This year our Tar Creek was number 6 of the 10 most Endangered Rivers in the country.

Throughout the summer she got lots of positive attention. Over 600 people signed the Clean Water Protection Ordinance petitions circulators carried throughout Miami to grant the citizens the Right to clean water and a Healthy Tar Creek and would give Tar Creek the Rights nature had bestowed to her. Those rights would allow her to flow...

We were proud of the great attention this effort brought to our often neglected stream by you, your neighbors, friends and family members. More registered voters were needed to get the ordinance to the ballot for a vote by the people. But really we feel the people did vote in a way. They spoke up with each stroke of their pen as they signed their name acknowledging the need the ordinance would have addressed.

In July Todd Stewart, the Oklahoma University photography professor came to Tar Creek to take a few photos for the Anthropocene Alliance. A couple of children met us there and were part of the story he was shooting. But others arrived un-perplexed by our presence and jumped right into the water our 2 girls had been so careful not to allow their skin to touch. The set of boys did the improbable. They swam. Diving under and through the culverts at the low water bridge and laughing. It was a dream. Something I longed to see: children loving the creek and using the water as their grandparents would have been able to do. My teacher friend spoke to them about the water and that it was bad water, but from their reaction those words made no impact on the summer's fun as they persisted with their frolicking. 

The good times at the creek persisted through the rest of July, all of August and September, the end of their summer.
Over 25 years ago, we crafted warning signs for bumper stickers Don't swim or fish in Tar Creek funded by the ATSDR and the Ottawa County Health Department. Then 10 years later we had them printed again, mindful that DON'T messages are a turn-off. So we did the same design but added NOT YET. But who wouldn't begin to wonder if NOT YET... THEN WHEN???? When happened this summer in a big way with the swimming and the fishing. Our children decided that message would not deter them in any way. The City was told at a City Council meeting that children were swimming in the creek. Not once but twice.

Reclaiming that water showed their belief it was not harming them with exposures to it. They also claimed it by damming it. Trapping it as their own. They dammed to the north and put effort in constructing a bigger dam  so the water would become deeper.

We discovered this before Labor Day and a small team of us breached both of those dams so water could flow through. Many of the rocks that were used were heavy, taking me and another person to move. Our deconstruction continued until the syringe was found among the rocks. We had no protective gear so we stopped our actions.

I attended a public meeting held by the City about zoning, speaking before it convened to City representatives about the dam and the Clean Water Act violation it was, since restricting the flow of any stream in that way breaks the law. I stood at the microphone to say the same and that it had been reported as a complaint to the state.

We were sure the City would remove the dams and post signage to protect our children from the heavy metals we know are in Tar Creek. There was more evidence of use every time we have gone. More rocks on the dam, the trees had been hacked with a small ax to make footholds to climb for jumping into water. Later rope swings, steps hammered into a tree to leap in the water. More old trees are cut and injured, the very trees that are keeping the streambed from eroding in flood events. The fire circle and then the continued effort to dam under the BNSF railroad bridge, using the chat as fill. The very same chat that EPA is spending millions to rid from  your county to protect children from lead poisoning.

So the alphabet soup of federal and state agencies have been notified ATSDR  ODEQ  EPA  USFW OCC  OWRB GRDA including Army Corps. If we use these letters like the game SCRABBLE we can spell many words like: GREED, DROP, DEAD, SOAP, FEE, but we cannot spell the one word we need which is HELP.

42 years this community has waited to use their Tar Creek. It is time EPA does their work.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

"Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect."    - Chief Seattle, Duwamish

One of the oldest items in my home is a Cherokee buckbrush basket that came to be mine from my father's mother. It is smooth to the touch and reaching into it is like reaching into the past. The colors are like the summer tan I get, deeper browns lay next to lighter hues, as how the sun marks your short sleeve shirt and the line where your sandals mark your feet in different shades.

In 1974 while working as Indian Counselor for the Sapulpa schools I attended an American Indian Basket-making class offered at Tulsa Junior College held on Saturday mornings.  What I learned there has stayed with me.

Hepsey Gilroy, was the instructor who must have been the age I am now when she taught the class. I gained the ability to weave reeds into a basket and learned how to make Cherokee doubleweave baskets from a Creek woman! These baskets are double the strength of a regular basket because once you are finished what could be your basket, you actually rather flip it and do it again, thus making it a doublewoven basket.

I learned using commercial reeds that are soaked and used wet. These reeds are rather course and will do, but once you have used buckbrush or honeysuckle which are smooth when they have had the outer bark-like layer removed, your hands certainly feel the difference. Scientific Name  Symphoricarpos orbiculatus Family  Caprifoliaceae

On my property in Craig County I can go out the backdoor and gather a winter's worth of these runners growing abundantly. The honeysuckle, too much so, so removing these runners help to control their spread. But both work up into beautiful baskets. They are filled with my "things" and become gifts, I can hope to be treasured by those who receive one.

But the point I am making is the availability of the resource and the fact that they are safe to use. There is not a worry in using them, pulling them into my home, working and processing the runners after soaking in hot water, pulling the bark-like layer from the inner white strand lying inside. I can do this.

The people, any person gathering such materials for the home-made baskets in Ottawa County, must consider where they are gathering. Plants can uptake metals. Are they growing in the superfund site? Are they gathering in a yard or near an ally that has been successfully remediated. Are they gathering too close to Tar Creek? or the Neosho River after Tar Creek joins? or either side of the Spring River? How close is too close? Who tells us these things? Where are the warning signs?

What I can do safely, I want you to be able to do safely, without worry.

If Native and you want to base back to your culture, if you are not Native but are wild-crafting, you have the right to a clean environment and you don't have it. And you won't have it unless you begin to yell that you want it or that you want it for your grandchildren and their grandchildren.

EPA will not fix this until we are heard saying very clearly, it is time and we demand it now.

There are 2 EPA repositories in Ottawa County. One is located in the Miami Public Library and in it are all of the documents the Environmental Protection Agency has written concerning the Tar Creek Superfund site. The materials are available for the public to have access: to dig through the facts and the data. The other repository the public has no real access to. It is the place all the dirty dirt is taken when EPA/DEQ removes the contaminated soil from your yard, the parks, the school playgrounds in this county. It is stacked up and smoothed over an area about 15 acres and perhaps 8 stories high just a few miles north of Miami, and west, just feet west of Tar Creek.

If you were a weaver and like to make cattail mats, there are lots of cattails growing on that road to the repository, but you should not use them, not yet, they are loaded with heavy metals, they are sucking those metals out of the ground and keeping them in every single part of those plants. But there are no warning signs there either.

Yes, I want the land healed and I want you all alive and well to see that it is done and done right. Be there to do that, live through this pandemic, do everything for us all to be there together. Get vaccinated, care about yourselves and the future of the land and water here. Let's weave these thoughts together, lets gather our materials and weave the future together too.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

David Noel gifted the basket he had made, filled with good wishes and butterscotch candies.

For 20 years until my 60th birthday, I was a part-time ROPES Course instructor at the Tribal Adventures course constructed on what seemed like a mountain just across Lost Creek on the lands of the Eastern Shawnees. It was a magically place and it was there that people found courage they had lost, some who had left it behind in childhood, others in battlefields on the other side of the planet. But before there was a course, there was the dream and the great need to create a space where anyone who allowed themselves to trust the instructors and the team they gathered themselves in might become almost born a-new with confidence and a fresh inner belief in themselves they had needed but didn't know they needed.

The course layout forced the plan to have a high spot with a clearing long enough to enable the longest zipline to travel close to but not require cutting a single tree, because it was a forest and keeping it one was a great intention.  There were important low elements that had to be cited to create the privacy yet follow a progressive flow as the participants gained skills and confidence in their team as the settings moved ever closer to the high elements. The plan came together when the forest gave us the place the swinging log would hang and where the spider web would wait to entangle one passing through it. This magical place filled two decades of my life with the excitement others felt at each accomplished feat.

It was the trail and the stories along the way we told. We based back to our culture and watched for the Little People and told of the Boy Scouts who gave us the alternate trail up the mountain to the highs.

We are in the rain-less era right now and Tar Creek's flow is diminished at present, but one million gallons of toxic water from the Boone Aquifer keeps coming.

Along the access points for Tar Creek in Miami, water is still in some places.

With some regret a complaint of a violation of the Clean Water Act has been submitted to the DEQ Hotline for the incredible child-created recreation area that has dammed Tar Creek.

What stories the Boys of Summer will have to tell when they remember these days with their bikes and their fishing poles and the power they felt when they moved those rocks and built a DAM to build their very own swimming hole and trapped water to make it deeper for their fishing hole. It wouldn't matter if it was a carp or a red ear sunfish caught there.

These Boys of Summer made me reflect on the summer we searched for the perfect place to build the Tribal Adventures Challenge Course. We walked the lands of Miami, the Peoria, the Wyandotte, the Eastern Shawnee and the Quapaw land, it was a dream, accessible only by water. We walked for months, looking at the possibilities, where the wild berries were best, which place had running water. And tall trees. But ultimately we went with the land offered that actually had bathrooms. It wasn't so much for us, we were tough, we were summer forest walkers after all. The bathrooms were for our unknowns, our guests, our new to us people. We wanted to make all types of visitors feel ok about  themselves and us, so we took the offer from the Eastern Shawnees to use their land for the ROPES challenge course that we called Tribal Adventures, mostly because of all the tribal adventures we had had in our search for where it would call its home for the 2 decades it existed.

So how do I feel about the Boys of Summer and what they did? I am good with them, until they claimed the creek as their own recreation site without regard for the ecosystem they were messing with depriving downstream of what was naturally missed when water ceased to flow as it should and had and will and must flow through the centuries.
Seeing the special place Miami kids had created for themselves, a place to enjoy with friends. They had built a challenge course with the trees, the rocks, the water elements. The only problem was where this treasure was. And the water they were messing with is not safe for them. It is still loaded with heavy metals, as it has been for the last 42 years. This treasure has the additional burden of bacteria that can harm humans, could harm these creative guys.
EPA has the responsibility of cleaning up for good the creek these kids and the generations who follow should be able to enjoy without fear of toxic exposures. It is wrong to have a treasure like this running through backyards and be forbidden from using it for decades of lost summers.

These kids claimed it back. They just went too far to claim it all just for themselves. That is a violation of the Clean Water Act and their dams must be removed. But they remind us to apply the pressure on EPA to fix their playground stream. Get her done!

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 

You don't always get what you want, The Clean Water Protection ordinance did not collect enough verified voters to allow the ordinance to go to a vote of the people.

But the people did express themselves on how they felt about Clean Water and a Healthy Tar Creek.

They want both. And hundreds of people all types of people signed confirming that.

Had we had enough to go to the ballot, we would have had a campaign this fall for Clean Water, Tar Creek would have gotten some attention and a bunch more love.

But Tar Creek is resilient and patient. She got friends, lots of them and EPA will find that out.

Our circulators were handicapped by our rules: that they should limit their exposure to COVID, by either masking or talking to neighbors, relatives in small groups, and outside when possible. Our circulators got through this process without being infected and we believe not infecting others.

We are proud of them and for each of the people in Miami who picked up a pen and put their names on the line!
Don't be disappointed. We will proceed with a Rally for Tar Creek this fall and we will be asking any of our participants to consider joining a Stream Team and taking on testing one of the sites along Tar Creek once a month, so we can determine just how she is doing. We will test for nutrients, bacteria and heavy metals. In other words, we will take her temperature and if she is good at one site, and that all changes at the next, we know something has happened, one of those pesky polluters can be found because we will turn in our findings to EPA and the State, and certainly share our findings with the City, since through all this we have learned the City cares too.

It is just hard to be bold, hard to leap onto the concept of giving Rights to Nature. As Native people, having a relationship with nature is natural, understanding our reliance on the importance of water and knowing it is life itself, makes giving water rights a concept easily accepted, not foreign. When the Intertribal Council voted unanimously to approve a resolution in favor, we were honored and felt blessed with that designation.

But it is a concept that we worked into the ordinance in a simple way. When Tar Creek's rights were violated by a polluter or in some way robbed of the right to flow and regenerate, Tar Creek became the victim, and thus gained recognition as more than a "thing" more than a creek, she became a living victim whose rights had been violated. This would have been a nuisance misdemeanor, a thing that the City of Miami knows how to manage.

42 years ago last November our once beloved was tainted, stained and shunned because basically the Little One was abused, you might even say she had been raped and began to bleeding red and orange so much so, the world could see and did.

Through the years she has been abandoned, forgotten, shunned. But this summer, it was like the neighbors, the towns people turned back to her, started to remember, started to hope for her, began thinking of her as family again and signed those Clean Water Protection petitions for a Healthy Tar Creek.

It was time and she looks better, not so strangely colored, true, some of that may be hidden by a green tinge in the water, but actually the color is better. How come, what could be different? The 2 decades of work a fellow from the University of Oklahoma, Bob Nairn done by capturing and treating the huge load of heavy metals that had been flowing from Commerce from George Mayer's horse farm next to his brick factory and the water escaping from the "red" hole as it had been known there near the Commerce High School.

Bob Nairn hasn't worked on this project alone, he has had decades of students join him. But he got one of our own when Miami High School student, Nick Shepherd's presented his science fair project at one of the National Environmental Conferences on Tar Creek right here at the Miami Civic Center. Bob recruited him for OU, and it is there he is now finishing his pHD.

The Commerce projects are taking "bad" water and slowly through a passive treatment system flowing it through a series of "ponds" removing metals and filtering it so when that water leaves to enter our Tar Creek, is has become "good" and fish-worthy.

Now we need EPA to pick up the pace and do the work that will stop that daily load of 1 million gallons of bad water each day. Bob and Nick have done their part, the citizens in Miami did their part and now we demand EPA do theirs.
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Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
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I grew up by the side of a busy road adjacent to a highway in a house with a wide front porch and very long hot summer days, when many of those days found both of my parents looking way off smoking cigarettes and probably having a whiskey sour with crushed ice. Those old sliders they used all those years are now at my brother Clark Frayser's front yard, refurbished, rehabilitated and looking brand new.

The front porch at the LEAD Agency office is burnishing re-painted metal chairs and a settee, JoAnn Walkup gifted us. There we can have a morning coffee and await the Postman or see who will drop by and check out what's in the Little Free Library out by the sidewalk.

There is a lot that can be shared on a front porch. The art of dialog could have been born there and could be revived. Lots of people may be out on their own front porches dealing with grief and missing the partners who had long sat with them. Reach out in some way to the people in your life. Start a conversation. We are out of practice.

Lots of memories were made on front porches, but I made a new one this evening, when sitting out on Barbara Smith's, watching the traffic pass by on Central, but actually it was much easier to hear it go by, since there do not seem to be any limit or discretion used when exerting every effort to enlarge the sound of the engines as they passed.

But memories were actually what I heard as she shared with me about long summers with her grandparents. There is a way we remember, maybe it works for you in one of these ways, I tend to remember with sort of slide-show of images that had frozen a moment, or as Barbara who sees the images connected like short pieces of a self-made movies from the past that can surprise you with what had once been forgotten shows up again in great clarity.

We sat and reminisced, about childhood experiences and then traveled on to the teachers. My mind took me to a 6th grade teacher who gifted me with poetry, to love it, to memorize it and then actually gifted me with a volume she had embossed with my very own name on the front. But the poem that jumped out of course was the House by the Side of the Road by Sam Walter Foss.

I see from my house
by the side of the road,
By the side of the highway of life,
The men who press with the ardor of hope,
The men who are faint with the strife.
But I turn not away from their smiles nor their tears-
Both parts of an infinite plan;-
Let me live in my house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

The teachers she and I we worked with, she revealed only now how some had been her friends since college. The powerful team of professionals MHS had assembled, the students who touched our lives then and continue to reach out and include us in theirs as if no time had separated us. Memories will be made soon as the school year begins with brand new MHS and Jr. High experiences for those attending and certainly for those teaching there.

But her grandmother stories brought my own grandmother stories to mind, and how summers were hot and long back then too and boy we experienced that heat so more intensely than we do now as we escape it leaping from one air conditioned venue to the next, from home to car and back as if knowing it deeply again is forbidden. The climate is changing and the earth is heating up and we are doing it, we humans. But aren't we adding to it with all the energy we use to make it seem to not be happening, as we cool those of us who can afford to, and ignore the whole continents of people who have little chance to cool at all.

Barbara and I ended up talking about the Initiative Petition, but it led us to color and hope and the softness of shirts and as the day had cooled slightly and the bit of breeze could be felt, I collected the book shared because reading is another thing hot summers can allow. And one her grandmother had implanted her with, the joy of reading and the magic places those books can take us.

But nothing is as real or as entirely magical than time spent on a front porch, looking way off and traveling back in memory to the places our minds take us.
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Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
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