If you see Larry Tippit riding off into the sunset it will be on a horse he raised from a colt right here in Ottawa County.

We have heroes among us. Unsung heroes you might not know and may not have had the opportunity to see in action.

The one with the hat who sat with the Tar Creek Trustee Council represented one of the affected tribes is retiring from his job with that tribe's environmental department after 16 years. No longer employed by the tribe removes him from that position on that Council.

I was an Indian Counselor for Miami High School when the Tar Creek Trustee Council was born and got to hear just a bit about how they would operate right before the doors were shut tight to the public and all that has gone on inside those rooms has remained  confidential, as required by law.

And I retired in 2002. All those years the trustees have been actually fighting for the public, which is us, for our rights to have the natural resources that were spoiled, taken, ruined by our legacy mining restored to the public for our enjoyment, nurturance, sustenance and because by law it can be required.

During these years I have seen state and federal authorities cringe when they saw the man wearing the Hat sitting back there on the back row, on the front row or right smack in the middle of the venue - always sitting so those in power could see him and knowing he would ask the questions that would be heard and answered for the public record.

I have copious notes of past Tar Creek Conferences and the exchanges he initiated making those in power quiver when he spoke up. He won't be missed, he will not be silenced. Heroes with that kind of courage and that studied background of this site will not go gentle into that good night, as Dylan Thomas would express.

Larry Tippit grew up knowing he would always be tied closely to the earth. Those wild plants were on his plate. The game and fish were dinner. He learned the ways of the deer from his grandfather and practiced what he had learned with his father and has passed that knowledge on to his young.

Learning to love the environment isn't taught. It is experienced learning and knowing it can provide for us gives us the responsibility to protect it and in all ways find ways to restore what has been damaged.

Ottawa County will not know how much they owe Larry Tippit because how do you put a dollar amount on that deer that is taken in season this year? It is tied to the years of walking quietly with grandfather then father, the quantity hours how do you value those?

Larry Tippit's Ottawa County ties run in his blood with both Seneca and Wyandotte coming to him from one side of the family and Cherokee on the other.

He has stayed close to the earth he protects and has for the last 16 years worked with the Peoria Tribe.

He is known for horses. The hat is actually worn by a real cowboy who raises horses.

My first understanding of the harm our mining did was talking with another man who loved his horses, George Mayer. Larry came to know and understand the need to ride this "pony"- wrestle with responsible parties and get some of the legal remedies our site deserved in the bank to provide the means to begin the tedious years it will take to restore to the public what we have lost, gone so long we didn't even have it in our memory banks to know we were missing it.

The Tar Creek Trustee Council members are called Trustees and they must as they used to say must speak for the trees as the Lorax did.

These Trustees speak for the environmental damage our environment has experienced. They know it because they have Assessed it, studied it, counted and KNOW what they say is truth. They are not speaking for the whole state of Oklahoma. They are standing up for those in our environment that have no voices, the mussels, the Mad Toms, the beaver, otter and the wood ducks who cannot speak of these losses.

The little ones that failed to hatch, to swim to fly home to nest in trees that will provide the fruit and nuts that will provide the safe nutrient needed for a healthy life.

Our environment is damaged and everything, including us is harmed by it. The tragedy of this is vast and wrong and these trustees are setting about to making some of those wrongs right. They are doing it with the money they made, legally won funding from some of the entities who messed up our lives before most of us were born, made their fortunes for these companies and danced out of here and kicked the chat dust off their boots as they left.

And then they met up with the likes of a fellow who knew how to handle wild horses and look them in the eye and tame them. And that is what he did with his teammate Trustees.

I say, "Hats off, mister, we, the little ones, we thank you."

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

The reference books are laid out on the desk's surface, overlapping each other. The Encyclopedia Britannica World Atlas 1957 edition opened to the page illustrating the full length of the country of Scotland.

I got to go to Scotland once and feel the wind on my face as it comes off the North Sea, looking way off and almost able to see Norway. There along the shore embedded in the sand small pieces of sea-glass left me wondering the age of each and their origin story.

And later on that trip to see the heather in bloom across acres accented by abandoned rock walls. No homes in sight out on those winding roads in the north country.

It is now when reading The Highland Clearances by Eric Richardson that I am understanding what I saw on those lonely stretches. All that was left of the lives of the indigenous people of Scotland. The saying "Leave nothing but footprints" came to mind. That is what they left. Their homes had been brought down as our Cherokee relatives' homes were taken down, burned, or in a few cases moved right into as the invader's own. But for the most part, our Scotts and Cherokees were viewed as vermin whose homes would be vile, unclean and beneath the invaders' standards. The homes gone, the shame of removing them has not been passed down through the generations. That happens when history is not spoken and truth is allowed to be forgotten as if it never happened.

Once these books are laid out and the research begins, the stories of these clearances begin to blend. I can almost hear the moans, the cries, the longing to stay put, the questions of Why? that must have been asked by the young in their own languages still in their warm beds. Those who had the knowledge the change, their removal was eminent, many may not have known to ask before the removal came to them.

They cried. That is how the Cherokee removal came to be known as the Trail of Tears. The Americans knew about Clearances. They knew how to do them, their relatives were writing the text book on how it could be done. And as it turned out many of these Scottish Clearances on the Highlanders were happening at the same time our own Trails of Tears were occurring to not only with  the Cherokee, but countless other tribes in this country.

Our own Ottawa County is full of those who were removed forcibly in Clearances from their traditional territories, where they had been for the life of their tribes, where their origin stories were based.

It is a deep dive into centuries old language reading this text. Words are describing places and kinds of relationships long forgotten and keep me turning the pages of the largest, oldest Oxford Dictionary in my house in order to get the gist of the mindset of the words the writer is quoting.

That same deep dive is the origin story of LEAD Agency. We started out as a group of people wondering Why? and What? Why are we sick, how did our children get lead poisoned, how does a "cleanup" happen? Those questions took a group of us to the Miami Public Library to study the documents that resided in the "repository for the Tar Creek Superfund Site" all in large 3-leaf binders on the rolling cart, which could be pulled to the table we bellied up to read. The research meant reading and wondering, taking notes and then discussing what we each had discovered.

That repository is still there at the Miami Public Library, not on a rolling cart anymore, but on the shelves in the basement. LEAD got duplicates and keep them in our own what we call our "Toxic Library" at our office, along with more of the health studies that have been done and countless other documents on mercury in fish, lead toxicity, and all the BF Goodrich documents we were able to FOIA from the state.

The search for the truth. I have little patience for lie believers. Let's keep finding the connections from our past to our present. Let's learn from the wrongs that brought us here. Consider the new Clearances that are occurring. Not so much by man, but by what man has done to change the climate on this one precious place we all call home.

Those winds, those tornadoes did what we would have called in the past: Clearance. They took down hundreds, perhaps thousands of homes, so efficiently, all in one night, causing those same ancestral feelings that connect us to them, they are crying. And we understand the loss and the starting over that is happening with a whole swath of people, not a single tribe, but yet so much more so, our people.

After each flood event the homes you grew up looking across the street and seeing each morning of your life, are removed when they are inundated by high water. Each of those homes were ones where joy had lived, sorrows, too. There will be more clearances coming. We must plan for the new homes to be built for the high waters that will be coming, plan for the 500 year floods that are not that far into the future.  Clearances have happened here in Miami, too, let's plan to have fewer.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

There was a country western song written by Stan Jones the year before I was born that became popular back in the day called Ghost Riders in the Sky,

Those riders made me think of the term Ghost Writers. Not at all the same, but the tune came to me when Mark Drajem with the Natural Resource Defense Council - NRDC called me this week.

We had a conversation about the flooding we experience in Ottawa County and not that we can do much about the flooding, but we did talk about the THING we can do for the next month. We can submit comments to the Federal  Emergency Management Agency about the revisions they are considering in the 50 year old regulations that have been their guidelines for those decades. I was trying to explain the difficulty high waters cause us and how flooding is always a "dirty deal." But add a layer of toxic water coming down Tar Creek and that water laying down in our front yards, parks and across that segment of the NEO College property. It was a heartfelt visit, as I guided him on the editorial he would be writing and hoped to have accepted in print in the news outlets that are more apt to think "environmental" isn't a radical topic to cover. We exchanged several emails as he worked on his editorial and accepted my corrections, or clarifications on wording. Then this evening he sent me the notice his work had been accepted and would be published in Morning Consult this week, but when he forwarded his work, titled: Making Sure the Next Flood Isn’t a Tragedy by Rebecca Jim!

I had met a ghost writer who had written my article for ME. But the story is not ME, the story is WE.

We all have our moment in time to say a thing, reply, comment about the rules the generations who follow us will have to help them as they use FEMA to get to the other side of the disaster they have endured. So many of our residents know what didn't work for them after our lived disasters. Let's comment, let's tell our stories about how we prepared, how we endured, how we recovered afterward and what would have made that easier. 

We are the middle of the United States, not on the coasts where we know the oceans are rising and those living on the edges of our country will face flooding on a scale we have never dreamed soon. We are upstream of trapped water. The climate is changing and weather will be more extreme in the decades and centuries to come. We are dealing with a man-made, man-controlled flood for the most part. As our lake continues to fill with sediment from Kansas, chat from our superfund site, when flooding rain begins the water is backing up quicker, and we will experience flooding sooner and more severely. If EPA and GRDA and FERC and FEMA would sit down together and look across the table at each other, AND we locked the door...  Perhaps they would see this is a single issue and should be dealt with by all of those agencies working together in a united effort. Our issues could be dealt with by agencies with the power to do it, should they receive the motivation to act.

So until that miracle happens, choose up sides, flip a coin and see who Ghost writes who on the comments to FEMA. You can hum that tune if it helps motivates you to motivate others.

But a last thought: Only a few weeks ago, I saw a dear old friend. It was a moment I will relive, the feeling of how special it is to be accepted as a friend and to know the privilege that is. She died this morning with COVID. Our unvaccinated relations have every right at this time to keep that status. But I am old and making new friends is not easy. I treasure each of these gifts of trust and know that they are mingling in the world and breathing the same air we all share. I ask for each of us to have conversations with our people as we are watchful to prevent accidents, we are mindful to put our seatbelts on, we do and are a part of the world we inhabit and we care for one another. Be the gift that keeps old friends a bit more time together, a few more times around the sun.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

The warm dry weather has inspired time in the sun out on the land. In that field that will be burnt in the spring in the process to begin restoring the Tallgrass prairie, the red cedars are coming down  but sprinkled along the field are some loblolly pine saplings seeded from the stand I have been mourning in my yard, one by one dying from the pine bark beetle infestations. But those saplings jumped the fence and got a start a ways away from the infestation and may be the new stand that may make it to the next century. In the fall just a couple of months ago, my remaining tall pines were hotels for the migrating monarchs, latched onto individual pine needles, resting before the next leg of their flight to Mexico. It will be great to know they will have a way station growing across the gully for the wee-ones' future use.

We had gone to pick up some dry wood that had fallen near and on the neighbor's fence there on the prairie's edge just at the fence line where the tree whose limbs had fallen, the bark sloughed. There at the base where the land lapped were waves of du-wi-shi , fluffed up like light golden miniature pillows: Pleurotus ostreatus. I never saw such a site. But right on the edge of my property, inches away, across the fence not mine to take.

Another day took me to the edge of the property where a family of red cedar seedlings had landed, all perfectly lined up like soldiers next to my adjoining neighbor's barbed wire fence. I had driven the John Deere and taken the heavy lobbers and turned the engine off and began the process. 86 cedars cut that afternoon and had daylight lasted, the other 89 cedars would have been cut to finish that fence row.

Today after sitting through the best part of the virtual Oklahoma Water Conference presentation, the daylight could not be resisted, so it was the slow removal of honeysuckle vines. One plucked out, gingerly to not break the strand, strand after strand. Each one hung separately on the leafless redbud tree. Those vines will become baskets in the weeks to come. The vines will be boiled and the bark easily removed to reveal the smooth woody strands that will make beautiful Cherokee double-weave baskets that will be filled with the wild plum jam made from the summer's crop and black walnuts for Christmas gifts. The plants that grow on my property are why I push for the cleanup of the Tar Creek Superfund site. None of the plants that grow along Tar Creek, or in the flood zones along the Spring River down to Twin Bridges may be safe to eat. Research by our own Ean and Meredith Garvin has proven this. And that is NOT right.

DEQ called to say GRDA will be addressing the dams on Tar Creek this week, so her flow will be restored, but the trees that have been vandalized and will die may produce wi-shi, that no one should eat. The sediment they have been growing in will have accumulated metals for the last 100 years that the roots have been pulling up into and embedding in their cells, while those roots were holding sediments that would stabilize the banks, curbing erosion, trying in their way to protect her neighbors from more extreme flooding. Tree seedlings will have to grow for decades to replace the ones our very own vandals have cut down or cut in ways to ensure they will surely die.

Last week in kayaks on Hudson Creek down to the bend that flows into the Neosho River, I was reminded how water can connect us, that slow smooth surface brought friends together to enjoy nature's beauty, find the feather treasures left by the pelicans who were finding the same place a sanctuary. That beauty along our creeks serves as our buffer, provides life to the communities of species, and is our gateway to the treasures of the natural world we live upon with them.

The Rights of Nature. We understand that right deeply and much more clearly as we take ourselves out in it. Take some time and gift yourself that afternoon sun, a moment to value the treasures we have around us, the random seedlings that are planning their life's work for your grandchildren and know our responsibility is to live through this pandemic for them. For in us are the stories we have not yet told, the work we have not completed and the true love we still need to express.

With Rights also comes Responsibilities. We have a responsibility to ensure those rights for Nature, too.
And Eddie Webb, our county's environmental deputy will be enforcing them!

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim