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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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