For a semester each Monday morning at 7:00 and Thursday afternoon at 2:00, I have joined a class of 10 Harvard landscape architect students for over a hundred class hours in a process as they developed their projects to remake Tar Creek.

Having never attended any architecture class before, having no background to bring other than a true desire to have this place, this creek and our communities get a do-over, I humbly sat with Niall Kirkwood's class and participated in the process that was revealed this week.

Earl Hatley, LEAD Agency's Grand Riverkeeper joined in the sessions from Vermont while half of the students joined each week from their homes in China, since all the classes on the campus at Harvard have been remote this year.

We sat together and throughout the class sessions professional landscape architects joined to present their styles and to serve as critics for the student work as it progressed through the winter and into spring.

During the last moments of the class Earl had to ask the question we both had had and had failed to ask: how did the students decide what to take on, which of the issues at Tar Creek, and there are many, how did they select their project goal?

Earl suggested perhaps all of our issues were put in a hat and each student pulled one out? No, Niall said he "had not divvied them up but they each had decided on their own. and continued saying "this is not the end, it will carry on. Studios are driven by the students, freedom to promote their own ideas."

The class came about because of Niall's visit twenty years ago with 3 other Harvard professors. "The impression the people, the reception, the circle dance in the gymnasium, the Toxic Tour, Tar Creek, the chat piles and my now frayed t-shirt, the visual memories haunt me forever and are deep and centered in what I am interested in. This is only a start of how we will engage."

The student work began with Holly's "Weave the Unseen."  Her installation gives attention to the river (Tar Creek she calls our river) by beginning her project on 2nd street in the neighborhood by Roosevelt school and brings the community directly into the campus of NEO, which she mentioned was established in 1919 as the School of Mines.

Through a system of linked patches the unseen treats the water and brings people into a dialogue with the land and the eco-system to the edge of the creek in an area for contemplation, instruction, entertainment and cultural events.
Au Sun reminded us that the Quapaw were mound builders and are in the process of building new ones on their land mounding contaminated and unusable materials into structures that can resemble their past. Reshaping their land grouping piles with wisdom of wind direction will create microclimates, these sites become classrooms of evolving environment and reminders of past culture.  

The Healing Power of Vicky Wang took us to life after the chat piles, the regenerative form as the land becomes natural prairie, adding fruit trees and making agriculture a self-healing and growing future.

You have to allow others to see our place in their own way and Ms Zhang saw us a colorful, originally aesthetically striking and through her project how these colors will shift as our environment is cleansed.

Yokki took on Tar Creek herself using phyto-remedial planting and a wetland strategy using passive treatment and braiding river morphology to relieve the most urgent and contaminated stream and restore the dynamic and affected landscape once more to Tallgrass prairie preserve. But Diane just re-routs Tar Creek, creates a useable, enjoyable stream while mine-discharge is treated.

Dear Olivia took on the flooding while Jackie and Alykhan use technology to give Miami a whole new life.

Joyce took on the last but not least challenge. The sinkholes don't rank as solvable and are never reduced or considered as fixable by EPA, they receive zero funding.  Using her network of phytoremediation pods ON the sinkhole, the water would be treated and to be protective of humans, robots would manage the system. Pedestrian walkways allow visitors to safely view the work, that Mark Grigsby suggested must be constructed with lightweight materials since the ground is unstable near those sites. The studio was charged with excitement with the innovative project with Kurt Frantzen offering to submit a proposal in 6 month to Elon Musk for private funding to begin the project at once! As Joyce concluded she hoped through her work, "the landscape could become beloved."

I have long thought this place will only find the solutions and the reclamation deserved by establishing relationships with people with vision, skills and training and ultimately the power who will see this place but also see and experience us, each of us they encounter as people who matter, who have lives that matter and desires to live in places students like these can imagine.

We will always be grateful to Niall Kirkwood for remembering his experiences, the challenges we face, but mostly for remembering us and allowing us to meet his friend Kurt and his huge cadre of colleagues who so kindly guided these students with their projects throughout the semester. These students took on Tar Creek and with their projects Remade it all and gave hope where there has been none.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

This week brought the opportunity to speak at the virtual Intertribal Council's monthly meeting. I was as nervous as if I had to physically walk in the door. They each gain my respect for taking on the task to serve their tribe in such leadership roles and I always hope to show that respect while in their presence. Their agenda was long and what proceeded and followed my brief words came from both "outsiders" and locals with ideas and projects to share with this distinguished group.

Just yesterday I had picked up a copy of the 19th Bureau of Ethnology's Annual Report to Congress for 1897-98. The large green cloth bound volume was a throw-away from the Miami Public Library, found in their dumpster in the late 1990's and given to me by the fellow who jumped in and retrieved it.

Inside the book are the Myths of the Cherokee by James Mooney with photographs he had taken of places most Oklahoma Cherokees have never seen, not since our ancestors nearly 200 years ago had to leave experiencing the "enforced deportation" as that author described our removal. For me this occurred only four generations ago.

So while sitting with those Ottawa County tribal leaders, I was reflecting on all we collectively have embedded in our DNA, those experiences that brought each of our ancestors to be there together now and the resilience we must be demonstrating to the world by our continued existence. The three chiefs visible had relations who came to then Indian Territory as the Modoc from the state of California, having survived a War of Extermination, taken to first Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas and finally found a sliver of land with the Eastern Shawnee. The Ottawa from northern states then to Kansas and finally home with less than 14,000 acres. The Miami from the vowel states Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, deported to Kansas then again to Indian Territory to stay on 1,400 acres.

Great Nations. Peoples who had thrived for thousands of years were thrust together in this little county and have surprised the historians, the Indian Agents of the past and have thrived and rebuilt and have come to find the pride our very government tried to deport out of them.

My humble asks were for approval of the University of Arizona's Institutional Review Board for their student's work with LEAD Agency on collecting oral history we are calling Water and Work Stories.

The other subject was to alert them about the American Rivers' Endangered River status Tar Creek gained this month and the asks that are associated with that: the MOU we want GRDA, FERC and EPA to get them talking to each other to solve the big problems here; asking Congress to reauthorize the Polluters Pay feature of Superfund and to ask EPA to go back to the table and come up with the big fix for this site. I asked for them to ASK for these actions.

The words from Woody Guthrie's lyrics Deportees was inspired by a plane crash in the desert near Fresno, California that killed 28 farm workers being sent back to Mexico.

"All they will call you will be deportees"

Throughout my life, perhaps yours, we have been told we traveled, we experienced a Trail of Tears, we were relocated, but every one of the tribal leaders in the room I was not present in had relations who experienced forced deportations. We all had relatives who did not want to come to Indian Territory. We were forced and not one of us experienced that ourselves, but connect with it and relate to those Trail of Tears Stories.

But we were forcibly deported from homes, gardens, graves of our fathers, and from the mountain sites in the photos James Mooney took himself in 1888 standing in places our ancestors knew to be sacred, places we have never viewed ourselves.

We were never called deportees, but as I listen to the news this evening and tomorrow and the tomorrows that follow, the deportees in those stories, they look a lot like our people, our tribal people, lost in a strange land, just as our great greats must have felt, hearing unfamiliar language.

They are us. We are them. We just were never called deportees in the local newspapers or in the songs of that day.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim