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