One May afternoon could be twenty years ago Bob Walkup, a Civics teacher at Will Rogers Jr. High, Nancy Scott, the Cherokee Nation Service Learning coordinator and I gazed at the tire dump in Commerce, OK. It was really amazing to see so many tires in one disorganized place. Cattycornered were what were locally called the “red and green” holes, two significant cave-ins and a collapsed mine shaft that had grown into different colored ponds.

We were discussing the problem of the tires since mosquito season was coming quickly. The tires later caught on fire, and the fire was hard to contain. The owner was fined daily by the Department of Environmental Quality for not getting rid of the tires. As I remember it, DEQ agreed on a “pilot project” to allow the tire owner to dispose all one hundred thousand tires into the sinkholes across the street. The tires went in, but though they were heavy, if you have ever tried to lift a tire and especially one that was full of water, you will attest to that, the tires refused to sink. They floated. So then some of them were cut up to help make them not seem so much like a life-preserver waiting to be of service. Eventually most sank.

Ten years after the tires went into those “ponds” the City of Commerce worked with state agencies to fill the red and green sinkholes with mine waste. With the ground cleared there was a plan for a soccer field above the filled sinkholes. Ed Keheley spoke up explaining it was not a good idea because the mining done in that area could make it more susceptible to subsidence. He was a member of a subsidence evaluation team that had surveyed the Tar Creek Superfund site. He explained the cave-ins had been filled in but there was still a deteriorating mine cavern about 100 feet below the site. He went on to explain the mining in Commerce was not as deep as other parts of the district and could be more susceptible to subsidence and re-collapsing after they were filled.

So it has happened again, January 2017, just across the road from those “ponds” as a new passive water treatment system readies to deal with the mine water discharge that had continued from them and maybe because of that work, a new subsidence has appeared. Part of the old Route 66 has been blocked indefinitely because of the indications the road is being impacted by it.

It is important to note that all of this is happening close to the Commerce High School on what you might imagine as the back side of a large city block. Across the street from the former red and green holes are homes. Cattycorner where the tires were there are mobile homes. Go to the intersection across from the former red and green holes, for the new cave-in. It isn’t too big, surrounded by yellow tape, an SUV could fit nicely within it. Not far from the cave-in is the neatest dirt bike track, totally boy-made for kids to ride. And not far from their track is an entrance for the newly established Northeast Oklahoma Veterans Memorial Cemetery.

I do not want to be an alarmist. But I do worry about what could happen in this neighborhood. A gentleman had been examining the new sinkhole, and accompanied me to see it, saying they were pretty used to this happening though it had been awhile since anything huge had happened.

Are people at risk? How will we know? If something needs to be done to protect lives and property, who will oversee it? With all the complaints EPA has earned through the years, it was their agency that made sure residents could have a voluntary buyout in Picher and Cardin. It is through EPA and superfund that the chat piles nearest Commerce are gone. Through EPA thousands of yards and schoolyards and parks have been cleared of high levels of lead in Ottawa County. And children have been protected from those exposures.

I am going to ask Senator Inhofe to keep it coming. This superfund site can be cleaned up. Residents should know they live on solid ground or be allowed to move to safer land. Schools and kid made dirt bike tracks should be deemed safe and veterans’ last resting sites should be hallowed ground and that hasn’t been proven, but should be. Children need the everyday dust they have in their lives to be JUST dust and not loaded with lead and other heavy metals. Fixing the Tar Creek Superfund site is not Rocket Science. But it will take asking. We need to say it clearly, this isn’t over, more work needs to be done. People have a right to solid ground, clean air and fishable, swimmable water. The superfund’s name sake Tar Creek needs some help, if it is ever to run clear again.

In 2004, Senator Jim Inhofe requested a study of the potential for future major subsidence with the largest scale subsidence evaluation ever undertaken at that time, focusing on the Picher/Cardin and the Hockerville area. The regret is the whole Tar Creek Superfund site should have been accessed, public safety implications remain.

Awaiting clear answers  ~  Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

    “Don't cross the bridge till you come to it, is a proverb old and of excellent wit.”  *

My college transcript is loaded with courses that ended in “ology” the study of everything from hard sciences like biology and geology to psychology, anthropology, sociology and even 9 hours of hominology, which was  a required course offered nowhere now. All resulted in a degree in what else but behavioral sciences!

After reading and re-reading my son a children’s book I Want To Read it became obvious that learning was an important part of my life and with any luck it would end up being important to him as well. I got hooked on learning early in life and thought the purpose of any schooling was to learn. It wasn’t until nearing graduation at Black Hills State College I was asked what career I was pursuing. Career? I was in college to learn. Why else would I be taking all those “ology” courses? That question caused me make a decision to join Teacher Corps and get an education degree, and through it “nudge” people the rest of my life to love learning.

Actually became a more important word lately, as it begins most of my nephew, Weston's sentences, and actually "nudging" is a real term used now days by behavioral scientists who are working on ways to better serve the American People for social good by simply using a word or phrase differently. Examples could be to encourage veterans to use available services, add the word earned  since they had earned the right to services because of their own service to our country; to stress to children they all can learn, stress the brain is a muscle, work it.  Words can be powerful, use them for good.

This week I went to a memorial service for a woman who was a teacher who figured out the "ology" of teaching children in new ways before those new ways made headlines and became standards that have made learning easier for children. She mentored new teachers in learning styles and how to move children from rows to learning groups, mixing children throughout the day so success came more easily to them all. I didn’t even know she had been a teacher, much less a great one until she was gone.

We miss opportunities by not coming to know each other better. Ask those questions, let's find out more from each other. Pauline Sanders and her husband were Martin Lively’s grandparents, roles they held with great pride, but the lessons on teaching and surely her love it I missed learning from her.   
           
While standing on the new Stepps Ford bridge in the early morning and marveling at the span, the marvelous Neosho River flowed beneath, the “madtoms” were establishing themselves and daring us to bother them. John Clarke the County Commissioner for the district was pleased with the bridge, but also appreciated fishing spots this spring might be a bit easier to reach.

Standing with the designers, builders, Jack Dalrymple who donated land to the cause, Betty and Prentice Robinson and others out early that cool morning Gary Crow took the ribbon cutting picture. The bridge it replaced had been closed since 2013 and had not been strong enough to allow fire trucks or ambulances to cross.

We cross bridges, in this life and into the next. The Creeks believe we all have to cross over a log to get from this world to the hereafter, a big log, not so hard to cross, but the animals are the log-keepers and if you have treated animals in a cruel way, they can turn the log and you will not make it across, but will find yourself falling as in those dreams, but never landing. The kindnesses we can do to each other, and to the four-legged, let us just go ahead and say or do them. Ask that question, engage in knowing the people in your life in a new way. Learn from them or continue learning in whatever way fits you now.

We know we will cross bridges, perhaps a log, when we get to it. Each of us, but the folks on the other side of the Stepps Ford Bridge will sleep safer now that help can also cross it.

"Actually" Planning to Nudge You -

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

   * "I'll cross that bridge when I get to it"- The ultimate origin of this proverb, a caution not to anticipate trouble and often put as don't cross a bridge till you come to it, has been lost. The earliest recorded use is in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Golden Legend (1851).

People remember the “ice storm” but for most of us there were two distinct ones, each maxing us out, but both made us stronger, more confident in our own abilities to survive, more humble knowing we each needed help and were given it, and in many cases were able to give even more to others during those times.

The announcements began early about the “ice” storm coming. There was no general panic. The news had us on the edge, the temperature on the fringe of freezing. We remembered zeroes and single digits and weeks of cold and dark, and for many quiet, except… the trees cracking and breaking on every street, in every yard, in the gully behind my house. They broke sounding like the crack of doom through the cold dark nights and into the daylight, each branch and limb coated crystal clear with layers of ice. Trees we had planted or grown up under their summer shade. Old friends they were.

I was reading Thoreau’s Walden this week thinking about my mother who would have been 100 years old next month and my father who absolutely loved to watch wood burning often calling it his other “TV.” I loved to go cut wood with him and was always reminded that wood heated you three times, cutting it, stacking it and burning it. Thoreau’s first winter at Walden he used a fireplace, then his second winter he used a stove and felt like he had lost a companion when he couldn’t see the face in the fire as before.

The year I retired from Miami High School Earl and I went to Norway and one of my fondest memories is of the great pride every home had of their firewood and how they stacked it. Years later there was a TV channel there showing hours of cutting and splitting wood, then 8 hours of simply a fire burning in a hearth capturing the age old entertainment of staring at a log fire. Thoreau and certainly my dad would have loved Norway.

Walden Pond is 62 acres and was mapped by Thoreau during the winters by cutting ice to measure depth and he found it to be one of the deepest ponds in Massachusetts. Recently Curt Sager, a professor of natural sciences at Paul Smith’s College studied the pond’s “muck” with 24 inch deep samples taking us back to 1,500 years ago. At the 9 inch depth he found the clean lake of Thoreau’s residency.

He found the history of the pond and her changes in the sediment samples he analyzed. The last century revealed extreme changes due to what many scientists are labeling the “Anthropocene epoch” (the Age of Humans), and similar signs are being written into sediments worldwide.

At Walden Pond he found Asterionella formosa and Synedra nana, diatoms evidence of 1920 nutrient pollution caused by human use of the pond and surrounding area by the public. Not too deeply in the muck there is a layer that emits radiation, cesium-137, evidence of the thermonuclear weapons tested during the 1960’s that contaminated every body of water on earth and every person, too.

 The next layer was deposited in the pond during 1968 with rotenone, a fish-killing pesticide when county officials killed non-sport fish to stock the pond with non-native rainbow and brown trout.

Ice still forms in December but later than in Thoreau’s time and melt about two weeks earlier.

The researcher found plankton samples with Mallomonas, an alga common in waters around the world caused by climate change and he feels that Walden Pond teeters near an ecological tipping point.

Continued warming in New England could amplify the pond’s phosphorus problems and the processes amplify into a cycle that could lead to a nutrient overload that could kill the pond much like the fear we have for our Grand Lake and the numerous ponds we have in northeast Oklahoma.

Sager believes we are not separate from nature or immune to its laws. We are nature, a truth he came to see through the eye of a pond.

I put another log on the fire and listened to an old Beatles song, Norwegian Wood as I watched the fire and remembered cold icy nights and the woods screaming in pain and wondered: what is the sound of a dying pond or the Grand Lake we have held dear?

Burning to Know the Sound  ~ 

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim


 

They couldn't go. They stayed home to take care of babies and elderly grandparents. They couldn't go because it cost a lot of money to get there. Who had the warm clothes and the boots went and found they weren't nearly warm enough.

Some people went with purpose to stand with the standing, to stand for something just like the song lyrics, "You've Got to Stand for something or fall for anything."

Earl couldn't go because to walk on that ice would have ruined his new knee and his hope for the good walk after the next new one next week.

People die in the cold. Just one hour away from Standing Rock 2 people died from exposure to the cold and another person is missing. Nick's tent mate got so cold he kept wandering out of his tent to find the warming space and was luckily found by a patrol of the camp and was taken to one of those few warming spaces, leaving Nick to wonder through the night if he would be found in the morning as an alone dead.

Cherokee women Mary and her sister went just days before I arrived. Rebecca Nagle went with a purpose, her life's purpose to stand with those who have survived abuse. How appropriate. Who went who hasn't or would be experiencing abuse? She met with women for circles to talk, circles to make quilts to remember and celebrate their survival, then took those quilts and walked that sacred hoop to make them whole and mended their spirits.  She brought the Monument Quilt to Ottawa County a couple of summers ago where our survivors of domestic abuse and rape spoke with strength and resilience. There is no shame for those who have been raped or abused, the shame is on the abuser, the rapist. Not all survive their abuse, but their loved ones can survive their grief.  The quilts they made might have then begun to warm their bodies in the cold, just as our grandmothers knew they would.

Each one who went to Standing Rock may have had their own purpose to go, but everyone left with so many more reasons for living, so many more purposes to strive for in this life.

Those who sent money sent prayers sent firewood sent good wishes began to believe in peace in an ever deepening way. Everyone went to Standing Rock and everyone looks at their own water differently now. We are all protectors because there have been protectors who stood for water in the face of hatred, greed and weather.

People are changed that went to Standing Rock, but we are all changed and I think now given permission to do something with the rest of the lives we have. Life is a firefly. But enough fireflies can light up the night's sky, just by being a firefly.

Before going my will was updated. I went with purpose with all I had to offer, just myself. And to see that prophecy of Crazy Horse and of Black Elk of people coming together to mend what was broken.

Those who went to Standing Rock took everyone we know with us, they lifted us during the long hours to even get to the high plains and certainly during the cold nights. How long were you there? How many surveillance flights did you count? They were there, too, watching for hours. How were they changed? How were the contractors with dogs changed? Peaceful, prayerful protectors standing for water. Those images are with us all, we all went there and we all stood there on one side or the other.

The veterans went and those who didn't go with them, stood at attention knowing their brothers and sisters were there.

One night at Standing Rock the dome was filled to its capacity for Round Dance and 49 songs. We moved to the songs, some we knew, some we learned. The circles moved clockwise as they should, the dance an old friend to the Natives, but a new dance to brothers and sisters who took it on and began changing the flow. I knew it was a different kind of 49 when some of the dancers took out their lighters, lit and held them arm up for the singers. As it continued, the songs still so clear and strong, Natives began to leave  the newbies, with no resentment.

Standing Rock was a paradigm shift in every possible sense. A Native author Dr. Chuck Ross disappeared from the dome, too. He wrote Mitakuye Oyasin Lakota for "All My Relations," a prayer of oneness and harmony with all forms of life. I left knowing we are truly connected in this Hoop of Life surely by the firefly within us all.

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.
It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the Sunset. - Crowfoot
 
All my relations 
~ Respectfully submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

Harsh weather and hard times have gone together for past Decembers for Native Americans with the Wounded Knee Massacre and the signing of the Treaty of Echota both occurring on December 29. Both events signaled the end of eras. For the Cherokee in 1835 a few tribal members claimed to represent the Cherokee Nation signed The Treaty of New Echota which ceded all of our lands east of the Mississippi River to the U.S. against the wishes of the majority of the tribe. This provided the legal basis for the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation from their lands. Chief Bigfoot and his band of Sioux were massacred that day in 1890 as a closing act for the Indian Wars the U.S. Government had been conducting against indigenous nations since the country began.

What is known as The Dakota 38 occurred the day after Christmas in 1862 when President Lincoln sentenced 303 Dakota men to hang for crimes said to have been committed during the Indian Wars in Minnesota. The president commuted the sentences of most but 38 were hung in the largest mass execution ever carried out in this country.

Horse rides this December have been completed to commemorate the Wounded Knee Massacre and the Dakota 38 + 2. Harsh winter would scarcely begin to describe what those riders have endured to remember the past and for the sake of those hung and to work through feelings and deep losses and to seek reconciliation. I spent an evening watching a full length film about that 300+ mile long ride from the Lower Brule Reservation in South Dakota to Mankato, Minnesota where the executions took place. It has been only 3 weeks since we was driving on much of the route the horse riders would have followed, but their trek included blinding snows and even colder temperatures than we had experienced while riding in the jeep with the heater turned on.

The Navajo, 8,000 were forced on what they call the Long Walk and incarcerated at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Those who did not surrender hid in the canyons and mountains to avoid detection. When the Navajos returned from Fort Sumner in 1868 their reservation was one-fourth the size of the original territory they had used before the war.

We have an incredibly beautiful and diverse country and this December a lot of it got protected by President Obama using the Antiquities Act of 1906. Since the Antiquities Act was passed, 16 presidents have designated 152 national monuments using the legislative authority. Obama has used this power to protect more land than any previous president. During the 110 years of the Antiquities Act it is the first time that tribes have come together to ask a president to use the act on sacred sites on their behalf. The President of the Navajo Nation explained, "Diné people, but also our Hopi, Ute, and Zuni neighbors came together in an unprecedented show of unity to conserve these lands for future generations of all Americans." Delegations from five tribes tried for 8 decades for this area to be protected.

This December the Bears Ears area in Utah from earth to sky unsurpassed in wonders, which had been a refuge for many Navajo during the Long Walk received protected status. Another area important to tribal heritage with additional sacred sites received protection in Nevada. Gold Butte is the land that connects Lake Mead and the Grand Canyon. It had been named for the gold that had once been found there. Gold is a recurring theme, the quest for it in Georgia led to the Cherokee Removal Bill of 1830 and the quest for Black Gold, oil brought over 300 tribes together at Standing Rock to stop a pipeline.

The urge to extract gold, yellow or black has not gone well for Native people.

This December has been one to remember for what can go right for the tribes. But always with the lingering thoughts of past Decembers and how quickly what is right is lost.

The Cherokees and the Navajos were led on forced marches. Americans and Philipinoes were forced to walk on the Bataan Death March during World War II. My brother Tim walked in New Mexico's Bataan Death March when he was 52 and signed up on the next to last day to do it again this March. He registered and will take that walk, or as he says, he will march the 26.2 miles of it.

No one will force me to walk, I will be walking in marches against pipelines that can harm water such as the Diamond Pipeline which will cross the Trail of Tears in Arkansas and organizing walks this year, for Tar Creek, and for Water.

Every step I will be thinking about the power of putting one step in front of the next, the next steps we take to fulfill our dreams, the next steps to take to reach a goal, the next step remembering steps taken by our ancestors who survived so that we could all be here, the next steps we take so this planet and the future for the next seven generations to have the beauty we have seen.  As we step into this next year together what will your next steps be?

Remembering Days in December.. Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim