“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