closer so we get through this.

 Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

       In winter
          all the singing is in
            the tops of the trees  - Mary Oliver
 
As our cold weather settles in it I am reminded of the sounds of winter.

When I first lived in Spearfish, South Dakota. I rented a room from a widow. After she would leave for work, I would shower and wash my hair, towel dry it and rush off to class at Black Hills State College. It wasn't a long walk.

Fall was quick there and the temperatures dropped and as they dropped way below freezing, I would hear the most peculiar sound. It might have taken me a week or two to finally understand where the sound was coming. It was my hair. It was my long hair hanging down my back. I was leaving with my hair not totally dry.

That cold was really nothing I had ever experienced. And each individual hair was freezing. The sounds were them clinking together as I walked. 

I am like many people finding the cold settling in the thing we have to endure to get us closer to spring and spring gets us all closer to being outside without all these layers of clothes we have pulled out from the closets and bottom drawers to be able to tolerate these few days that may end up being a longer stretch than we thought was coming.

But the cold brings time to think about and ponder and that may be why questions have surfaced ranging from particular health questions to what is really happening with GRDA and are there any next steps to step into with them and where and how do I get my water tested.

Those and a multitude of past questions are why LEAD Agency organized over 24 years ago. We had questions ourselves and believe we will keep generating them. There are a couple of organizations, some colleges and universities who have professors with students who want to help communities like ours that have questions and want real answers, based on facts. So keep asking. Call us, reach out, wonder with us. As they say we are stronger together. AND LOUDER!

Currently we have a couple of scientists helping us create the interactive map that will be of use for those of you who may not know you will be in deep water if and when the lake rises 2 feet. We need it now so you will be able to get your gear to higher ground because you will know you are at risk. We are working with a college on air issues and would like you to contact us if you might want to help them help us all. The Harvard School of Design has a class full of graduate students working on what Tar Creek Remade might look like. We need those designs because that creek will be clean one day and we want to be ready with ways we can enjoy being near her!

Another project we are starting we can't really start without your help. Young women, one from the University of Arizona and another from the University of Oklahoma want to help us collect the inspiring stories some of you may want to share about your work or how water has been part of your life. Water and Work we are calling this. 

Again, health questions got us started all those years ago. And there are still questions on health coming in that are puzzling us since they weren't on our list of what to expect so they weren't on our list to ask about. We didn't know to ask about Aspergillosis or low iron. Before we leap out with the new health survey, please update us on what you are experiencing yourself or in your family so we can include these in that new survey. What we had no idea was coming on us when we formulated our health survey almost 2 decades ago was of course the corona virus COVID-19, which has infected many people and caused too many here and around the country and around the world to die. We will have time to gather and organize the health survey we need, because we will be waiting to conduct it until it is safe to be doing it.

It will be cold, layer up, send us an email at  leadagency@att.net or message us on Facebook, call our office at 918-542-9399. We will pile your questions in on what we have already, we will layer them in, we will seek the answers or look for solutions.

We will keep you posted on the next layers EPA is putting out there about the what's next in their take at the largest superfund site in the nation right here in Ottawa County, OK and how we get to learn what they are looking to do and why.

Stay warm, lay on another blanket, keep your faucets dripping, bring in your dogs. Take some time to ponder and keep your questions coming.

Respectfully yours ~ Rebecca Jim

For over a quarter of a century, I have seen Tar Creek as a wounded, damaged, bleeding water running through a town that built itself between a creek and a river. And once she bled orange, I have been warning people to keep their children away from it lest they become damaged themselves.

None of this is false. Our Tar Creek has a reputation to live up to, worst, most polluted, lost. She is even the namesake of one of the largest superfund sites in the nation. A site that has yet to have a comprehensive plan developed for a real and lasting cleanup.

We have all shown patience. We have waited knowing that the only federal governmental agency with PROTECTION as a middle name would have the best and wisest scientists, geologists, hydrologists who would put their minds together as one and solve the issues, scrape this moonscape back together, healing the land and allowing clean water to flow through it, passing through Commerce and bringing that delightfully refreshing water down through the pecan grove, past my friends' homes along her banks, siding by Torbert Park and nesting through the Frisbee Golf course sliding by what was the Coleman's gazebo before she ducks beneath the Rockdale Bridge, edges through the college campus, lies neatly beneath the bridge at Central before passing in sight of the Rotary Centennial Park where those walking know she passes quietly nearby, while barely noticed she slides under the Highway 10 bridge and gets going wide and deep enough for a fleet of kayaks to join her on her way to the Neosho.

I came to see Tar Creek differently today. I was invited by one of LEAD Agency's board members to come to care for the creek. We have done cleanups along the creek over the years. But this was different. We did pick up a bit of debris, but we took time to watch the water flow, traveling as it did over the rocks, spilling past, shining in the sunlight, rushing past, not noticing many of us watching, pausing to marvel at the roots of the trees washed away by the water, finding the limb broken from a tree, so clearly worked by the resident woodpecker, the hole a work of art no longer his. I always slow when walking along this part of the creek to find a rock that works as a worry stone, and easily bent for this day's, which was later gifted to one of our local medical heroes walking past at the end of his day. We can ease much of his worries if we all wear our masks, social distance and take our vaccines when our turns come around.

Discarded items, some unnamed, debris, bits of broken glass already being weathered by the water were removed. But the Indian patterned blanket we left wrapping the tree as we had found it. As has usually been the case, we did find a tire, this time a very small one, allowing my Texas accent to announce that, "Yes, we had indeed found TIRE CREEK." (An old and sad joke I have pulled on her all these years, because there most always will be a TIRE discarded in her.)

The sun's light, the breeze, the temperature of the afternoon put together gave those of us gathered this pandemic day a chance to see this creek in a new way, brought together friends, and new friends and gave us pause before we left to reflect on the time we had experienced there.

I left the house without bringing Olive Sullivan's poem, Martin Lively read Amanda Gorman's insightful words:  
                For there is always light,
                if only we’re brave enough to see it.
                If only we’re brave enough to be it.
 
Then the words of an old Gaelic Blessing were read by a child:
 
                May you always be blessed with walls for the wind.
                A roof for the rain. A warm cup of tea by the fire.
                Laughter to cheer you. Those you love near you.
                And all that your heart might desire.
 
All these years coming to the creek, this time we came to show we cared while we listened to Jen Myzel, whose music is medicine for these times, sing "Seed Kiva's" words:
 
                "Dream with me. What is the beautiful world beyond war and fear,
                that you know in your heart is not only possible but is what we are here to do?"
 
                "The seeds are dreams of poems yet untold of stillnesses the universe unfolds."
 
That is what we heard and the seed of this day is the dream of what we can find, what we can have if collectively we begin this journey to care, to genuinely care for this water that seeks only to pass through and find her ocean.
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

         Throwing shade is a subtle way of disrespecting or ridiculing someone verbally or non-verbally.

 I do know I have been disrespected at times. I can wear it. But the kind of shade I would like to talk about is the real thing, the stuff trees gift us with in the hot summer, the commodity a city needs that must be planned and planted for the generations not yet born.

Where I grew up in west Texas, there were very few trees, but we had one. It shaded our front yard, was climbable and became one of my best friends. It also provided my first experience with serious illness and ultimately death. It was an elm and it got Dutch elm's disease, that slowly starved the tree of nutrients and water, causing the leaves to fall and then the branches died. As a child, I noticed it first, and kept climbing up and trying unconvincingly to have the tree heal itself and get well. I was at school when it was cut down and removed, or I might have displayed my future self by "tree-hugging" it to have it remain forever.

It was no wonder when our 6th grade teacher required us to memorize and recite poems aloud that  I chose Joyce Kilmer's Trees, which ended with the verse:

       Poems are made by fools like me,
       But only God can make a tree.

Yes, but anyone can plant one. Or can plant many.

It is interesting to me that the first tree of interest to me was infected with a fungi spread by elm bark beetles and I learned later those beetles had only arrived in North America in 1928 and by 1989 over 75% of the estimated 77 million elms had been lost. My tree was only one of the casualties.

Now pine trees are dealing with the pine bark beetle. Those beetles have been around for generations, but the difference now is climate change. They are thriving and instead of reproducing every 2 years, they are reproducing 5 times a year and their population is exploding and the trees that made the Black Hills black, are now dead. Same with much of the Rocky Mountain air you used to love to smell. Those trees won't be there for you like they were.

So do we give up? No, we plant more trees. We need the gifts they give. We start again.  And we start this season. We plant trees for the future. For our future, for our children's. And we plant them to remember these friends and relatives who we have lost during our part of this pandemic.

Trees will provide oxygen that we need to breathe. In a community that deals with flooding remember that trees can help reduce the amount of storm water runoff, help reduce erosion and even can play a role in storing or sequestering carbon. Tree roots filter contaminated rainwater and can and trap it before it moved downstream.

Trees provide that SHADE that becomes the canopy that helps reduce the heat we feel on summer days.
But the additional gift trees give may be the fruits or nuts they can provide for the grower.

Which leads me to bring up a particular type of tree and the vision someone had 40 years ago. Our LEAD Agency office is on the corner of A and Steve Owens. And right there in front of it are our Giving Trees. Much like The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein would remind you that the tree gains happiness from the joy we get from the shade that is given and the crop of pecans produced for the taking.

One of my happiest memories is the time the Boys and Girl Clubbers picked up pecans counting each one and then figuring out the total they had all found that day! But the tree must have also loved our Earth Day events, our Community Garden Parties and Greg Fitzgibbon and later Grant Smith playing music in the shade.We know pecan trees are native to America, and thrive locally AND are great in a pie, but pecans are actually really GOOD for YOU.

According to a study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, pecans contain more antioxidants than any other tree nut. They are loaded with vitamins and minerals such as manganese, potassium, calcium, iron, magnesium, zinc, and selenium. Pecans contain monounsaturated fats which help reduce the risk of heart disease, and are packed with fiber. Pecans increase metabolism, protect the human body from cancer, are rich in magnesium which is known for its anti-inflammatory benefits, are a rich source of manganese which is a powerful antioxidant, and the list goes on.

And they can be used as a meat substitute to make hamburgers and a great chili (recipes available on request.)
 
Vision with me throwing some shade on the next generation. And let's get some pecan trees planted this spring.

       To exist as a nation, to prosper as a state, and to live as a people, we must have trees. - Theodore Roosevelt

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim
 

Thirty-four years ago I attended a Say It Straight Training taught by Paula Englander-Golden and learned the empowering communication skills and behaviors that have propelled my self-awareness, improved positive relationships and helped reinforce my drive for social responsibility. She defined several communication styles, but the one that works is called: leveling -- when one is able to speak clearly and truthfully about your feelings with respect for yourself and for others. I have waited all these years since for a President to "level" with me. That is what Joe Biden did in his inaugural address. It took him 15 minutes to actually say he was leveling, but he was doing it throughout his speech.

It ends up being pretty simple. His message: Tell the truth, be the good people he says we are. Treat each other with dignity and respect. He believes we can join forces, stop shouting and lower the temperature. He leveled with us all when he said "my whole soul is in this" in bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation and he asked every American to join in the cause.

His whole soul is into uniting our nation. It is like he is asking us to help, to join a cause bigger than our opinions so we can face some of the feelings and the real life issues that we may be experiencing like: anger, resentment, hatred, extremism, lawlessness, violence, disease, joblessness and hopelessness. He goes on to imagine that "with unity, we can do great things, important things. We can right wrongs."

It was almost like the "I have a Dream Speech" given by Martin Luther King, Jr., but it was Joe Biden talking straight about how we can finally end up dealing with the 400 year old cry for racial justice that we no longer have to defer. We might even listen to our planet for her own survival.

He sees unity as the path forward to get us through our historic challenges and the crisis of the virus, seeing each other as neighbors not as adversaries. He proposes we begin by listening to one another, seeing each other again and seeing our common hopes for opportunity, security, liberty, honor and yes - truth.

Mr. Biden asks that we all open our souls instead of hardening our hearts, show tolerance and humility and end this uncivil war dividing us. We have lived through one Civil War and other great struggles through the history of this country and as Lincoln reminded us our better angels have always prevailed.

We have a dark winter ahead with the pandemic still raging, we are going to need each other. Biden asks that we face this together as One Nation and make it the American Story that will be told by the generations that follow us, of how we pulled together and answered the call of history, did our duty and healed a broken land.

The platform at the Capitol never became full. The mall in front of the capitol held thousands of flags  waving in the wind instead of the normal supporters, while thousands of members of the military were brought to ensure the peaceful transfer of power would happen without a hitch. We were not there, clapping for the talented performers singing the songs of America, we were not there to stand in amazement for Amanda Gorman's poem, "The Hill We Climb" written for the day by the young poet laureate or to stand for the new president and vice president.

She and the president, the new, but oldest president ever and the youngest poet, these two speakers caught our breath. She hit us aside the head when she said, "Where can we find light in this never-ending shade?" Did she notice how the sun came out when President Biden spoke, just as the sun had broke free when Abraham Lincoln stood in that same space for this 2nd Inaugural speech, after the Civil War was waning. She got us thinking about how quiet isn't always peace and what just is Isn't always justice. She told us "a nation that isn't broken but simply unfinished" - that "we aren't striving to form a union that is perfect, We are striving to forge a union with purpose."

Amanda agreed with the president that we must put our differences aside, laying down our arms "so we can reach out our arms to one another." The efforts must be made and can be.

"If we merge mercy with might and might with right,
Then love becomes our legacy
And change our children's birthright.
So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left."
 
This old white man and the young black poet made music, gave hope and began the first day of a new American Story.

I think we can try to be brave enough to take his challenge. We can level with each other, show our fellow humans dignity and get to doing our part in what will be the story we want told of how we healed our nation, each one of us, just like Joe Biden thought we would.
 
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Fever: Although a fever technically is any body temperature above the normal of 98.6 F (37 C), in practice a person is usually not considered to have a significant fever until the temperature is above 100.4 F (38 C).
Fever is part of the body's own disease-fighting arsenal: rising body temperatures apparently are capable of killing off many disease- producing organisms. For that reason, low fevers should normally go untreated, although you may need to see your doctor to be sure if the fever is accompanied by any other troubling symptoms.

Yesterday my eyes were tired, I was sore to move, and I felt totally like AM, the nickname for the fellow in Vinita who moved at a speed that was hard to detect much movement at all. (Vinita's kids were hard on each other and gave nicknames that would follow you throughout your life) AM's nickname was short for "Ambitious" because these boys didn't think he had any. So for the last 2 days I was totally "AM."

But there was a moment when I was thinking about last week's actions at the Capitol and thought about a technique I learned from Paula Englander Golden. She taught us how the take the temperature of a group. Not with a thermometer of course, but by asking and taking time to listen to how people were at a particular moment of time.
What if someone could have stopped the feverish crowd last week and taken time to listen and to be listened to. What if by talking and discussing truths, perhaps real truth could have been honored?

I was able to take the temperature of lots of different groups through the years. Our country had a temperature last week. We were beat into a frenzy. Even though there were thousands of "patriots" activated to invade the capitol, they did so in defense of a lie. Definition of fever pitch : a state of intense excitement and agitation; an example of fever pitch in a sentence: "I worked myself up to a fever pitch of enthusiasm."

A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good just because its accepted by a majority. Booker T. Washington
 
And that day on the steps of the Capitol and those who broke windows and doors did so in a fever.
 
Yesterday after acknowledging my personal symptoms I hunted down the lone thermometer in my house.  It proved along with the symptoms and no AMBITION that I did have a fever. My Dad always told me if I sucked on a "fever stick" long enough I would get well. That is what I have been doing the last few days, and I think it is finally starting to work.

Rest and clear fluids, and dash of cranberry juice will get me though. 

Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us. William Penn

What will it take for our country?

Calming thoughts can be a cure. There has to be a change in our hearts. But we have to start with what we listen to, and what we see and take in to be true.  But we cannot rule out justice. We have been wronged.

Perhaps by people you care most dearly. There will be consequences, and some of that has begun. Some will be put on the "no fly list" for life. Some will be arrested. Some will try to gain fame from the actions they took at the capitol. They had a fever. And that fever could have been fatal to this country, our democracy just like our bodies are fragile.

The miracle each of us is, the amazing parts and systems we have that crisscross and allow us to get up in the morning and have the ultimate opportunity to make that day the best it can be, for us personally and for the real live chance to do for others just because.

This fever will pass. We can drink those fluids, bundle up in our beds and keep thinking 'well' thoughts but Rudyard Kipling nailed it when he said, "Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” And perhaps taking time to visit with your neighbors and relatives and talk through the trauma and the feverish feelings they may have been experiencing. We can lower the temperature by using that powerful drug, WORDS.

Be a real man, or gentlewoman and remember to continue wearing masks. Oklahoma was not represented well last week when our own representative failed to accept a mask and remained unmasked in a pandemic and so far 3 others have tested positive for COVID19 who were sequestering with that group in the Nation's capitol.
Take care of yourself, wear a mask and help us save lives.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

We can be stronger once we mend. A bone is after new bone forms around the fracture so as to protect it, a graft onto a fruit tree, even a broken heart can make one stronger.

Cat Stevens' song came to me with the words, "Morning has broken" and so did it seem for awhile that our democracy would be broken.

I could not sit and watch, but I could not stay away. It was as if the country we had grown up with, flawed and historically cruel to non-whites was not on fire, but fracturing with people moved by the righteousness for power denied by the results of our last election denied by the most powerful person in the world.

Results had not been conveyed in believable ways. The concepts I had grown up with have gone away, like: "Don't be a sore loser."  "Winner takes all."  "We take turns." "Win some, loose some."  For the most part we didn't  "burn down the house if we lost."

Elections. Even before I could legally vote, I chose losers and have voted for many losers. But I never had a fit. I didn't even get a Pussy Hat last time around. I have participated in peaceful protests in my life, but never to overthrow an election, but to stop pipelines we knew would leak, because all pipelines leak, or to stop unnecessary wars. I have never participated in a coup, or an insurrection, or a radical takeover of an occupied government building filled with elected officials at work on the people's business.

But I did get to witness such an action. And it was frightening to watch just exactly how fragile democracy might  be. But as the day turned to night, our people went back to work for us. They climbed out of the closets and got off the floors, unlocked doors down long lonely halls and stood back up and came back to finish the task of the day, for us, the American people, to value the votes we had cast, because that is how we determine who our winners and naturally who our losers are.

According to John Haltiwanger Wednesday January 6 was the first time the US Capitol was breached by a large, violent group since the War of 1812 and Senator Cory Booker went on to express his description of both events being inspired by cults of personalities, one a foreign adversary and the other our sitting president. 

This peaceful transfer of power is unique and a thing we have taken for granted. And may not take for granted anymore. We will have to be vigilant and remember how nearly broken we were. We will be stronger, but we have to reach back to another time in our nation's history, and reach deep into how divided we can be as a people. Think back to the Civil War and the deep hatred ginned up in the nation and when Lincoln was re-elected, the words that stood out from his inaugural address:

  With malice toward none; with charity for all; ... to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

As he spoke he wore a jacket and inside the lining these words were embroidered: One Country - One Destiny. 
There is an image from the takeover of our nation's Capitol that connects those times to now. The Confederate flag originated during the Civil War as a battle flag for the pro-slavery Confederacy and throughout the entire Civil War the flag never entered the Capitol, but photographer Saul Loeb captured it being carried through the rotunda in 2021, remarkably shown between the portraits of Charles Sumner, an abolitionist and John C. Calhoun, a defender of slavery.

There were many such flags and many carrying the name of our current president who eventually asked the rioters to go on home, but not before he expressed his love for them.

As we go forward, with a new president who will take his office with malice toward none... he will have to bind up the nation's wounds from the hatred and divisiveness, the divisions we have had even over the deadliest contagious disease our nation has ever faced and find a way to bring us back to the hope we all have of One Country - One Destiny. We have a common destiny.

Morning has broken like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the world
 
I have had many friends contact me and nudge me to get the vaccine to be protected from COVID19, and am glad to report my brother got his first shot today and I will have my first in 2 days. Speaking of praise for the morning!
 
I am believing our common destiny must help our broken feelings heal and attempt to bind up our nation's grief.
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

Suggested reading:
Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln,” Edward Achorn

A large avocado colored envelop arrived 10 days ago in my rural mailbox, and looking at the return address I knew it was from our friend Diana Duran at the avocado ranch she had inherited recently. When I opened it of course... it was a book! What else from a woman so attached to our Miami Public Library, than a book. But this one? Embossed with the words of Lucy Larcom: He Who Plants a Tree Plants a Hope. The little volume was filled with a quote on each page not limited to the value of trees in our lives but how to inspire hope.

But she and trees, hope and remembrance have been brought forward in my mind of late. 'There are many reasons to plant trees, the best time? twenty years ago!' That saying goes on with, 'the second best time is now.'

My dad and I planted a cedar tree near my house and I remembered him saying he had been told when planting one he would never live long enough to stand in its shade.  He knew he would never benefit from it, but valued his role in the planting.

Over the holidays I had time, to reflect and go through stuff stashed in a corner and found one of the little booklets Indian Club made for our 'Candle Lighting Ceremony' conducted the day school let out for the Christmas holidays; held there and once at the Miami Mini-Mall, where there I will never forget one of our shyest 9th graders ever, simply opened her mouth and filled that space with the most beautiful song, sung from the heart.

For several years we made luminaries, which are a thing of beauty. Simply made, brown paper sacks half filled with sand and a candle lit inside. We lit them at the Intertribal Council Candle Lighting and on the front steps of Miami High School when held there.

The little booklets were assembled with each page containing 6 to 8 names of the newly lost and those who continued to remembered. Each year someone was moved to write a poem. Each name was read and a simple remembrance given or a story that sometimes made us laugh together through tears. Each was remembered in honor of their lives lived.

There were other times when we planted trees for those we had loved and lost, some we planted for people we never got a chance to know. Like the redbud at MHS we planted for the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Trees were planted for reasons, with purpose. When remembering Jake Whitecrow, we planted a white pine for peace on the east side of ITC. At the Quapaw powwow grounds, we planted a dogwood outside the tribal headquarters after a storm had come through and broken limbs off larger trees. Down by the campsites near Beaver Creek we planted cottonwood trees as hypo-accumulators to take up heavy metals deposited from legacy mining, and to be the shade that campers might enjoy 30 years later.

Many of those trees were later cut down, some did not survive. But we did the act. You plant a tree for the future.

We dug up the ground and placed those trees to remember and long afterwards no matter if the tree survived or not, the act is remembered and in the act, those dear souls are remembered and they are remembered in the shade, with each pecan that is picked up, for the walnuts that crash through the branches and bomb us with memories.

As I look out the window and see the deer eating the acorns under Annabel Mitchell's oak. Around the bend stands the walnut tree John Sixkiller and I planted with a simple walnut. The bench I placed there 20 years ago has long dissolved back to nothing. but the tree provides walnuts and the kindling I need to light the fires that keep me warm each winter.

The loblolly pines here were not planted in rows, they were planted in groups of 7 down the lane to my house for the 7 clans of the Cherokees. When the wind blew through them I was reminded by the sound of my winters and summers spent in the mountains, in New Mexico, in South Dakota's Black Hills and in the Colorado Rockies.

Many of the pines have died here, some each year as the pine bark beetle works their way through one and then has not far to fly to the next. But I don't regret planting them.

There is something about digging the dirt out and planting a tree that symbolizes starting over, while honoring our loved ones and watching for signs of life that comes from those efforts.

Come spring, I will be planting trees, for my friends, and now my cousin who have died of COVID.

I imagine groves of trees. Cities will have shaded streets, perhaps plaques for whom they were planted.

We must remember. We cannot forget they loved shade, the blooms on fruit trees, the fruit so sweet in the summer. The pecans made into pies in the fall.

We will remember. I will remember as I plant these trees that I will never live long enough to stand in their shade.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

When I was growing up my parents would occasionally challenge each other in ways that for the most part paid off for us kids.

For example: They would make hot rolls using their own secret recipes and we got to be the judges. But the time I will never forget was when Nora O'Bannon the little girl who lived across the street came for a sleep-over and it was the fudge-making contest we woke up to that Saturday morning. We could not decide and well... ate way too much fudge during that deliberation.

My son and I re-activated the challenge today with Bread.

Using my mother's recipe, the twist? on top of the stove in a cast-iron Dutch oven. His challenge? Using metrics, measuring grams precisely on digital scales using YouTube instructions and a recipe found on-line from a London chef.

Of course winning is prestigious, but when you lose, you really win because the winner becomes for example, the "Bread maker" for all times. Which meant with tonight's bread decision, I win by loosing since I get to enjoy fresh loaves of bread the rest of my life, that I don't have to cook myself!

Winning is for keeps in our family. My mother never had to make fudge again either.

Traditions can be re-lived and I hope you will find ways to remember your traditions, whatever they have been, jive them back using the twist that fits for you and your loved ones who may be long gone, or recently lost, but the memories are real again as tastes, odors, and the tinge of competitiveness can bring those loved spirits back, their love of the game back with you. Feel the way we are connected in long forgotten experiences.. in new ways...

Nora towered over me. We were in the same grade, but she was older because of the extended time she had to be in an iron-lung as a child. As my dad would describe bigger girls, like Nora, as "horsey" a term he ungraciously used for a girl who could probably beat up any boy she heard calling her that. She only looked bigger because she was actually older and had a year's head start on me.

But Nora was my friend and all these years later keeps crystal clear memories of the times she spent across the street at our house, of a family that could laugh, eat meals together and stay in the same room without all hell breaking out for the most part of course.

It was because of Nora I learned to cook. I wanted to learn because Nora could cook. I still have the little skillet my mother gave me to learn how to fry my very first egg. It is the one with the burnt wooden handle.

Nora had to cook. Her mother made her grow up quick. She prepared meals before her mother got home from work. She had to learn, and I got to. Learning only later that cooking wasn't always the privilege I took it to be since my experience in our kitchen was the joy it could sometimes bring.

Nora grew up in a broken home with a single mom and was a for-real latchkey kid, the only one I knew. But Nora also was the only kid I knew who had had polio. The summer my family moved to Big Spring, Texas kids lined up at Central Ward elementary school to get the polio vaccine and were glad to get it since no one wanted to be stricken by that disease spreading  rampantly just as our COVID19 is now for us.

Polio (short for poliomyelitis) a serious, contagious disease caused by the poliovirus which attacks  nerve cells in the spinal cord, and could leave muscles permanently weak or damaged. About one in every 100 people infected with that virus became paralyzed (unable to move). Nobody wanted the child-crippling disease since most remembered it had even crippled President FDR as an adult.

Doctors and researchers had learned an infected person could spread the poliovirus right before and about one to two weeks after they have symptoms. Ninety percent who got polio didn't have any symptoms but could still pass that virus to infect others. People where dying to get their children in that line to get vaccinated and urgency was the factor just as we have such an urgent need in the US and the world to stop the spread of this generation's virus that will put many in the updated iron-lungs. Our sickest patients will need  ventilators  to be able to breathe like those in my childhood depended on those iron beasts to push weak lungs for them until they were able to breathe on their own.
In the height of the epidemic  that year an outrageous 3145 deaths occurred, and people got in lines and got vaccinated and because we mobilized our country we eliminated polio, but we still vaccinate our children because we know it could come back. As it did for Nora who is suffering with post-polio syndrome as an adult.

AND now we have that many deaths EVERY DAY. Will we stand for this? No. We will stand in lines soon. We will want to live. We will want to know who will win that bread-making contest in our very own kitchens, we will want to know who will be the fudge winner and who gets to enjoy the winnings for keeps.

Respectfully submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

I got invited to go to an empty building my old friend owned, take some boxes and fill them with books and just drive away with them.

Because of COVID, leaving home is rare, but she assured me I would be going to a place where there would be no other persons at all. But as I was heading out, my son decided to come along. It was 4 years ago when he and I had jumped into that jeep and headed up to Standing Rock together, so for old time's sake we were on the road again and he didn't want to miss what might be an adventure of sorts.
 
We turned into her driveway took our boxes, went behind her house and pushed open the yellow door to Carol's private library complete with a loft with a fireplace. Books of all sorts filled the shelves and we were astounded by the variety and quality of what we found. “Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.” – Henry Ward Beecher who also said, "A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life."

And this building was truly well-furnished and certainly full of these necessities! Carol had been widowed by retired anesthesiologist, Malcolm Freeman, who had the books to prove it! along with medical texts and a cadre of calculus volumes, she explained as a subject he longed to master.

Books keep us learning and by stretching our brains, perhaps we will all be ready for what the future will be bringing. We found books for the LEAD Agency library and our popular Little Free Library to be taken home by our public readers. Novels, mysteries, Columbia History of the World, whole sets of the Little  Golden Books, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, countless other children's books, a single copy of the Joy of Cooking, books on writing, grammar and Birds, Dogs and The Night Sky. There was a beautiful coffee table book with the art of Monet, Going Home, Jesus and Buddha as Brothers by Thieh Nhat Hanh and a signed copy of The Little Giant, the Life and Times of Speaker Carl Albert. The prize of them all was the rare book Griffin & Sabine.

How do you thank someone for gifts like these? You take time out to find the other kind of joy she left behind and fall back into the pile of leaves outside the door and laugh full-heartedly.

Who brought us there and why?

Carol Abernathy, formerly had taught 8th grade Civics, the equivalent of Home Eco, and had worked at Northeast Area Vo-Tech, but thirty years ago Carol Abernathy also wrote columns for the local newspapers entitled: "Table Talk" for the kind of things just regular people might find talked about around the kitchen table, and "Chin-up" after a Ponca City news column she had saved decades earlier. I read those columns and actually my writing style might be mimicking my memory of her writings.

Carol has left Commerce and all of us behind, moving to a brand new community and finding her way around those neighborhoods and will be finding her "what's next" there.

We can find kindness and we can mimic it until doing kind deeds can become what we do, much as Cori Stotts took on finding ways to make this Christmas one that children around here can find a bit more joyous, all made possible by the little acts of kindness given by countless others.

This will be a holiday season unlike any of us has experienced before. Let's remember to be kind, wear our masks and protect the people we love and heck, even people we definitely don't love!

I have been reading one of Chuck Neal's November Book Picks: Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln  and finding the shadows of hatred and racism flowing through it are still here in America. What divided our Nation is still alive. There is a darkness that was frightening then with blood-letting ruthless in the position for "our rights" and though we may not be stepping over the dead in our states as they were doing, we are facing more deaths as people define their "rights" to breath death in this other way upon others, even those closest to them.

We can learn from the past, and learn from those who lived during those times, even from a former slave who instructed us that, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” – Frederick Douglas.

Let's choose to be free. Let's choose to be kind. We will wait our turn for a vaccine. And we'll meet down at the library, we will meet at Chapters, we will gather round, keep our Chin up and Talk around the Table.  

It doesn't cost anything to be kind and it really doesn't hurt anything either.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

In 40 years the US lost 675,000 to AIDS and 32.7 Million world-wide.
 
In 43 weeks the US has lost 279,865 to COVID19 and 1.49 Million world-wide.
 
What day will we choose to acknowledge these losses?
Will we have a Day of the Dead "Día De Los Muertos" and celebrate these lost ones, decorate their graves and leave their favorite foods? Will we design a flag that will be placed early that morning on their graves and see them waving reminders for us to remember on that one day.

Will we have a day just dedicated to preparing their favorite meals since so many missed having Thanksgiving dinner this year?
 
Will we set off fireworks since they may have missed them last Independence Day?
 
Soon we will be losing as many people who died in 9-11 each day to this preventable virus. And yet we continue with parades? The only parades we can justify are the ones taking our friends to their last resting place, because we do not attend their funerals because we are old and gathering in large numbers can be dangerous.
 
We cannot continue believing there is no danger because we want our lives back. We can live through this, there is an over. There are vaccines coming. We can wait this much longer we can hold out, we can survive home-cooked meals, we can recite our blessings and read the texts scheduled by our houses-of-worship, in our homes. We can call our friends on the phone, write a letter, email, zoom and text those we want to have in our lives later and be protecting of each other. We got this.
 
I was the HIV/AIDS Educator for the Miami Public School District for a great number of years and most every teacher had to spend some time with me as a district requirement. Before those staff-development sessions I did what I am doing tonight: reading the latest statistics, the latest tips for the public on how to best protect themselves and others. As you must know, those sessions touched on the intimate ways that virus was spread or perhaps shared would be a better verb to truly explain transmission. And stopping the transmission was the aim.
 
As adults we could condone and promote the use of condoms, even proper use and how best to discard used ones. Sometimes I had a basket of brand new colored or scented give-a-ways. We talked through the latest myths and spoke the sometimes uncomfortable facts.
 
We didn't have to close schools, fear church services, reschedule ballgames. We had to pay attention to body fluids of all types getting into someone else's body. We lost some really good people to AIDS who had a lot more they could have given the world, their gifts were many and varied.
How big is the COVID Quilt? The AIDS Quilt grew so large finding a venue to display it became difficult. Miami is represented in that Quilt by several of our own who were remembered with each stitch it took to create their piece.  
 
Our new dead: we will memorialize, we will honor, remember and we will miss you.
We will realize how this happened. We simply breathed the same air. The same air that has carried the heavy metals you have been exposed to that may be why our kids are hyperactive, the same air that carries a fungus known as Aspergillus fumigatus, the fungus causing Aspergillosis. The air that carries the styrene that is emitted by the hundred-thousand pounds a year, the same air we worry brought benzene and asbestos into our lungs, the same air that we co-mingle and breathe wondering how we got sick from those exposures we won't name or blame either.
We are what we breathe.

I am known for demanding, wishing, desiring clean water as a right. Clean air is our other human right. But we can be also a source of BAD AIR, this is how we spread COVID19. We are the source, it can't live and produce on its own. It needs a host to carry it and transmit it. We are doing this to each other. And knowing we are the source or could be demands by human decency for us to shut down our emissions. We are the polluter. We are the regulator. We are in control of the air we breathe out to others. Masks  both guard us and protect others from virus we may not know we carry.

I heard a phrase today that may fit and we must fight against it. Empathy Deficit.

Is that what we have developed? Have we lost the ability to have empathy for others? Do we have a deficit? Do we no longer care for our brothers, our neighbors? Have we become selfish?
 
No, we are goodhearted and sensible. We are protective of others. We want to see each other come summer, maybe by the fall out shopping, walking our dogs, attending soccer games, back at church with the kids OUT OF THE HOUSE and back to school. There is an after and we can meet over there.
 
       "Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing there is a field. I'll meet you there."
                                                                     ~  Rumi, 13th century poet
 
         Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim
 

Tar Creek got invited, she snuck in at the last minute in the competition as one of the most Endangered Rivers in the country, with a brand new video. True she isn't a river. But she does flow and she is endangered, and that designation might bring to light only too boldly that she needs some help, real help, the big kind, the inclusive and the all purpose fix she deserves.

What else did she get? She got some good attention by a local writer, Linda Sue Warner when she added Tar Creek and her unquestioned ability to share what flows out of her onto property near and new to be flooded with Senator Inhofe's dream coming true to raise Grand Lake's level up 2 more feet especially so when she will be spreading across yet unflooded properties near her. Warner's series of Coyote stories brings him from a visit on Monkey Island to a fishfry and pot luck at the LEAD Agency office where Coyote gets more than fish and fries, he gets the load-down on who gets injured when that creek goes out of bounds.

There is a great deal of talent out there and Tar Creek desires it. She is damaged, yet, she wants to be thought of, considered, themed in literature and rhymed in poetry and put to music in lyrics that will be hummed when you might be doing dishes or walking your dog.

Tar Creek has potential and has dreams of being your friend, your playground, your stomping grounds, your swimming hole. She wants friends to come to her and sit on that log and have feet dangle in the water. She longs to have batches of baby wood ducks learn to swim in her and duck their little bills into the water to find sustaining nourishment.

Cherokee Volunteers can you imagine it was 25 years ago you planned the First Tar Creek Fish Tournament? And still there are no real fish tournaments held there? Your work made history, planning that inventive event, that first virtual fish tournament Tar Creek ever had. I verified you made history when I found it on the Oklahoma Historical Society's TRI-STATE LEAD AND ZINC DISTRICT page for all the world to read.

Millions of dollars has been spent moving, selling and stacking up chat that is not sell-able, while Tar Creek waits her turn. The Superfund site's name sake has patience. It is what she has. She waits for justice. She waits for equity, and waits to be included in the work done at her superfund site.

A creek knows no time, just as the river who accepts that water, they are simply vessels and paths for that water to flow. All moving to the wider rivers and on to the sea. The water cycle is the cycle of life, flowing from and to perpetually moving. But our Tar Creek, she flows as Ryan Lovell said as a sophomore in high school knew when he described what he saw as her "eternal flow of evil."

Our Tar Creek is not evil, but she carries with her the sins of our grandfathers, the ore left behind in the mines bleeds out and into this creek every day for forty-one years this month.  I am keeping time for her. Another set of children will grow up not knowing they lost the use of a treasure. Growing up next to a creek running through your hometown? Doesn't get any better. Ask countless people who knew this one before it was tainted. Ask people who grew up in Tahlequah, and other little and bigger towns all over America. They haven't had their creek taken from them.

It is serious what this creek has seen since mining began and on to our present. This is Tar Creek's second pandemic. Mining was in the heyday in 1918 and the interurban, the network of electric railway lines allowed miners to commute to work.   The first case of the Spanish Flu was reported on March 11, 1918 in Kansas and less than 2 years later over 1,000 people had died of it in Ottawa County. 

To date we have 22 deaths in this county, but at the rate we are going we could certainly match that number. That early flu and COVID19 are both respiratory viruses. Both pandemics have closed schools, but ultimately enough people wore masks and contained it before. Very interesting to many reflecting on the similarities between these time periods when looking at the presidents in power and their slow reaction and that they both contracted the virus of their day.

Tar Creek is still on course for this second round, and would gladly remind you the ones who lived through before outwitted that virus by not breathing it in and did that simply by wearing masks.

I wish you the kindest of weeks, full of fresh air, time with the people you share your home, and loving thoughts for those who from afar wish you the best.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

This week my friend, Elaine Irvin who lives in Miami asked me to please write about COVID19, the virus that is taking over a thousand people's lives PER DAY. Humbly, I wondered what could I say that hasn't been on the news, in social media, the same messages: wear a mask, social distance and stay home if you can to stop the spread.
 
Masks. Maybe people don't have masks. Why don't each of us make sure we have some to share, to pass on, just in case that is why we still see full faced people, because these are our neighbors, our friends, perhaps they have hit on some hard times and can't afford a mask, and don't want to admit it, or don't know where on earth you buy them, or don't have a momma to get her sewing machine out to whip some scraps together to make original creations.
 
This must be why, because these are our people. They do good things, they are friendly. We like their parents, their kids. They would never want to hurt others. One of my neighbors, did a sneaky drop off of the most luscious jars of jam, didn't knock, just left them in a cute little basket and waited for me to discover it. It would have been great to see her and get a chance to thank her in person, but she told me over the phone, she can't wear a mask for a medical reason, and didn't want to get in our space without one. There are tons of acts of kindness going on all around us.  And I bet you are doing some of it yourself.
 
My doorbell rang yesterday. How often does that happen way out here in the country? When I opened the door I didn't know who the masked man was at first. A carpenter had returned to do a project on my house and charged me a much too modest amount, to be kind I think, but when I paid him, I added the value he deserved.
 
He valued me, I valued him. We wore masks.
 
My dad inherited the land I live on, but worked out of state until he retired and moved home. I remember his brothers taking turns calling long distance, remember when that was a thing? They would ask him to hurry up and get moved back to Oklahoma because their friends, people my Dad had grown up with were getting older and  "dying like flies," and his brothers wanted him to get up here to "help bury them."
 
This is literally happening now for real. People here and around the country are literally "dying like flies," They are dying in hospitals alone because they are too infectious for family to be with them.
 
I remember the AIDS Epidemic. At first people didn't know how that virus was spread, and there was alot of fear ginned up against gay people, until children with hemophilia began to get it and more was learned about that virus and how it could be spread and how that spreading could be stopped and the virus contained while medicines and treatments were developed.
 
This virus is worse, you don't have to be intimate with a partner, you don't have to exchange blood, all you have to do is breathe what is exhumed from a person who is carrying the virus. It is an air exchange. Think about that.
 
We all have to breathe to live. But we do not have to exhale virus that can then be breathed in by a person passing by you, someone you might not even know. They could be standing in line near you and there is your virus hanging out in their air. That easy.
 
Back in the AIDS epidemic, to stop the virus from spreading, the mask of that day was a condom. Not all guys wanted to wear one of those either, lots of virus was spread by the macho man of the day, to women and to other men, people who didn't have to die but did.
 
I remember going to visit a former student of MHS who was in hospice in Tulsa, in his last hours, quietly dying without his parents because they shunned him for who he loved. He didn't die alone, he was not going to share bodily fluids with me, I was not in danger.
 
Our people who have been exposed and are quarantining with each moment the real fear must be will I be positive?
 
Back in the AIDS Epidemic being positive was a negative just as it is now with COVID19. People who live through a bout of this virus will be learning for years what lingers and can bite you later as many of us have learned who had Chicken Pox as children, in our later years only to get its mean brother Shingles.
 
Our new virus will have lots to teach us, those who survive it will be the guinea pigs who will bear witness to medical professionals for the decades to come.
 
Together we share responsibility, and care for our community.
 
Thanksgiving's next week, make the choice to only interact with those in your household and not others so you'll all have a next year to share.
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

After having lived in Pueblo, Colorado for only 3 months, I went back one afternoon 2 years later, wearing moccasins and my robe for graduation.

Southern Colorado State is a university now, but when I enrolled there it was a college with a program that changed my life forever. The program, Teacher Corps, was a 2 year commitment of service in a public school, basically in practice teaching, while completing  2 years of college level education courses, while also any "spare" time was spent doing service in the community where you lived and worked.

While living in South Dakota, I learned about the Teacher Corps program in Colorado, grabbed a map and found the campus and the site for my 2 years of service was actually 2 mountain ranges away from the college campus, but with 7,000+ showing on the map, it looked to me like a nice sized town in the mountains. What could be better?

Those 3 months on the campus in Pueblo went quickly, and soon my team drove the 5 hours to my new home on the Southern Ute Reservation in Ignacio. I could hardly contain my anticipation and yes, excitement when I saw the city limits sign. Those same numbers I had seen on the map all those months ago... were the elevation. And the population? 303.

There was suddenly a moment of clarity. And the number that really resonated was the number 2, the commitment of 2 years in a town of 303 people.

As I said earlier, this experience changed my life forever. Most college students enrolled in teacher education have a semester, and sometimes even less time than that to experience life in the classroom and from that make the decision to pursue that career or not, based on that one experience. My team of 5 got to spend 2 whole years in a variety of classrooms, different levels, different subjects with really experience teachers. We all chose to stay in education until retirement. So we must have found education fit for each of us.

My college town of 3 months, if you want to call it that, was in the news this week. Why? Right there in the middle of town, blocks from where my little apartment must have been is their Superfund site. Yep, waste from what else? lead.  There had been a lead smelter and EPA had been in the process of cleaning it up, and the town? getting yards remediated for lead!  Just like us here!

Why was it in the news? Community members are afraid EPA is going to walk away and not finish the work. Yes, that can happen. That is why I hope while you might be home more, it might become more urgent for you to call DEQ at 1-800-522-0206 and ask for your yard to be added to the list to be checked for lead in the soil, and if found to give permission for that contaminated soil to be removed for FREE and replaced with soil you can grow a garden in, or have your children play safely in the dirt. We have been spoiled with that opportunity being out there, year after year. But 1995 was a long time ago, and EPA rarely funds what people WANT, but they are doing this, for as long as people WANT it and are calling in and asking for this service.

One third of my time in Teacher Corps was service in my community. Bnd this sounds like a Commercial, or an Ad for EPA to pay for this Service in our community, and it is. Take advantage of making sure you have a clean yard, and so your neighbors do too.

Years ago I heard the fact that almost a quarter of all the people living the U.S. live within 3 miles of a Superfund site. And yes, I have worked in Ottawa County for over 40 years, and the whole county now counts as one big superfund site because the mine waste was hauled all over it, but I don't live here, I live in Craig County on land untouched by industry or mining. But tonight, I found out the heart of my college town is a Superfund site, early in her OU's.

To check out  that 3 mile theory, stating so many people live within 3 miles of a superfund site , I checked on where I had lived in Big Spring, Texas, and they got it wrong. The nearest superfund site is FOUR MILES AWAY, not three. It is at the Lake we would ride our bikes to.

This is a lot to settle in on.  Those years in Teacher Corps changed my life, and my years here dealing with one of the largest superfund sites in the nation, one that is all around us. That blend of education and service was the training that has kept me focusing on our superfund site, but we are not alone. There are nearly two thousand sites on that list.

Let's keep learning, share what you learn, do what you can to help your neighbors and let's band together in service to make this place get cleaned and off that LIST so EPA can get on with helping our sister sites.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim