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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if? Why not?    

 
Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ducks, on your mark....

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim