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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted,

Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accessibility to water

Revitalizing our Downstream home

The Role of Water

The degree of wetness

Rekindling our kinship with place and water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

We raise our own.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The players with power have failed us.

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Is that something like, "Act your age?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or do a thing.

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”
― Albert Einstein

It is an honor to have the opportunity to work as equals with people who passed chemistry in college.

At the University of Texas when its only campus was the one in Austin, I actually took chemistry for a few days, in a classroom that must have seated 500 people. A classroom full of people who had had chemistry in high school and passed it.

It took only a couple classes for me to get that I was running on a deficit and dropped the class quick enough and met a science requirement for graduation at another institution.

In the last 2 days I have spent more time talking science with scientists than I ever sat through in that chemistry class all those years ago. And not once was I made to feel deficient , nor did those old feelings jostle back into focus during any single moment with any of them.

The choices we make as young people can hold us back but they don't have to. Believing in equity, doesn't limit me to Equal or Civil Rights, but allows me to also value my gained experience after living on this planet this long and makes interacting with people who bring their own specific educational training with them work as we settle in and have conversations on finding ways to tackle issues that rattle around as unsolved in this community.

It is easy to diminish one's self as not having "the" credentials that should deem one qualified, but our life experiences and those of people who have lived in a superfund site that is older than the majority of the residents living in this county gives us credibility. There are few research-based investigators who have that on their resumes, but we do.

Those choices we made as children, the places we played, the substances we remember putting in our mouths and the distinct taste that can be recalled, or the sound small pieces of chat made when swished back and forth inside a child's mouth with those baby teeth clinched tight.  Bill Honker wrote a song in 2000 called Made to Last, though all of it is quotable,  one line, "...the sons and daughters of the mines were raised on iron and lead"... that's you. This stuff of the mines came home with the miners, came home with your Daddy to fill the potholes in your driveway, filled our sandboxes and perhaps every ally in the county and certainly every dirt road you drove in the summer with the windows down.

There was a time period when some of the best houses in town were built with heating and air conditioning ducts in the floor and for whatever reason, the builders surrounded the ducts with loads of chat before pouring the concrete floors. As time has gone on, house by house have experienced issues. Only one family went public on the front page of the MNR.

No one wants to let it be known there is an issue that could diminish the value of their  homes, even as it is diminishing the IQ of small children and perhaps causing long-term issues with most every organ of the bodies of the people living and breathing inside that house.

Why? When the chat that surrounds the metal ducts gets wet, the sulphur  in chat forms a sulfuric acid and can eat through even stainless steel ducts and allow the chat and its fine particles to blow through the ducts.

But as you know, I am not a scientist. But all the ones I met with this week got to hear this story. Wouldn't that be a thing to bring up now with the present administration wanting to reduce lead poisoning and putting money toward getting that done. 7,000 postcards will show up in Miami mailboxes from DEQ reminding you to have your yard or gravel driveway checked for lead. Its free and if high levels are found, they will dig it up and replace it for you.

But what if the DEQ Hotline started getting calls about the dust coming out of your ducts? What if they got lots of calls? While the money is here. I would like every single house to have their indoor chat dealt with. That house years ago that went public, moved out; had a cement truck come and fill all their ducts with cement and at their own expense put their ductwork overhead. I think EPA should pay to do this work and protect everyone with this issue. Don't you?

And I didn't have to take chemistry to understand this.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim                                    

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Niall Kirkwood is a designer. He teaches at the Harvard School of Design. Twelve of his Masters level landscape studio students will accompany him on a visit here the first full week of March.

My responsibility is to guide them all in understanding the landscape of Ottawa County and how we experience it. No simple task. My plan is to schedule tours and interviews with individuals, large and small groups. Your invitation is to help me.

These landscape students have enrolled in the class entitled: Ottawa County Remade. What do your grandchildren need to thrive in this county? What beauties you love seeing and being near do you want them to enjoy? What hopes do you have for what will be seen from their backdoors?

We already know the University of Oklahoma students are coming and will be seeking your permission to learn from you about the experiences you have had in the past as we gather Air, Water and Work Stories, and now we have the unique chance to then also look forward to the future.

Unique it is.

The phrase "what's past is prologue" in Shakespeare's The Tempest, is quoted and even carved in stone on the National Archives building in Washington, D.C.

I had never considered that phrase until it has landed smack on my lap like it has with these two distinct opportunities to shape our future and tell our past.

My brother Clark Frayser was a teacher for 40 years and became a playwright as a natural outlet for his love for the theater and the way words lay out on the page, but come to life when spoken.

When laying out the pieces of what would become a book: Making a Difference at Tar Creek with a real editor, Marilyn Power Scott. I was shown how she must have laid out the pieces of the Cherokee Volunteer's second anthology. The beginning of the books were key to her. The pieces of books, the ones I have turned past all my life: the introductions and prefaces, the foreword, ended up being prizes that set the tone of the books and gave key information to the readers who long to get the most out of any book they might take the time to read in full. There are two ways of attacking books. The second: I flip past all but the cast of characters, if listed, because I have always thought those added pages would give too many clues to the surprises I knew lay ahead in a brand new book.

But with the plays Clark showed me time and again that the prologue is sort of a kick-starter to a play, and without one you are left sitting literally in the dark.

The past is prologue right here in Ottawa County. We are piecing the past together with your help, with each of your stories, we are handing it off to the future builders, the designers who are assembling only too soon.
We have time and as the Cherokee Chief John Ross said, "Let us look forward to the pleasing landscape of the future."
 
Two days earlier, the geology students from Emporia State University will be coming to tour the Tri-State mining district. They are interested in what we have laying around that both made our history and ruined the health of our people, tainted our water and has forced the US government to take on the challenge one of the largest superfund sites in the nation, one piece at a time. So literally the past is prologue as the days of March lay out for us.
 
Put yourself on high alert. Be discovered. Share your past, dream with us for your future generations. We have time and gladly will add you into the circles that will be forming, minds full of questions, and we have lived the answers they will long to hear and have dreamed the dreams they need to know.

Call LEAD Agency 918-542-9399 or email:  leadagency@att.net  to save your spot on the itinerary.          
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

"Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday"- Taylor Swift

At this moment in time there is little a single person in Miami OK can do to save this town from the flooding that will be coming. There is some desperation. But we have the law, we have right on our side and we have at this time a mayor who knows how to rally a town, and be the cheerleader with the simple mantra:
                                                   We have been flooded enough. We won't take it anymore.

What actually is a mantra? Think of it as our "motto" or a long slogan or nowadays we might call it our "tag" line.  Over a thousand people did just that signing their name right here in Miami, OK right before the streets, our doors, our schools closed as we hunkered down to keep our heads down when COVID descended upon us.  These same people still have had enough, just the thought of yet another flood brings back the fear, the defeat and the anger deeply held by a community threatened by high-water caused by nothing they had done wrong.

What if we used our own words to fight? 

                We've flooded enough.
                We won't take it anymore.

LEAD Agency put out these signs with businesses that had been flooded, while some were carried about the community. We captured only the first thousand. No one turned us down. Because who in this town would WANT it to flood again? Who benefits? No one. We all lose. And some of us lost much more than others.

Would you like our 1000 people to come to your business? Could we sit our thousand people's signatures with you like they sat with us when we went to Riverview Park and when we sat on the park bench, the park bench now only small children can fit due to the massive amount of sediment the floods have laid in the park.

Our 1000 signatures started seeing daylight out on the front steps at the LEAD Agency. All lined up neatly with just enough space between them that our cat was able to wind both up way and down the other without jostling anyone of our friends who were still speaking out 2 years after they signed their names.  Consider us on call. It is easy to fit us all on the empty front seat of my car. We can make this statement and repeat it. How else can we do it?

We could do it in a song. The song that is stuck in my head, and I hope you will forgive me for sharing it directly to yours, is Taylor Swift's Message in a Bottle. First, the chorus repeated in my head over and over again, in what has been coined as an: "earworm" or known as "stuck song syndrome."

Then only this morning, I listened to the whole song. Taylor Swifts' phrases STOOD OUT:

"I am reaching for you TERRIFIED  and"
"You are the reason I can't sleep."

So in my mind I imagined the ceremony where we all stood on the banks of our precious waterways, the Neosho River and our Tar Creek and we launched our very own messages in bottles that float past us and head toward the lake and will rest up in mass along the edge of the dam, the messages all written in our own handwriting, or printed in some way on scraps of paper, allowing the people who manage the dam to know that we are frustrated, scared, angry and demanding to be cared for and respected as teammates and members of a shared watershed.

"Message in a bottle is all I can do"
"Standing here hoping it gets to you."

This symbolic action won't happen. We won't pollute our very own water with thousands of bottles, but we can imagine that moment and in seeing it, we are stronger, more confident, activists for the change we are demanding. Put yourself there. Imagine the power you feel and multiple that by the friends and neighbors and the people sitting in the vehicles passing by you. And you will become the change agents we need to get us through any disaster yet to come.

And while you are standing there, remember this Crystal Moment as your own and maybe you will be humming that tune that got stuck in your head, too.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

 

Not being a hydrologist, sediment scientist, or hydro-geologist gets in my way of being the activist I long to be. Righting wrongs, spouting knowledge, showing the reliable data, establishing the model, and understanding how the sediment transport model might save the City of Miami.

Who are these experts who can don the cape of knowledge and explain it to FERC in the language that will translate into the actions that protect the lives and property of the upstream dwellers? There is a sudden fear that they are not coming.

It is possible we are going to have to take the dive into these documents, get our old high school chemistry and physics books out, seek out those who "aced" those classes and put our heads together as one. The questions as citizens that should be asked are not being asked. Do we even understand how to address and to whom any credible questions should be brought? Will they be answered and will the answers change the force of action that may drown a large part of this portion of the county?

How many homes are at risk when the lake level rises. Do they have to let it rise, can this be stopped? If so who can do that? How do all of us settle in with the sediment, the copious amounts of sediments that are being deposited and that are filling those lower stretches of the lake that will too quickly fill to capacity while we wait for the Army Corps to respond to the urgency backwaters can become.

GRDA released a Sediment Report and you can read it,  you can mark it up like I have. You can circle the charts #32, #36, #63 and study the marks on the curves indicating sediment sizes.

Sediment controls the physical habitat of river ecosystems. Changes in the amount and real distribution of different sediment types can cause changes in river-channel form and river habitat. The amount and type of sediment suspended in the water column determines water clarity. Understanding sediment transport and the conditions under which sediment is deposited or eroded from the various environments in a river is therefore critical to understanding and managing sediment and sediment-related habitat in rivers. https://www.usgs.gov/centers/southwest-biological-science-center/science/river-sediment-dynamics

You can also read and wonder about the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 stipulations in regard to the Pensacola Dam which includes special legislation applicable only to the Pensacola Project, and it significantly changes the scope of the ongoing relicensing for this Project. We continue to wonder how this applies to our National Defense, and how it in any way will be party to what floods us in the future or if indeed it could somehow protect us?

What I don't know is obvious. What I do know is we have needs and real scientists and those skilled in the world are welcome to take t hose dives with us to make this piece of the earth a bit more tolerable. Henry David Thoreau asked all those years ago: "What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?"

In the last year I have attended several of the Miami City Council meetings, and on the agenda have felt or heard so me kind of disgruntled regret on t he cost the city is paying the attorneys they have engaged to fight for the city in this regard. The city's attorneys are hiring the HELP we need. Their attorneys are fighting to protect the city with the exact scientific experts who speak the language and understand the biometrics of hydrology, how water works, how water floods and destroys dreams. I had also hoped that the EPA, t h e federal agency with "protection" as a middle name would jump in and assist us in understanding the FERC document dumps that come out. When EPA documents on the Tar Creek Superfund site are released they have furnished outside consultants to assist us in better understanding what is proposed so we can make educated comments. What if FERC had that same system in place and all the residents affected by this re-licensing effort could  be active informed parties who could speak up in t heir best interest and strengthen the City's standing in this legal fight to save itself.

What we need are those experts to give us all the cheat sheets so we all can speak with a single,educated voice and get ahead of the change that not climate alone will endow us with, but the force GRDA hopes to rule with.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Visiting scholars spent a couple of nights at LEAD Agency lately, both professors at the University of the Pacific, who were here for the first "snow" on the ground day this new year brought us. Jennifer Little brought her cameras and drone and went out following the light and captured the contrast of red water with the white of the snow. But when she reviewed her footage, the image of where mine water is discharging from a stand pipe absolutely captured the imagination of Gabriel Teo, who teaches film and animation at the same university.  They then reviewed the unique projects the Harvard School of Design had created and suddenly we dreamed of how these talents might blend and collaborate with this semester's graduate landscape studio students.

The first part of January brought the Sierra Magazine article written by Wendy Becktold which actually called me a "do gooder" saying, "The lifelong activist brings people together to heal the land." A week later on an eighteen degree day, I was faced with a drone that found me standing on a chat bar in the middle of Tar Creek right at dusk. At one point even asked to give a "Rock Star" stance. All are bizarre moments that should be happening to the new young activists who will emerge, I believe almost any day. I know they are out there. These budding environmental advocates, water protectors who long to be tapped, encouraged to speak up and out and this is what Micalea found herself doing when she reached out to her tribe and began communicating with their staff about the project, rather a capstone of her marine science education. She has developed a water project on the very stream running through her tribal boundaries and she is inviting other Ottawa Tribal members to come to the water on upcoming Saturdays for creek cleanups and experience the beauty that surrounds Tar Creek as they work together.

There is beauty with running water cascading over the rocks along the stream bed, the sound as it flows, the hope that lies within it, for the life once the superfund site is restored that will fully return. Crayfish, minnows, bass, tiny crappie want to return. Her tribal teammates will observe the beauty each of these upcoming Saturdays. They will note the types of trees, grasses, vines that grow in along the banks. All hoping to find evidence or even the chance sighting of their standard bearer, the otters.

They will look for signs of wildlife and identify the birds that they will surprise while they practice those skills we long to hone back into... of connecting back to nature again. It will be a pleasure to share time with this young budding environmental activist and those who rise to give her a hand as she leaps free from her graduate degree into a life of... my best bet? as another "do gooder."

What if any random person woke one morning and with her inspiration or that of Berkley Ulrey's monthly Riverview cleanups, decided to do an act of service or even begin a life of service, maybe as a career or the hobby or the calling  that won't quit calling  until up and doing begins? Those acts of Service that Martin Luther King Jr. Day inspires all across the country  jar and jostle righteousness out of the most impossible sets of people, maybe even yourself.

LEAD Agency now has a VISTA position open and are hoping service minded persons may seek to apply. Longing to be involved in assisting us as we investigate the multitude of issues any community may have, and more so within one of the largest superfund sites in the nation? Do-gooders are encouraged to inquire.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

There at the end of The World of Pooh, in "the Enchanted Place" chapter, there is a moment when the inevitable seems to be happening, when the boy is on the edge of saying he is about to leave his childhood behind.

Christopher Robin experienced the tenderness of a child's first love outside of parental love, the bond to a cherished bear. Can we reach back to ours? Who were they, what were their names, these lost loves. My mother and her only brother remembered her dolls' names when they were pulled out of the high cupboard in my grandmother's home seventy years since they had been cuddled. My little brother had a blanket that we all knew as his, "Me."

Pooh experienced the hundred acre wood and those that lived in it became his friends and adventurers. Just out the door of my home in only a few feet I can launch myself into the wilderness and do. The best times there are those without purpose, timeless pursuits of discovery. Each season bringing change and the beauty of the place.

Can places be loved dearly? Longed for? My prairie lands and the woodlands that follows the creek bed down in the gullies, filled with the native plants who have deep roots and the new species that do not belong edging themselves in, winding round and longing to belong themselves.

There on the prairie before it falls off the edge, I created an ecosystem of places I had loved by planting pines I could smell in the summer when the heat brought out the aroma of the Black Hills or the Rocky Mountains where I had lived in New Mexico and Colorado.

I had a dream this week that people, all sorts of people began to love Tar Creek and wanted to have birthday parties along the stream, they wanted to send rubber ducks down her, they longed to have Easter Egg hunts along the edge each spring. Graduation parties would take place and candle ceremonies like Tora Nagashi, the Festival of Recovery with floating lanterns which started in Japan after WWII when in 1946 so much of Japan remained in ruins. Perhaps our floating candles might be lit for the people who have lost their lives, from or during our current pandemic.

Tar Creek is getting some help in Kansas. EPA is working on her before she enters Oklahoma, for how can we do a real cleanup until the most upstream parts are addressed. As Piglet said to Pooh, “I used to believe in forever, but forever's too good to be true,” but cleanup has begun on Tar Creek because landowners began to believe the efforts could work. 
 
The landowners along our section of Tar Creek have begun believing. She is damaged, yes, but even naughty boys can be loved, right? So let's start having creek dreams and start longing to enjoy the new improved creek she will become, the enchanted place she will be.

There are tough times for Miami coming and it is hard to believe but the councilors must trust the City's attorneys to speak for you and the trees you all live in the shadows of in the fight for the life of the city during this GRDA relicensing process. https://www.grda.com/pensacola-hydroelectric-project-relicensing/ Catch up with the fight, encourage those who long to protect your homelands, your hundred acre wood, to keep you high and dry.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

If you see Larry Tippit riding off into the sunset it will be on a horse he raised from a colt right here in Ottawa County.

We have heroes among us. Unsung heroes you might not know and may not have had the opportunity to see in action.

The one with the hat who sat with the Tar Creek Trustee Council represented one of the affected tribes is retiring from his job with that tribe's environmental department after 16 years. No longer employed by the tribe removes him from that position on that Council.

I was an Indian Counselor for Miami High School when the Tar Creek Trustee Council was born and got to hear just a bit about how they would operate right before the doors were shut tight to the public and all that has gone on inside those rooms has remained  confidential, as required by law.

And I retired in 2002. All those years the trustees have been actually fighting for the public, which is us, for our rights to have the natural resources that were spoiled, taken, ruined by our legacy mining restored to the public for our enjoyment, nurturance, sustenance and because by law it can be required.

During these years I have seen state and federal authorities cringe when they saw the man wearing the Hat sitting back there on the back row, on the front row or right smack in the middle of the venue - always sitting so those in power could see him and knowing he would ask the questions that would be heard and answered for the public record.

I have copious notes of past Tar Creek Conferences and the exchanges he initiated making those in power quiver when he spoke up. He won't be missed, he will not be silenced. Heroes with that kind of courage and that studied background of this site will not go gentle into that good night, as Dylan Thomas would express.

Larry Tippit grew up knowing he would always be tied closely to the earth. Those wild plants were on his plate. The game and fish were dinner. He learned the ways of the deer from his grandfather and practiced what he had learned with his father and has passed that knowledge on to his young.

Learning to love the environment isn't taught. It is experienced learning and knowing it can provide for us gives us the responsibility to protect it and in all ways find ways to restore what has been damaged.

Ottawa County will not know how much they owe Larry Tippit because how do you put a dollar amount on that deer that is taken in season this year? It is tied to the years of walking quietly with grandfather then father, the quantity hours how do you value those?

Larry Tippit's Ottawa County ties run in his blood with both Seneca and Wyandotte coming to him from one side of the family and Cherokee on the other.

He has stayed close to the earth he protects and has for the last 16 years worked with the Peoria Tribe.

He is known for horses. The hat is actually worn by a real cowboy who raises horses.

My first understanding of the harm our mining did was talking with another man who loved his horses, George Mayer. Larry came to know and understand the need to ride this "pony"- wrestle with responsible parties and get some of the legal remedies our site deserved in the bank to provide the means to begin the tedious years it will take to restore to the public what we have lost, gone so long we didn't even have it in our memory banks to know we were missing it.

The Tar Creek Trustee Council members are called Trustees and they must as they used to say must speak for the trees as the Lorax did.

These Trustees speak for the environmental damage our environment has experienced. They know it because they have Assessed it, studied it, counted and KNOW what they say is truth. They are not speaking for the whole state of Oklahoma. They are standing up for those in our environment that have no voices, the mussels, the Mad Toms, the beaver, otter and the wood ducks who cannot speak of these losses.

The little ones that failed to hatch, to swim to fly home to nest in trees that will provide the fruit and nuts that will provide the safe nutrient needed for a healthy life.

Our environment is damaged and everything, including us is harmed by it. The tragedy of this is vast and wrong and these trustees are setting about to making some of those wrongs right. They are doing it with the money they made, legally won funding from some of the entities who messed up our lives before most of us were born, made their fortunes for these companies and danced out of here and kicked the chat dust off their boots as they left.

And then they met up with the likes of a fellow who knew how to handle wild horses and look them in the eye and tame them. And that is what he did with his teammate Trustees.

I say, "Hats off, mister, we, the little ones, we thank you."

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

The reference books are laid out on the desk's surface, overlapping each other. The Encyclopedia Britannica World Atlas 1957 edition opened to the page illustrating the full length of the country of Scotland.

I got to go to Scotland once and feel the wind on my face as it comes off the North Sea, looking way off and almost able to see Norway. There along the shore embedded in the sand small pieces of sea-glass left me wondering the age of each and their origin story.

And later on that trip to see the heather in bloom across acres accented by abandoned rock walls. No homes in sight out on those winding roads in the north country.

It is now when reading The Highland Clearances by Eric Richardson that I am understanding what I saw on those lonely stretches. All that was left of the lives of the indigenous people of Scotland. The saying "Leave nothing but footprints" came to mind. That is what they left. Their homes had been brought down as our Cherokee relatives' homes were taken down, burned, or in a few cases moved right into as the invader's own. But for the most part, our Scotts and Cherokees were viewed as vermin whose homes would be vile, unclean and beneath the invaders' standards. The homes gone, the shame of removing them has not been passed down through the generations. That happens when history is not spoken and truth is allowed to be forgotten as if it never happened.

Once these books are laid out and the research begins, the stories of these clearances begin to blend. I can almost hear the moans, the cries, the longing to stay put, the questions of Why? that must have been asked by the young in their own languages still in their warm beds. Those who had the knowledge the change, their removal was eminent, many may not have known to ask before the removal came to them.

They cried. That is how the Cherokee removal came to be known as the Trail of Tears. The Americans knew about Clearances. They knew how to do them, their relatives were writing the text book on how it could be done. And as it turned out many of these Scottish Clearances on the Highlanders were happening at the same time our own Trails of Tears were occurring to not only with  the Cherokee, but countless other tribes in this country.

Our own Ottawa County is full of those who were removed forcibly in Clearances from their traditional territories, where they had been for the life of their tribes, where their origin stories were based.

It is a deep dive into centuries old language reading this text. Words are describing places and kinds of relationships long forgotten and keep me turning the pages of the largest, oldest Oxford Dictionary in my house in order to get the gist of the mindset of the words the writer is quoting.

That same deep dive is the origin story of LEAD Agency. We started out as a group of people wondering Why? and What? Why are we sick, how did our children get lead poisoned, how does a "cleanup" happen? Those questions took a group of us to the Miami Public Library to study the documents that resided in the "repository for the Tar Creek Superfund Site" all in large 3-leaf binders on the rolling cart, which could be pulled to the table we bellied up to read. The research meant reading and wondering, taking notes and then discussing what we each had discovered.

That repository is still there at the Miami Public Library, not on a rolling cart anymore, but on the shelves in the basement. LEAD got duplicates and keep them in our own what we call our "Toxic Library" at our office, along with more of the health studies that have been done and countless other documents on mercury in fish, lead toxicity, and all the BF Goodrich documents we were able to FOIA from the state.

The search for the truth. I have little patience for lie believers. Let's keep finding the connections from our past to our present. Let's learn from the wrongs that brought us here. Consider the new Clearances that are occurring. Not so much by man, but by what man has done to change the climate on this one precious place we all call home.

Those winds, those tornadoes did what we would have called in the past: Clearance. They took down hundreds, perhaps thousands of homes, so efficiently, all in one night, causing those same ancestral feelings that connect us to them, they are crying. And we understand the loss and the starting over that is happening with a whole swath of people, not a single tribe, but yet so much more so, our people.

After each flood event the homes you grew up looking across the street and seeing each morning of your life, are removed when they are inundated by high water. Each of those homes were ones where joy had lived, sorrows, too. There will be more clearances coming. We must plan for the new homes to be built for the high waters that will be coming, plan for the 500 year floods that are not that far into the future.  Clearances have happened here in Miami, too, let's plan to have fewer.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

There was a country western song written by Stan Jones the year before I was born that became popular back in the day called Ghost Riders in the Sky,

Those riders made me think of the term Ghost Writers. Not at all the same, but the tune came to me when Mark Drajem with the Natural Resource Defense Council - NRDC called me this week.

We had a conversation about the flooding we experience in Ottawa County and not that we can do much about the flooding, but we did talk about the THING we can do for the next month. We can submit comments to the Federal  Emergency Management Agency about the revisions they are considering in the 50 year old regulations that have been their guidelines for those decades. I was trying to explain the difficulty high waters cause us and how flooding is always a "dirty deal." But add a layer of toxic water coming down Tar Creek and that water laying down in our front yards, parks and across that segment of the NEO College property. It was a heartfelt visit, as I guided him on the editorial he would be writing and hoped to have accepted in print in the news outlets that are more apt to think "environmental" isn't a radical topic to cover. We exchanged several emails as he worked on his editorial and accepted my corrections, or clarifications on wording. Then this evening he sent me the notice his work had been accepted and would be published in Morning Consult this week, but when he forwarded his work, titled: Making Sure the Next Flood Isn’t a Tragedy by Rebecca Jim!

I had met a ghost writer who had written my article for ME. But the story is not ME, the story is WE.

We all have our moment in time to say a thing, reply, comment about the rules the generations who follow us will have to help them as they use FEMA to get to the other side of the disaster they have endured. So many of our residents know what didn't work for them after our lived disasters. Let's comment, let's tell our stories about how we prepared, how we endured, how we recovered afterward and what would have made that easier. 

We are the middle of the United States, not on the coasts where we know the oceans are rising and those living on the edges of our country will face flooding on a scale we have never dreamed soon. We are upstream of trapped water. The climate is changing and weather will be more extreme in the decades and centuries to come. We are dealing with a man-made, man-controlled flood for the most part. As our lake continues to fill with sediment from Kansas, chat from our superfund site, when flooding rain begins the water is backing up quicker, and we will experience flooding sooner and more severely. If EPA and GRDA and FERC and FEMA would sit down together and look across the table at each other, AND we locked the door...  Perhaps they would see this is a single issue and should be dealt with by all of those agencies working together in a united effort. Our issues could be dealt with by agencies with the power to do it, should they receive the motivation to act.

So until that miracle happens, choose up sides, flip a coin and see who Ghost writes who on the comments to FEMA. You can hum that tune if it helps motivates you to motivate others.

But a last thought: Only a few weeks ago, I saw a dear old friend. It was a moment I will relive, the feeling of how special it is to be accepted as a friend and to know the privilege that is. She died this morning with COVID. Our unvaccinated relations have every right at this time to keep that status. But I am old and making new friends is not easy. I treasure each of these gifts of trust and know that they are mingling in the world and breathing the same air we all share. I ask for each of us to have conversations with our people as we are watchful to prevent accidents, we are mindful to put our seatbelts on, we do and are a part of the world we inhabit and we care for one another. Be the gift that keeps old friends a bit more time together, a few more times around the sun.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

The warm dry weather has inspired time in the sun out on the land. In that field that will be burnt in the spring in the process to begin restoring the Tallgrass prairie, the red cedars are coming down  but sprinkled along the field are some loblolly pine saplings seeded from the stand I have been mourning in my yard, one by one dying from the pine bark beetle infestations. But those saplings jumped the fence and got a start a ways away from the infestation and may be the new stand that may make it to the next century. In the fall just a couple of months ago, my remaining tall pines were hotels for the migrating monarchs, latched onto individual pine needles, resting before the next leg of their flight to Mexico. It will be great to know they will have a way station growing across the gully for the wee-ones' future use.

We had gone to pick up some dry wood that had fallen near and on the neighbor's fence there on the prairie's edge just at the fence line where the tree whose limbs had fallen, the bark sloughed. There at the base where the land lapped were waves of du-wi-shi , fluffed up like light golden miniature pillows: Pleurotus ostreatus. I never saw such a site. But right on the edge of my property, inches away, across the fence not mine to take.

Another day took me to the edge of the property where a family of red cedar seedlings had landed, all perfectly lined up like soldiers next to my adjoining neighbor's barbed wire fence. I had driven the John Deere and taken the heavy lobbers and turned the engine off and began the process. 86 cedars cut that afternoon and had daylight lasted, the other 89 cedars would have been cut to finish that fence row.

Today after sitting through the best part of the virtual Oklahoma Water Conference presentation, the daylight could not be resisted, so it was the slow removal of honeysuckle vines. One plucked out, gingerly to not break the strand, strand after strand. Each one hung separately on the leafless redbud tree. Those vines will become baskets in the weeks to come. The vines will be boiled and the bark easily removed to reveal the smooth woody strands that will make beautiful Cherokee double-weave baskets that will be filled with the wild plum jam made from the summer's crop and black walnuts for Christmas gifts. The plants that grow on my property are why I push for the cleanup of the Tar Creek Superfund site. None of the plants that grow along Tar Creek, or in the flood zones along the Spring River down to Twin Bridges may be safe to eat. Research by our own Ean and Meredith Garvin has proven this. And that is NOT right.

DEQ called to say GRDA will be addressing the dams on Tar Creek this week, so her flow will be restored, but the trees that have been vandalized and will die may produce wi-shi, that no one should eat. The sediment they have been growing in will have accumulated metals for the last 100 years that the roots have been pulling up into and embedding in their cells, while those roots were holding sediments that would stabilize the banks, curbing erosion, trying in their way to protect her neighbors from more extreme flooding. Tree seedlings will have to grow for decades to replace the ones our very own vandals have cut down or cut in ways to ensure they will surely die.

Last week in kayaks on Hudson Creek down to the bend that flows into the Neosho River, I was reminded how water can connect us, that slow smooth surface brought friends together to enjoy nature's beauty, find the feather treasures left by the pelicans who were finding the same place a sanctuary. That beauty along our creeks serves as our buffer, provides life to the communities of species, and is our gateway to the treasures of the natural world we live upon with them.

The Rights of Nature. We understand that right deeply and much more clearly as we take ourselves out in it. Take some time and gift yourself that afternoon sun, a moment to value the treasures we have around us, the random seedlings that are planning their life's work for your grandchildren and know our responsibility is to live through this pandemic for them. For in us are the stories we have not yet told, the work we have not completed and the true love we still need to express.

With Rights also comes Responsibilities. We have a responsibility to ensure those rights for Nature, too.
And Eddie Webb, our county's environmental deputy will be enforcing them!

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

I live on the land at the end of a road that wasn't there before it was needed. My home-made home on the prairie is set facing west with a neighboring ridge across the gully with a great slope for sledding in the winter. The snows made that slope faster after each of us had taken our turns, slicker to climb and faster with each pass. We pushed to make it to the creek below but also feared we would!

At the bend in the creek was the only tree my dad said had been on the property when he first came there as a boy. That tree would have been 70 by then and fully mature, and heading soon into the old age trees experience as the weight of their branches become just too heavy to be held up property.

The last time we went to sled, we left my son's sled hanging on the barbed wire fence, knowing we would be back, surely another snow would follow that one and we would be ready for it. But the winter ended too quickly that year and the sled remained on duty, waiting, sort of like the Toy Soldier waiting for the little boy who put it there to return.

Time on the prairie changes the landscape if it is not managed, the grasses can lose a battle with succession. First the sumac circles grew larger and then the cedar seeds were carried in by the birds and found fertile soil, the right relationship beneath the sumac, nestled barely noticeable at first.

My attention has been focused, as you know on protecting our Tar Creek and that slopping hill has the tangled mess of honeysuckle joined to sumac, with vines that reached back on itself and woven into  what seemed like a blanket over them, a tangled mess to walk through!

I didn't cry. The hill and the slope are still there, it is almost like that blanket of vines was made to keep it like we left it. All we have to do is remove it. Which won't be easy. But can be done.

For now, I don't have any species that are defined in Oklahoma as noxious, none are against the law. But there ought to be a law against red-cedars, honeysuckle and sumac. Those three would make me wealthy if there was a market for them! All 3 of these species create shade and have replaced some of my prairie species.

What has occurred on my property is called secondary succession because it has not been managed, to restore the Tallgrass prairie each year these fields will need to be burned. Fire will help restore the land for her original plant families. I learned all prairies have some degree of vulnerability to invasive species but without some intervention prairies turn into woodlands and I am determined to push back.

Succession has also made it to the Mayer Ranch in Commerce, OK. First that tall grass prairie was fenced for Mr. Mayer's  white Arabian show horses, then the orange mine water began to discharge, flowing directly out of the bore holes the owner had no idea were there, staining his horses and forcing the sale for their sake. After years of waiting for "someone to do something about it"

Bob Nairn saw it and simply stated he knew how to deal with mine water discharges. This week he was able to celebrate the solution to the pollution was not dilution, for the passive water treatment system simply allows that mine water to pass from one bio-reactor pond to the next until what came in is transformed and flows out as water that would now support life. But what has happened to the land?

Through those years it went from tall grass prairie to being abandoned, then when the passive water treatment system was installed, no one thought to pay attention to invasive species and deal with them as they appeared. So now the property is a classic example of how succession happens to unattended property.

Bob Nairn and the University of Oklahoma students have managed the "irreversible" focused entirely on making bad water good, but when you look around the Tallgrass prairie longs for some management too, much like my own land, we have to pay attention, the land needs tending, too.

42 years this month mine water has been flowing out of the Picher Mine Field. Bob's dealing with a portion but the rest of that bad water washes right past us and we say nothing. It spreads over us in floods. But we are silent. That bad water must be managed, fire is not her answer. Our Tar Creek's burning desire? to be clean. She waits for success.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim