Tar Creek is like a candy store to journalists looking for stories and a toy store for researchers and first time visitors trying to take it all in during an afternoon.

Chat piles, sink holes and Tar Creek, Picher and Cardin buyouts and Hockerville and Treece never mentioned. Place and topography, toxins and dust, are not all these places are. Miami and Commerce, Quapaw and the long since towns of Douthat and Zincville hold their spaces in the Tar Creek Superfund story, too.

But the real story is about the survivors, the how people moved and moved on, made it, and are living their lives. The successes have not been told and there is much to be said. Mothers with kids who were lead poisoned and how they got them up and made sure they graduated high school. Classmates surrounded by kids with ADD learned to read. And those very ADD kids learned to read, too. Teachers who learned how to reach through their teaching to those who were left behind. Dads and brothers, grandpas and uncles worked the mines and made the living for families who have built these towns and served the lord before we knew what else left behind would harm the futures of those of us who followed.

The illnesses associated with exposure to our pollutants took loved ones and taught us all to value each day as precious. Folks who moved away before the buyouts missed that struggle, but had their own and made new friends as they all started over in new neighborhoods and changed their school colors. We all knew who and how people moved and how we all were so very cold during those ice storms learning to value heat and light. Flooding got some of our homes, but changed the routes any of us could take through this part of the county, but still we all made our way home those nights. Long way home it might have been. When mining was collapsing, and fear hid the acknowledgment collapsing land could follow, there was BF Goodrich to spread the jobs that fed our families until that too collapsed with scars and other toxins  beneath to keep a dread and loss alive again.

We are stronger and smarter for what we have endured and it is time to know this story is our story and it is time to tell it. Start practicing, get your thoughts together and share with us how you did this because this is the real story of Tar Creek. It is how we are living our lives in the largest superfund site in America and making each day better in our own unique ways. Get in line we will be ready when you are to listen deeply and discover the messages of strength you discover in the telling. LEAD Agency is gathering the young and the grey-haired to be the guides as you, our seldom listened to are heard.

What you find in your words may we believe be the message the path for some other community member in a place just now discovering they too have toxins lying just outside their doors and shooting through their bloodstreams just as you have or have had. We have endured thirty-seven years of knowing something is wrong here, ever since that creek running through towns turned orange. And even with that knowing, we stood up, learned to drive a car, registered to vote, or not, had relationships, got a job, cashed our first paychecks, celebrated living through another day, not dwelling on how the superfund site ruined us. How powerful is that? And how did I do it, how did you? let's tell our stories, let's help those folks just waking up and wondering how on earth they can manage in their new normal. We got this. Let's share it. Call us at LEAD Agency we will hear you, you have a valuable story and our listeners are gathering.

We've been living in the candy store long enough 'bout time we explain how we got out. We have our own recipes, all types, all favors. This season reminds us how easy it is to make it ourselves and how rewarding it is to share.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 

How do we get it? With a Strong EPA that supports the Superfund and how does that happen? By following the law that provides a tax not on us, but on companies that produce products that pollute. When what we call Superfund became law as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act or (CERCLA) it was like it was made for us. It was established by Congress in 1980 after Love Canal and other toxic sites in the country got so much attention.

Tar Creek began pouring out heavy metals just a year before CERCLA was established and it was put on their original National Priorities List where it remains to this day. Remember that cartoon which included the phrase, "I'm only a Bill on Capitol Hill?" That tone pretty much says it, Tar Creek is not only on the list but ranked high has not budged since then. And CERCLA got a nickname because of the way it raised funding for cleaning up polluted sites, it's called Superfund because in the law there was a provision with a vision for the future. The law established a tax that chemical and petroleum industries had to pay and that tax funded work that needed to be done immediately to protect human health and the environment until the original polluter could be found and made to pay for it, if any could be found. That system worked well, until Congress refused to re-instate that tax in 1995 and the fund went broke.

Now that Congress has given corporations the biggest tax break in history, it looks like a perfect time for the administrator for the EPA the only federal agency with PROTECTION as a middle name to ask for that tax to be reinstated so we can have the funding to make Tar Creek and the thousand other sites on that list whole again.

LEAD Agency is sending a message to Scott Pruitt now Administrator for EPA, Oklahoma's former Attorney General and letting him know our big wish. Our 6 foot long banner has been signed by countless individuals and still has a bit of room left. We will mail it just in time for Christmas, so drop by our office to wedge your name on it if you haven't done so yet.

What would a clean Tar Creek do for us? Just imagine it. Our kids could go to the creek again, take their fishing poles, catch a fish and bring it home for dinner. They could wander down to the creek with a friend and their dogs and let them lap up some refreshing clean water, they could wade in the summer and in some of the deeper areas take a swim. NEO students might find themselves with a book and a blanket down by the creek studying before exams. Not to say they might not see a few parties start up along the banks some evenings.

When the creek got up in your yard, and regretfully into your house during a flood, the fear would be gone after the water receded that heavy metals laid down in your carpet, in your back yard soils. And that stain might finally weather away from the new bridges constructed to cross it. The signs along the creek would go up because it would be a creek we respected and cared about. The pride of being a river and creek city would return. The blight years for Tar Creek and her name would be over. The vale would be lifted on Ottawa County and businesses would want to locate here, clean non-polluting businesses, because we would and could recruit them to come to a place where water runs clean through communities that care to protect it and have fought to have it.

I want that for Christmas and so do you. And Scott Pruitt may have helped us by adding Tar Creek to the latest updated list of superfund sites set to get more aggressive attention as was just recently announced.

I remember as a child telling my parents what I wanted for Christmas and sometimes, I got just exactly what I wanted and sometimes, I had to act like it was, because whether it was a doll, yes, but it was not the one in the catalog that I hid and they never saw. And then to the last dying day, never to admit there was ever disappointment in the gift received. All that to say, sometimes you don't get want you ask for. But here Tar Creek sits on Scott Pruitt's list, and what comes from it, may please us or may leave us wondering why he bothered and us wondering why we asked.

Tar Creek is not just Tar Creek to EPA and Scott Pruitt, and this placement on the list is bigger than our creek, it is the whole Tar Creek Superfund site, the 40+ square mile site full of complicated issues from the legacy mining that previously made us prosper. When you make your wish for a Clean Tar Creek, see it all, the creek running clean, the land cleaned, fish we can eat and our children running lead-free.

 What we leave behind tells a lot about who we are.

Years ago my Dad had a large pond constructed on his property. When my parents moved back to the land after retirement, it was the first place he wanted my Mom to see. When they drove down to it, it was gone, the dam had failed and it had washed away. With some help from NRCS I was able to reconstruct the old pond and was delighted clay had remained exposed when the pond was built.

Today I went back to visit it. My Dad might have had the experience of seeing his pond gone, what I found was mine had turned into a lake. Beavers have been hard at work, extending the dam, which almost doubled the size. Crossing the dam with a brush hog to keep it cleared had become impossible, so I took my heavy lobbers (if that is a word) and cut back the young trees that were coming up.

It is important to keep it cleared because some of the most talented Native potters come there to gather the best pottery clay they claim they ever used. People throughout the world have used clay to form objects for use, constructing pots of all sorts leaving traces of what their culture valued. The broken parts of these clay pots are called shards and the potters coming here are creating objects that one day will shatter and be tossed away  only to be found by someone in the future trying to discover what we were like, how and what we valued, and how highly developed our culture had become.

What we leave behind will tell much about us. Hopefully they will discover pieces made from my clay and know during this era there were people basing back to their past, to their tribal heritage who added their skills as artists and are showing a sophistication the plastics they have to dig through to find them might be hiding.

One of the first Cherokees to renew the art of making pottery was our friend Annabel Mitchell and we are proud that she sometimes used the Frayser clay. When Cherokees made the forced move to Indian Territory many of the skills they had used in the old lands were left behind. We all credit Anna for her research and for bringing the use of clay back and developing it into a Fine Art.

This country was filled with Indigenous people from coast to coast before Columbus and others found us. For over a thousand years Native people lived in an area in Utah, the Indigenous descendants of the Southwest, the Navajo, Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, Hopi and Zuni Tribes, we know this by what they left behind, the most identifying are their pottery shards.

Our previous elected President designated Bears Ears as the first national monument requested by those 5 tribes for land they hold sacred. The 1.35 million acre, 2,188 square mile monument contains tens of thousands of archaeological sites, including cliff dwellings. This has changed just days ago when the current U.S. president reduced the monument by 85 percent to only 202,000 acres.

It seems there had been requests made by a uranium mining company to make the change because it “threatened national security” since it disrupted access to additional mineral deposits by the last active uranium mine which operates on the outskirts of the monument.

Opening up the site will provide yet another kind of gold rush for pottery hounds scouring the formally protected lands. If you google POTTERY SHARDS you will find them for sale, site after site, no history, no cultural discussion, just prices.
 
The sellers got them somewhere and if they went out and found them on their own, the majority would have been found where those ancestors had lived and in many cases the best preserved pieces, and whole pots were found in graves.
 
A grave robber came to my house once. There is something that pushes the air right out of your lungs. It happened to me as the man  proudly unwrapped totally intact pieces of the finest pottery I had ever seen. They were exquisite. Effigy pipes, pots and even a flute of sorts. The beauty and craftsmanship like nothing I had ever seen before. And then he told me, he had dug them up out of graves in Arkansas, most likely the Quapaw.  He wanted to give me the opportunity to buy them before he took them to sell. I didn’t know his name and refused to buy them. This was years before I knew how to report him for this foul act.
 
The importance of preserving cultural history includes protecting archeological sites which may have pottery shards but also the scattered pieces of ancestors and what they may have treasured. Those ancestors were sure to have experienced the joy of sharing a meal with loved ones on a cold night.
 
There was a lot of laughter around the table at my house lately and I hope that for yours as well. Don’t fret over a beautiful dish that might be broken this season. Toss it out with the understanding what we leave behind tells our story, a story I hope shows we valued the beauty of fragile things and the experience of sharing time with others around our tables.

Hoping you have laughter around your table.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

There was a time back when Chad Smith was Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, I joined a group of people from the tribe to evaluate a gift the City of Vinita wanted to give the tribe. It was not my first ride in a helicopter, as Tami Marler with Channel 6 News had given me her seat for the news fly over of the Tar Creek Superfund site, suggesting a barf-bag might be needed when circling it, and then again when Steve Liss rented one for his fly over, which was a great deal more windy, since he had one of the doors removed to make his photos... better for an article for TIME Magazine. But on this short flight, we looked down on some property I had walked before, when part of the land had been a "landfill" or the dump as many of us used to call it. It was an amazing place when we first moved back to Craig County in the early 70's. You could drive in and dump everything in your pickup truck and if you were like me, you could assess what others had left behind. I got a great bookshelf one time that we still use. Large equipment would cover what was brought with what I called dirt, which was actually soil, and always there were seagulls around the site because of the food brought in the trash.

The helicopter flew over the 604 acres, landed to allow us to walk the gift-able fields. The portion that had been the dump had closed years earlier was totally covered, and had been monitored for 8 years by the city. The tribe never got back with the city about the gift, so now down the road a piece is the new Vinita Lake, which I hope is a great success and seemed to be. Last summer it was a delight to see entrepreneurs parked along the road with kayaks for rent by the hour!

The United Nations values soil enough to designate a World Soil Day which was celebrated this week, but the same day we flew in that helicopter over the land north of what was Eastern State Hospital was the day the farmer plowing my wheat field put a lot of my soil airborne, 5 miles away, there it was. Soil is a terrible thing to waste and that day a whole bunch of mine became somebody else's.

I remember seeing skies turn colors when growing up in west Texas, I later realized it was cotton fields north of town that were blowing our way and when walking home from school wearing a little cotton dress my legs would sting as if they were being SANDBLASTED, and knowing now they were being soil blasted. If we were in our home when the clouds of soil were coming, the sky would darken and we had just enough time to put wet cloths in the window sills to keep the dust from blowing inside.

Healthy soil loaded with organic matter, nutrients, fungi and micro-organisms takes approximately 1,000 years to develop. What I learned is soil supports biodiversity, but is itself biodiverse, hosting fully a quarter of all life on earth: a tablespoon of healthy soil has a higher number of micro-organisms in it than the number of people living now.

And it is valuable since 95% of what we eat is grown in it but is not made just for us but we need to realize it is a intergenerational trust we have to use it so it provides for the generations that may follow us.

Soil is the source of all life, the incubator that gives birth to all the nutrients, vitamins and minerals that we need – not merely to survive, but to thrive.

Our life is literally based on the soil. David R. Montgomery sees firsthand that soil regeneration is the key to increasing crop production and slowing climate change.

You won't see my soil airborne again, and hopefully farmers all over the world will begin to value the soil they have for the precious resource it is and begin to nurture it with organic materials to replenish its potential. All of our futures depend on the soils beneath our feet and in our fields being productive for the future. People are going to need to be fed, just like our soils need to be fed, not poisoned with chemicals that kill those friends our soil needs to benefit us all.

Think about what we do and what we can do differently. I think about our visits to the "dump" and how it smelled. It smelled because people had thrown food scraps in with their trash and it was rotting creating methane gas. People are still generating trash, what we can do now is save the vegetable food scraps for your compost, tend it and grow this valuable resource to restore nutrients in your garden soils. Don't garden? Then save your food scraps and of course your coffee grounds for someone who does! Your trash won't smell anymore, and since you are recycling more all the time, your own carbon footprint is shrinking. What could be wrong with that?

Soil is Alive and we need to treat it with respect, like our lives depend on it.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim