Not being a hydrologist, sediment scientist, or hydro-geologist gets in my way of being the activist I long to be. Righting wrongs, spouting knowledge, showing the reliable data, establishing the model, and understanding how the sediment transport model might save the City of Miami.

Who are these experts who can don the cape of knowledge and explain it to FERC in the language that will translate into the actions that protect the lives and property of the upstream dwellers? There is a sudden fear that they are not coming.

It is possible we are going to have to take the dive into these documents, get our old high school chemistry and physics books out, seek out those who "aced" those classes and put our heads together as one. The questions as citizens that should be asked are not being asked. Do we even understand how to address and to whom any credible questions should be brought? Will they be answered and will the answers change the force of action that may drown a large part of this portion of the county?

How many homes are at risk when the lake level rises. Do they have to let it rise, can this be stopped? If so who can do that? How do all of us settle in with the sediment, the copious amounts of sediments that are being deposited and that are filling those lower stretches of the lake that will too quickly fill to capacity while we wait for the Army Corps to respond to the urgency backwaters can become.

GRDA released a Sediment Report and you can read it,  you can mark it up like I have. You can circle the charts #32, #36, #63 and study the marks on the curves indicating sediment sizes.

Sediment controls the physical habitat of river ecosystems. Changes in the amount and real distribution of different sediment types can cause changes in river-channel form and river habitat. The amount and type of sediment suspended in the water column determines water clarity. Understanding sediment transport and the conditions under which sediment is deposited or eroded from the various environments in a river is therefore critical to understanding and managing sediment and sediment-related habitat in rivers. https://www.usgs.gov/centers/southwest-biological-science-center/science/river-sediment-dynamics

You can also read and wonder about the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 stipulations in regard to the Pensacola Dam which includes special legislation applicable only to the Pensacola Project, and it significantly changes the scope of the ongoing relicensing for this Project. We continue to wonder how this applies to our National Defense, and how it in any way will be party to what floods us in the future or if indeed it could somehow protect us?

What I don't know is obvious. What I do know is we have needs and real scientists and those skilled in the world are welcome to take t hose dives with us to make this piece of the earth a bit more tolerable. Henry David Thoreau asked all those years ago: "What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?"

In the last year I have attended several of the Miami City Council meetings, and on the agenda have felt or heard so me kind of disgruntled regret on t he cost the city is paying the attorneys they have engaged to fight for the city in this regard. The city's attorneys are hiring the HELP we need. Their attorneys are fighting to protect the city with the exact scientific experts who speak the language and understand the biometrics of hydrology, how water works, how water floods and destroys dreams. I had also hoped that the EPA, t h e federal agency with "protection" as a middle name would jump in and assist us in understanding the FERC document dumps that come out. When EPA documents on the Tar Creek Superfund site are released they have furnished outside consultants to assist us in better understanding what is proposed so we can make educated comments. What if FERC had that same system in place and all the residents affected by this re-licensing effort could  be active informed parties who could speak up in t heir best interest and strengthen the City's standing in this legal fight to save itself.

What we need are those experts to give us all the cheat sheets so we all can speak with a single,educated voice and get ahead of the change that not climate alone will endow us with, but the force GRDA hopes to rule with.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Visiting scholars spent a couple of nights at LEAD Agency lately, both professors at the University of the Pacific, who were here for the first "snow" on the ground day this new year brought us. Jennifer Little brought her cameras and drone and went out following the light and captured the contrast of red water with the white of the snow. But when she reviewed her footage, the image of where mine water is discharging from a stand pipe absolutely captured the imagination of Gabriel Teo, who teaches film and animation at the same university.  They then reviewed the unique projects the Harvard School of Design had created and suddenly we dreamed of how these talents might blend and collaborate with this semester's graduate landscape studio students.

The first part of January brought the Sierra Magazine article written by Wendy Becktold which actually called me a "do gooder" saying, "The lifelong activist brings people together to heal the land." A week later on an eighteen degree day, I was faced with a drone that found me standing on a chat bar in the middle of Tar Creek right at dusk. At one point even asked to give a "Rock Star" stance. All are bizarre moments that should be happening to the new young activists who will emerge, I believe almost any day. I know they are out there. These budding environmental advocates, water protectors who long to be tapped, encouraged to speak up and out and this is what Micalea found herself doing when she reached out to her tribe and began communicating with their staff about the project, rather a capstone of her marine science education. She has developed a water project on the very stream running through her tribal boundaries and she is inviting other Ottawa Tribal members to come to the water on upcoming Saturdays for creek cleanups and experience the beauty that surrounds Tar Creek as they work together.

There is beauty with running water cascading over the rocks along the stream bed, the sound as it flows, the hope that lies within it, for the life once the superfund site is restored that will fully return. Crayfish, minnows, bass, tiny crappie want to return. Her tribal teammates will observe the beauty each of these upcoming Saturdays. They will note the types of trees, grasses, vines that grow in along the banks. All hoping to find evidence or even the chance sighting of their standard bearer, the otters.

They will look for signs of wildlife and identify the birds that they will surprise while they practice those skills we long to hone back into... of connecting back to nature again. It will be a pleasure to share time with this young budding environmental activist and those who rise to give her a hand as she leaps free from her graduate degree into a life of... my best bet? as another "do gooder."

What if any random person woke one morning and with her inspiration or that of Berkley Ulrey's monthly Riverview cleanups, decided to do an act of service or even begin a life of service, maybe as a career or the hobby or the calling  that won't quit calling  until up and doing begins? Those acts of Service that Martin Luther King Jr. Day inspires all across the country  jar and jostle righteousness out of the most impossible sets of people, maybe even yourself.

LEAD Agency now has a VISTA position open and are hoping service minded persons may seek to apply. Longing to be involved in assisting us as we investigate the multitude of issues any community may have, and more so within one of the largest superfund sites in the nation? Do-gooders are encouraged to inquire.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

There at the end of The World of Pooh, in "the Enchanted Place" chapter, there is a moment when the inevitable seems to be happening, when the boy is on the edge of saying he is about to leave his childhood behind.

Christopher Robin experienced the tenderness of a child's first love outside of parental love, the bond to a cherished bear. Can we reach back to ours? Who were they, what were their names, these lost loves. My mother and her only brother remembered her dolls' names when they were pulled out of the high cupboard in my grandmother's home seventy years since they had been cuddled. My little brother had a blanket that we all knew as his, "Me."

Pooh experienced the hundred acre wood and those that lived in it became his friends and adventurers. Just out the door of my home in only a few feet I can launch myself into the wilderness and do. The best times there are those without purpose, timeless pursuits of discovery. Each season bringing change and the beauty of the place.

Can places be loved dearly? Longed for? My prairie lands and the woodlands that follows the creek bed down in the gullies, filled with the native plants who have deep roots and the new species that do not belong edging themselves in, winding round and longing to belong themselves.

There on the prairie before it falls off the edge, I created an ecosystem of places I had loved by planting pines I could smell in the summer when the heat brought out the aroma of the Black Hills or the Rocky Mountains where I had lived in New Mexico and Colorado.

I had a dream this week that people, all sorts of people began to love Tar Creek and wanted to have birthday parties along the stream, they wanted to send rubber ducks down her, they longed to have Easter Egg hunts along the edge each spring. Graduation parties would take place and candle ceremonies like Tora Nagashi, the Festival of Recovery with floating lanterns which started in Japan after WWII when in 1946 so much of Japan remained in ruins. Perhaps our floating candles might be lit for the people who have lost their lives, from or during our current pandemic.

Tar Creek is getting some help in Kansas. EPA is working on her before she enters Oklahoma, for how can we do a real cleanup until the most upstream parts are addressed. As Piglet said to Pooh, “I used to believe in forever, but forever's too good to be true,” but cleanup has begun on Tar Creek because landowners began to believe the efforts could work. 
 
The landowners along our section of Tar Creek have begun believing. She is damaged, yes, but even naughty boys can be loved, right? So let's start having creek dreams and start longing to enjoy the new improved creek she will become, the enchanted place she will be.

There are tough times for Miami coming and it is hard to believe but the councilors must trust the City's attorneys to speak for you and the trees you all live in the shadows of in the fight for the life of the city during this GRDA relicensing process. https://www.grda.com/pensacola-hydroelectric-project-relicensing/ Catch up with the fight, encourage those who long to protect your homelands, your hundred acre wood, to keep you high and dry.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

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

I live on the land at the end of a road that wasn't there before it was needed. My home-made home on the prairie is set facing west with a neighboring ridge across the gully with a great slope for sledding in the winter. The snows made that slope faster after each of us had taken our turns, slicker to climb and faster with each pass. We pushed to make it to the creek below but also feared we would!

At the bend in the creek was the only tree my dad said had been on the property when he first came there as a boy. That tree would have been 70 by then and fully mature, and heading soon into the old age trees experience as the weight of their branches become just too heavy to be held up property.

The last time we went to sled, we left my son's sled hanging on the barbed wire fence, knowing we would be back, surely another snow would follow that one and we would be ready for it. But the winter ended too quickly that year and the sled remained on duty, waiting, sort of like the Toy Soldier waiting for the little boy who put it there to return.

Time on the prairie changes the landscape if it is not managed, the grasses can lose a battle with succession. First the sumac circles grew larger and then the cedar seeds were carried in by the birds and found fertile soil, the right relationship beneath the sumac, nestled barely noticeable at first.

My attention has been focused, as you know on protecting our Tar Creek and that slopping hill has the tangled mess of honeysuckle joined to sumac, with vines that reached back on itself and woven into  what seemed like a blanket over them, a tangled mess to walk through!

I didn't cry. The hill and the slope are still there, it is almost like that blanket of vines was made to keep it like we left it. All we have to do is remove it. Which won't be easy. But can be done.

For now, I don't have any species that are defined in Oklahoma as noxious, none are against the law. But there ought to be a law against red-cedars, honeysuckle and sumac. Those three would make me wealthy if there was a market for them! All 3 of these species create shade and have replaced some of my prairie species.

What has occurred on my property is called secondary succession because it has not been managed, to restore the Tallgrass prairie each year these fields will need to be burned. Fire will help restore the land for her original plant families. I learned all prairies have some degree of vulnerability to invasive species but without some intervention prairies turn into woodlands and I am determined to push back.

Succession has also made it to the Mayer Ranch in Commerce, OK. First that tall grass prairie was fenced for Mr. Mayer's  white Arabian show horses, then the orange mine water began to discharge, flowing directly out of the bore holes the owner had no idea were there, staining his horses and forcing the sale for their sake. After years of waiting for "someone to do something about it"

Bob Nairn saw it and simply stated he knew how to deal with mine water discharges. This week he was able to celebrate the solution to the pollution was not dilution, for the passive water treatment system simply allows that mine water to pass from one bio-reactor pond to the next until what came in is transformed and flows out as water that would now support life. But what has happened to the land?

Through those years it went from tall grass prairie to being abandoned, then when the passive water treatment system was installed, no one thought to pay attention to invasive species and deal with them as they appeared. So now the property is a classic example of how succession happens to unattended property.

Bob Nairn and the University of Oklahoma students have managed the "irreversible" focused entirely on making bad water good, but when you look around the Tallgrass prairie longs for some management too, much like my own land, we have to pay attention, the land needs tending, too.

42 years this month mine water has been flowing out of the Picher Mine Field. Bob's dealing with a portion but the rest of that bad water washes right past us and we say nothing. It spreads over us in floods. But we are silent. That bad water must be managed, fire is not her answer. Our Tar Creek's burning desire? to be clean. She waits for success.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

Service to your community.

Lots of people take that as a thing we do as payback for wrongs we may have committed and as our way to repay the larger community for those wrongs, making them somehow right with that effort. But Thomas Jefferson  thought differently, “There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him.”

True service to community can be made and has been served by singular individuals as they sign up to serve America, not for an afternoon, but for whole stretches of their time. Not too long ago some of that service was not voluntary, not by personal choice, but the choice made by the military during periods when the draft took personal choice out of the dynamics of a person's required service to America. This week we honor those who took those oaths for military service by choice or not. They did their time and are honored publicly for it and sometimes simply when, "Thank you for your service" is uttered to a veteran.

But there are other ways to, as my Dad and Uncle Charles would long be quoted after a hot summer afternoon in the hay meadow, "There ought to be a better way to serve the Lord..."

There are other ways to be of service. After a few hours of Bell Ringing with the Salvation Army outside busy stores, and your own ears ringing for a time afterwards, or the times you bent and stooped to pick up trash along a stream or river, knowing there would be a need to return to that thankless chore. Service organizations perform their commitments of service in a multitude of ways.

Our Veterans are honored this week for their service and also this week the State of Oklahoma honored two of our own for their service in this community to promote the arts, and our lives are richer for their efforts. Both Barbara Smith and Ann Neal received well earned recognition with our governor and other elected officials.

In our little office on A Street, we held a simple ceremony to recognize the three year commitment Martin Lively had given LEAD Agency as a member of AmeriCorps/VISTA. Two of our board members were present, Kelda Lorax and Jill Micka, who herself had previously served LEAD Agency as a VISTA for two years a decade ago. Service should be acknowledged, and in our modest way, we did that in what I believed would be respectful and appropriate for the times we are living.  Our newly elected board president, Earl Hatley zoomed with researchers from Wellesley College, Siena University and Silent Spring Institution to acknowledge and celebrate ending Martin's VISTA service and to congratulated him on the transition to a new position with LEAD Agency.

Martin is a Miami High School graduate who attended Grinnell College, received a law degree from Ohio State University, practiced law for eight years in Georgia before coming back to Miami to care for his ailing grandparents until their passing. It was at that time, we asked if he would like to do something totally different and serve a year as a VISTA with LEAD Agency, he accepted and stayed two more, not so much for LEAD, but truly in service to America at one of the largest and most complicated superfund sites impacted by extreme flooding in the country.

“I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.” ― Albert Schweitzer

I truly believe my two years served in Teacher Corps on the Southern Ute Reservation set my path to a life made joyous through service.

And what do we take from Martin's service?

Trust youth, follow, guide and ride along with them as they take over, carrying on tradition, bringing new ideas and making the trail a little wider for the ones who we know will follow. That 7 generations thinking kicks in at LEAD Agency. The work we do, we may never live long enough to see finished, but those who follow will and their environment will be better and their lives longer and healthier.

Historian Howard Zinn understood the bigger picture and how each of us can do our part with our “Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”

This place is worth fighting for and we need our elected officials to join in that fight with us as we become stronger together, each doing our bit to serve the greater good.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

It costs nothing to be kind.

There is a generosity that is contagious and that season is upon us. You could be a giver and cause a cascade of giving to continue.

This is evidenced by the books that come through the back door. Just this week Pam Chaney brought her sacks to help us keep our Little Free Library filled, giving daily to the readers who pass by, stop and choose a selection. Perhaps they are building their own libraries for their families to enjoy, or once read,  or finding just that special one to give a friend. Sometimes they pass them back to us.

This giving is seen where warm coats hang on a chain-link fence and in the private ways we choose to give of our time, a simple letter to a person locked away from freedom or the real letters we write to children in our lives. As we pause to remember the value, the joy when the mail arrives with your name hand written on a letter.

November is on us and my walnut trees have gifted all they will and it is no longer dangerous to walk beneath them. The pecan trees have company this month beneath their open leafless canopy, as their treasures are collected to enjoy as the food they are, or as the commodity they also can be.

When working at Will Rogers Junior High one fall a quarter of a century ago, there were so many children who had experienced death in their lives, that I organized a grief group that met after school in the most special place in the building: the teachers' lounge. As I write now, I am not sure how many times a month we met, but as the weeks passed, we got closer. I remember each of their young faces and the who then missing from their lives. But as the holidays approached, their first without that loved one, there were those thoughts of gift-giving.

There are lots of ways to give and what we did was to choose a person to tell what we wished we could give them. I still to this day love doing this. If I find a beautiful "thing" in a magazine, I love to rip it out and gift-wish it to just the right person. It doesn't cost a penny to share a wish, not for ourselves but what we wish for our others.

 These great losses inspired the Candlelighting Ceremony that Indian Club sponsored for the remainder of my employment with the school district.  The call went out In December, and the date set for the event, always the evening of the last school day before Christmas. Those who had most recently experienced a death in their lives worked hardest to prepare the little booklets with each of the names of their loved ones. Each name was spoken aloud and a memory shared by those who attended. We were always a small group, lighting those candles for our lost ones. The gift we gave them was remembering. What we gave each other was that time to be gently there. Each year the little booklet grew with new pages because we kept all who had been remembered from the year before.

I came across one of the little booklets with the red ribbon in the upper left corner and opened it and a flash of memories came, the faces lit from the light of the candles and the singular voice reading a name and telling a story that brought both a tear and a smile. I remember the places we held these events: on the steps at Miami High School with the luminaries lining the sidewalk and the candles burning inside the paper sacks filled with sand, at the Intertribal Council, downtown in the Mini-Mall. That one I will never forget as Megan Brown who had lost her dear grandmother sang Amazing Grace and her voice carried through the entire structure.

This year as last, our remembrances may be joined physically with fewer in our circle as the virus lingers and continues to suck the life out of our friends. This time last year without the possibility of a vaccine to hold it off, this year we are losing ones who may have waited just too long to take it, or the few for whom it failed to protect. We still are the carriers and we must remember our best gift is the life we don't take from others.

Walk gently on the earth and leave only footprints. I hope each of you will gift your time, your compassion to those near to you or those afar.

It costs nothing to be kind.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

I take notes. It is better than jumbling the facts, the numbers, the rate and the parts per million into a set of unrecognizably useless dribble.

When scientists, engineers, regulators spout them, it is easy for them, their language, their world, their jobs. But as a regular person, an environmental activist, I actively have to dig, ask questions and do my best to learn it well enough I can translate it to people who haven't ever parts-per-millioned a thought.

My secret weapon? The teams of scientists, engineers and retired regulators who want to give back and set right what wrongs they may have been party to in their previous employments. Our stealth decoders, explain diagrams, decipher what looks like jargon and help me produce the cheat-sheets to use while sitting there on the front rows at these town halls and council meetings.

True, I have picked up a lot of accurate information on the situation we are nested in, but there is always more to learn, to pick apart and twist for not only the what is happening but the long term effects and the number of generations who will be messing with the mess we have unless we get this done right.

For years LEAD Agency has had what we have unofficially called our Science Advisory Board. At one point we were even going to list their names on our stationary. But we thought better. They have been our Secret Weapon. There could be a day that we go public. None of them have asked to be silent partners, they each have been willing at the end of a long day to make it even longer explaining and piecing out the dialect that might get through to a lay person.

So this week with the Tar Creek Conference, the notepad open, the Marantz recorder beside me, they began and my role changed from activist to host. Welcoming strangers, welcoming the speakers, among them, embedded are some of our silent to the public team-members. Our Tar Creek Conferences have been always open to the public and the public has wandered in and like me thought: "what did they say? what does that mean?" To help any newcomers we begin our conferences and always have with what we call a "Tar Creek 101"  held to explain who the players are, which agencies and what slice of the work they manage.

There is no way better to begin a discussion of superfund than with someone who came onto superfund  only when the one near her home she began to believe had caused her own father's death and inspired her new to be published book, GROUNDGLASS.  Still grieving, Kathryn Savage drove to Oklahoma from Minnesota to be part of the Tulsa Arts Fellowship  and that route led her through our superfund site.

Throughout the years artists and writers, potters, photographers and poets have found Tar Creek and LEAD has come to know them and their talents. Kathryn came to us, but we grew some of them, like novelist Vanessa Lillie who with Maryann Hurtt were featured in our first ever Writers' Circle.  

As you know having survived childhood -- name calling is a thing that can haunt you or follow you throughout your life. Sometimes, as an adult in a new community you earn an unspoken label. For me I only learned one of mine when Joby Taylor wrote it and then actually spoke it aloud during the Water Session of the 23rd Tar Creek Conference. He said I was known as "our region's environmental conscience."

Just last week in headline text I was called a Whistleblower. There is rarely pride gained from random labels, but those descriptors bring it. I worked in public education for nearly 30 years and if teaching by example is still out there, join in, take the mantle, be and have an environmental conscience.

Tune in and watch the recordings of this year's Tar Creek Conference. My goodness listen to Nick Shepherd and be amazed at the fish population that has returned to the unnamed tributary in Commerce. "If there is magic, it is contained in water." - Loren Eiseley. (This year's conference theme)
And there they are, the magic can be seen by the numbers of fish species!

You will meet my teachers, you will hear the facts and you will be stronger and smarter when you march right up and lead your friends into those council meetings to speak truthfully and emit the call to action for the environment. That environment is the very one where you reside.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Dawn Hill's 7th hour Art Class project:  Planet Earth - Lilli Kichler & Lily Bensley   Little Fish - Hannah Ray 
Aalissa Wiley - 2 fish in the upper left   Maddison Matthews - little fish   Ashley Stogsdill - Saturn River Rings
Brenlyn Key - Fish circling the Saturn rings   Kale Derwin - Lettering   Sarah Trew - Background

Memorandum of Understanding
When Bill Smiley came to Miami in 2009 we were his first out-the-door-to-community assignment. In 2009 no one got the possibilities. Now he has experience and understands the power his position can offer.
 
The flood commission and the Miami City Council held a joint meeting with only Silver Jackets as the subject and Bill Smiley the only speaker.
 
When he took the podium he commanded the room and took us each with him as he elicited the power his office has to meet the needs this community knows will be needed. Not if but when. We know that next flood is coming. How do we get ready for it? We know where the water goes first. It inundates us by the same route each time.
He can help the city get ahead of the water. He has a machine that can produce 30,000 sandbags in a day. He can build temporary levees, he has pumps with the power to push water  out of the subways flooded by Hurricane Sandy.

He had maps showing how the city becomes an island, shut off by most escapes. He knows the number of structures damaged first by Neosho and secondly by Tar Creek and how much damages cost.

Our needs muster around our water. When he describes the Neosho Reach and the Tar Creek Reach I visually could see that water moving, as it reaches the front yard, eases up to the porch, and climbs across the living room threshold to reach the beloved homes of our parents and their parents, our neighbors and those living across the street when we stand just out of reach this time.

All eyes and ears open and were listening. They paid attention and GOT the importance of the offerings this gives the city. They voted to approve and to move forward at the no-cost program known to us respectfully as Silver Jackets.
 
Before he left the podium, I asked permission from the mayor, Bless Parker if I would be allowed to ask a question. It was "with his understanding and expertise in MoU's, if he could work to pull one together for us, with Army Corps, FERC and EPA. and ... he said he could.

Re-licensing? One of the council members politely informed him of the 30-50 year license for the Pensacola Dam that would raise the level of the lake 2 more feet.
 
It was if Bill Smiley quit smiling. It gave him pause to know that fact. That the reach they had been figuring might be farther and faster and inundate yet more structures, that reach he was trying to figure to out run got a bit more challenging.
 
But he confirmed he could pull those agencies together for an MoU for us. And I began to imagine I felt hope for the community. I felt a sense of it rising from the floor reaching up to elevate spirits with a feeling who, tell me who had had in decades.
 
This City could be saved. The Army Corps was coming and bringing all that could mustered if the city does their part and defines the mission, gives the guidance and settles on filling out the forms that will lie dormant in a drawer somewhere, each box marked, every line completed, ready for the need, the trigger met and the date assigned to kick that work into action to save Miami OK.
 
But there are steps in the dance to make this happen, to get ready, the team must be built, the decisions made, the needs defined to bring his team to the table with all the resources the United States government has to offer. Those Silver Jackets. We are all going to want to wear one. We will plan the parades in their honor. Murals will go up and we will remember the day Bill Smiley came back to town and laid out the full force the US government can foster.
 
But one of the steps we have to do as a City is maintenance on Tar Creek, to clear the downed trees so they don't hamper or change the flow of the creek and take that water to reach areas not in the scope of work they know to form.
 
Which takes us back to the illegal dams on the creek that Army Corps is aware exist and already have a plan to remove. We have to work together to protect safety and property.
 
The rains will come and the reach of the water.  We wait to see how the city picks up the tasks and does them. Your task will be to join the team if you are asked or if you know in your heart you must join it. And we wait to see if he can MoU us. (the MoU could bring EPA to the table with FERC )
 
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

This week began with Indigenous People's day, a holiday taking the place of a day Natives have long scorned and refused to celebrate and a day Native novelist, Louise Erdrich's Pulitzer was announced.  Her Night Watchman was a summer read June Taylor was sure would wind up being one of my all time favorites. In The Painted Drum she writes:
 
"And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” ― Louise Erdrich, Chippewa
 
This is the season when the walnuts also fall. In the wind of course, but even on a still day watch out when passing under them so as not to have your head knocked by the randomness of one falling right on your head.
 
The sound as one of those walnuts gathers speed and falls through the branches is one you will stash away in your memory. It is primal. The forest making sure there will be future generations. Almost like they are falling hard and fast enough to self plant into damp soil or harm predators.
 
When I moved to this piece of the prairie, I planted 50 walnut trees so they could be my retirement. I figured they could feed me those nutritious nuts while I waited for them to grow into maturity until they would be harvested for the board-foot income they would provide.
 
But now, I rely upon their shade. They have become my friends. When one suffered so badly in the ice storm all those years ago, it pains me to see her injuries even today. In the gully where a dozen were planted, they are helping to 'Johnny Appleseed' walnut trees downstream every time the rains are heavy enough to float them to new homes.
 
New homes were the topic lately as a developer has made plans to give Miami a lot more homes on very small lots, lots one mature walnut might shade a couple of homes in Lance Windel's new Chisholm Springs neighborhood.
 
A city creates codes. They aren't born with them. Codes are rules, guidelines for a city to live by and they are created for the sake of the city.  Zoning codes can help feed a city, provide guidance and in some cases figure out ways to profit the city by growing the tax-base income by having more taxable properties.
 
Zoning codes in the future could be examined perhaps amended to give residents who reside in the city a more even  playing field so the residents could eye-to eye developers of subdivisions or businesses that might not end up being good neighbors.
 
Sometimes you are dealt a bad deal. But the deal can be made better when we all begin to pay attention. Sometimes it is the small print the whole time, but absolutely no one takes it off the shelf to get a look at how just regular folks loose power. And when that power loss is realized, a whole community can lose hope, look differently on their City Fathers.
 
The City Planning and Zoning Commission will vote on the proposed housing development project. All property owners have rights and the city has no power over what an owner does on his property other than the power the state gives the city which relates to public health and safety that is clearly defined within their set of codes.
 
Relating to regulations will require paying attention to that small print and amending for the future such segments that are not as strongly protective of the health and safety of those who choose to live within the boundaries.
 
There is a lot of responsibility running a city. There are rules, there are codes serving as guardrails. And within those words lies the protection of her citizens require but also the mechanisms to enable the city to not only operate but to grow.
 
Look closely at those words. Are you protected? Your health, your safety? Not is your wealth protected, not your property value, as I don't believe either the state or city regulations necessarily have to do that. Living in and downstream of one of the largest Superfund sites and being wedged in by the rising water in our Grand Lake risks your health and safety. These threats to your future, deserve effort.
 
I thought back to Louise's words and recognized when we are hurt and the apples (walnuts) are falling all around us, when codes are blocking every move, then taste trying, see what flavor effort has, just how sweet knowing you tried every one of them.
 
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Ken Harvey worked at the end of the hall with Harry Beggerly and Mike Bradley back in the day at Miami High School. They never knew it but when occasionally I had to go into their classrooms to ask a question or take a note to a student, I would hesitate and purposefully not want to interrupt their lesson. It was not only that I wanted to be polite but I wanted to learn.

There was a whole lot of science happening at the end of the hall and it was fascinating and got more so after Chris and  Season had come into my office. They had transferred from a science-based high school and when we told them about our successful service learning "school-wide recycling project" they challenged those of us in the room with the question: Isn't there any other environmental issue you could take on? We all looked around the room and knew that other issue was just a couple of blocks away, our elephant, as you say, was and still is Tar Creek.
We took it on and I have carried on with it all these years... I began to have regrets.

Those regrets were the classes, the scientific background I didn't have and still don't have and have needed ever since when taking on the hard science questions that surround that creek and her superfund site.

So here it is an October evening and I am comparing the laboratory reports from Tulsa's Accurate Lab dated 17 days apart. The E coli levels are higher by 10 points and the findings from NEO Science lab and the Eastern Shawnee results on that and other harmful bacteria taken this summer and now into the fall needs to translate into a THING those recreating in our creek can clearly understand. But I have to clearly get it first, right?

The metal result numbers see-saw, high in one sample lower in the other. Both show levels of concern of metals that can't be welcome to a body if consumed.

Back in my high school in Big Spring, Texas, I out smarted myself. I was determined to graduate a year early and not tell anyone of my plan. That meant arranging my class load each year to get those extra credits, but making sure to take the required classes to get into college. The regret was Algebra II. It was a requirement to get into Chemistry, but it didn't fit into my plan unless I took it during the summer. One semester each summer. Not completed in time to get that Chemistry class in that would be helping me this evening as I sweat through trying to figure out how dangerous the water in Tar Creek is to the children swimming in it this summer and into the fall.

Wishing those science teachers down the hall from me could have read my mind and said, "come on in here, you are going to need to know how this works in your life as an environmental activist. Don't you know, girl?"

Science I have found really matters. And I have known that for a great long time.

My regrets caused me to know how to go-around. My go-around is finding real scientists to make sense of what looks like random numbers.

That is why Fridays I tune in to NPR and listen to a program they feature on science, called, what else? Science Fridays. Well, this Friday, you may hear a voice you recognize, because, gulp, that's me on there on your speaker, claiming this stuff is important and knowing the answers lie in the science. The hope is those in power will use it for the greater good, protect our youth, help this place and heal our environment.

Science matters. And you can get a dose of it every Friday.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

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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    Our Circulators:

  George Briscoe              Kelda Lorax           Cori Stotts            Karen Fields              Lynda Roten              Jacklyn Robinson
  John Holt                         Jill Micka                Eli Kreeger           Rebecca Jim              Chris Robinson        Virgil Tartar        
  Justin Addis                    James Couch         Cassandra Grant              James Walkingstick              Lois Lively

    Proponents of the Proposed Miami Clean Water Protection Ordinance:
        James Couch                                    John Holt                        Jacklyn Robinson                   with Paula Johnston  
      

I knew what circulators were, googled the word, and found in addition they are a thing, unidirectional, circulating the flow of energy from each port to an adjacent port. The circulators I know are people carrying a petition to give the citizens in Miami, OK the Right to have Clean Water and a Healthy Tar Creek and to give Tar Creek specific rights, too.
 
There are 20 people, men and women, older and those just eligible to vote. A couple of the shyest most private people I have ever known are circulators. Cherokee Volunteers are circulators.  LEAD Agency's members, our youngest and our organic farmer carried hers in neighborhoods with her daughter and our champion youth volunteer leading the way,
 
Some have gotten only one signature, others have met whole segments of this city. Others seek out the opportunity, they find our circulators and want to become one themselves. They find their friends, their family and they are meeting strangers who are people who like themselves want the same thing, the Right to have Clean Water and for what we have to be protected from any new violations to Tar Creek that was once so valued by this community.
A grandmother is urged on by a grandson as he understands the importance of her efforts.

Your hair dresser, your friend, your neighbor have asked this question: Want to know what is going on in Miami, OK? Someone at church, someone knocked on your door. Maybe you saw them at the Farmer's Market all summer and finally stopped to ask if you could have a shirt, too. Nott's has a bench out front, and those folks at tai chi and others at book club got a chance to sign and have.

The pickup truck parks right out front and you know to get your pen ready to sign. Lots of people who were not voters are registered because they saw voting for this could matter.

Friends of friends and long lost friends have stepped up. College students are signing because one of their peers saw this as important.

These people have been circulating among you. And this is partly why: The proponents who brought this forward, put their names on it because Tar Creek is part of their lives.

"I own property on Tar Creek," John Holt says as he reflects on the stories of his family and how they have farmed, fished and enjoyed the land and the water flowing through it for generations. Jim and Wanda Couch built a forever home on the other side of the creek. The tree line is the first thing they see in the mornings and the last thing they see as the sunsets before them. Wild grapes, native trees and sawtooth sunflowers (Helianthus grosseserratus) grow along the creek and offer the peace at the end of a day they each have enjoyed since moving there 13 years ago.

Jacklyn Robinson lives in the home she and her husband Dr. Tom Robinson built on family land that took Tar Creek from the edge of Commerce all the way to the Wal-Mart property. Tom and her boys planted trees on that piece of prairie, but the trees along the creek were their sons' playground in their youth. Tar Creek longs for the swim parties the earlier Robinson's had the summer before WWl.

These people and many more, including Paula and Tim Johnston, love this creek. A log sits along the creek for Tim to watch the wildlife, watching well enough to notice the dead fish 2 years ago and report it. The same time John Holt noticed that wood ducklings were gone after that black water settled in.

This damaged creek longs to be yours again, visited by the girls who noticed the frog eggs under the water waiting and hoping to be born to good water, not heavy metal water. And by the boys who quickly lay their bikes down in the field before diving into that water.

We each have wants and hopes for this City. And Martin Lively exclaimed, "I want to see the City join the people of Miami in this effort by embracing the opportunity to be a proactive guardian of Tar Creek. EPA and DEQ can always help, but they are not always here. We are here, and it's time for us to step up and protect Tar Creek."

Voting for this ordinance allows the community to demand the City use its legal authority to protect Tar Creek . Our circulators have found you, and collected your signature and will be accumulating the last names during this final week to ensure we have the number of eligible voters needed to bring this to the ballot for the public to approve. More than enough will have signed, and each one is valued because they each see a brighter future, a time where the City cares about the treasure this once valued Tar Creek was and will be when protected.

Our circulators are the energy this City has needed for a long time.
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Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
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I do love to read. But the book I am currently reading has been a slow one. For weeks The Field of Blood, Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman, leaves me pausing and laying the book down to take time to consider the roots of the discord the US is experiencing now is absolutely linking to the past decades we as a country had lived through earlier.

There is a low grade fever in the country, it isn't a virus, it is rage and an unsettling dissatisfaction and mistrust about wrongs that lingers. The dialog in the book are the same words I hear in casual conversations, on the radio or even in memes on social media, depicting the attitude so far off the scale from peace and comfort not to register.

There is a danger to this much unease. As a member of a tribe like many who were edged out, wiped out, removed, this dull consistent  "wang" does not bring comfort and joy. As a country that was torn apart when this rhetoric grew too great to contain erupting into  the Civil War. It seems to be building, the urgency of grievances, the fear of COVID, the overwhelming un-grieved deaths, and a general disregard for the sameness that can and has brought us together to form a union in the first place.

I am concerned and long for peace in the valley, cum-by-you times, a rearing up of patriotism is needed, a call to the alter a pulling together to find our core beliefs are real, they are solid and we need each other to be strong.  Leaving me hoping that Kindness can return, civility and respect with it.

Because we have work to do. As a people who inhabit this one precious planet, we as a species have brought it to the brink with those same characteristics that are tearing our nation apart. We have been told for the last decades that the planet is heating, the climate is changing and we have done little personally to address it. But now all hands on deck, we must do it now. As native people we have always been instructed for our actions to be for the betterment of the seven generations to come. All of us need to put aside thoughts that have however been ginned up and begin the collective effort to save this place for the little ones to come.

All of the countries in the world will be meeting in a few days in Glasgow, Scotland to determine what all of us will have to do. There have been massive changes our peoples have experienced as they leaped from one era into the next, there are expenses, there will be great differences, but we can try them on we will purchase new and more efficient vehicles. The tractors running now on diesel that take me to the far reaches on my property, at this time of the year in search of the jewels on the prairie: the wild plums, well they will probably become extinct, relics in the near approaching future. The new efficient tractors are coming. And that fossil fuel? It will be left in the ground. And those old wells will be capped and the methane they are emitting will cease to heat up our planet.

We will survive, thrive and come home to fresh baked bread and try that wild plum jam you have made for the treat you didn't know you needed to experience. You will then be like me with big eyes this time of year, watching them as they desire to be taken from the tree, just waiting there for you to gently touch them so they can leap into your hand.
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This will be a time when your grandchildren's grandchildren will talk about the great shift, when the people of the earth SHIFTED everything and began to save the place those kids will love and wake to find the wild plums coming on just when they are supposed to and the blackberries in their time and the wild strawberries before them.  The skies will be clear and the smoke from the fires only a story they heard once.

Clear your head of the dialog that causes dysfunction and get on board to the place all of us need to be headed. Your grandchildren love you already, but theirs will honor you.

Myself, I am heading into Vinita to see the train that brought what ushered in the first big change, taking us from walking, horseback and buggies.

Now let's see together what comes next and get on board.

(The Big Boy stopped in Vinita for about 45 minutes Aug 12 as part of its 2021 Big Boy Tour.  It was the Union Pacific steam locomotive which was actually built in 1941 to conquer mountains while carrying equipment during World War II )

Respectfully submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
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All my life I have been first to climb the ladder, life or carry, tote and go. But I have experienced a great humbling as slowly these abilities have been lessened, taken and loss for a time sporadically over these last days.

The what's aren't getting done and the garden looks like a "Widow-woman's" ( a term my day would declare when seeing a home in disrepair, jobs left undone and garden/yards totally unattended that he might pass by). It was a disgrace to have a place appear to be neglected and requiring care and not have a "man" to tend to those chores.

It was the image of disrepair he taught us all to aspire to make right. It was the image he sought of things done right that had previously been left undone. It was the image.

Images of this place, of our Tar Creek and her Superfund Site have been captured, showing the neglect and the utter disregard of land once covered with the richest tall-grasses and clean clear water running through it. The images we see now are the "before" it is returned to grandeur. These images can bring our minds together as one to begin the collective will to see it better, as we begin , as we begin the work of seeing the future differently. As we take on the role Tar Creek needs us to take, so no one will think she has been friendless any longer.

What if we could charge our elders to look back through their family photos for the before photos of that creek when she was loved. Those images are the before we long to see and need to see.

But for now we begin reflecting with the set of framed photographs Nancy Goldenberg took and developed in the darkroom herself, the colors of this site, stark,, bold, shapes, the raw emptiness and devastation mining laid upon our land and water. Nancy displayed that set in the NEO Fine Arts foyer at the first Tar Creek Conference 22 years ago. They hand now in the LEAD Agency office, but they were the very images Niall Kirkwood saw that brought him back this year to create that Tar Creek Remade Studio with his Masters Landscape Design students.

These same images brought Vaughn Wascovich here to see the place, catch our light and find the colors with clarity, created a set of images displayed at yet another Tar Creek Conference, brought him back after the deadly tornado to see what was left behind twisted.

Stark black and white images done by Earl Dotter captured people as we interacted with the site, then add to those Todd Stewart's visits along Tar Creek as he met the proponents of the Clean Water Protection Ordinance and found children swimming in her as if Tar Creek was the clean water we long for it to be . Todd met the MHS art students who created the fish that could visit Tar Creek but not yet find it home.

J Pat Carter didn't drone this site, he flew with our Grand Riverkeeper over our last flood and captured the blend of our Tar Creek water with our watershed. Filo Gomez and RC Livesay droned breathtaking images.

Each of these images will tell a story each captures the moment in time of damaged land and water, and now of hope for better. Images being taken even today by Jennifer Little who will chase the light this evening and be there in the morning to find it taking your breath away in the image that who show the state our stream and her waste land is as it is at that moment. These are the before images. We need them. They will be the proof you will show when your Tar Creek us better and the lands she runs through are repaired.

Would you meet her and her drone at the creek one morning, just as the sun is just perfect for that image? Would each of you who have signed those petitions get yourself out of bed one summer day, like a Mary Oliver type of Summer Day and "with your one wild and precious life" line up and look up smiling? That is an image I see.

"You may say I'm a dreamer,
But I'm not the only one..."

That is an image in my mind, of all of us ready to celebrate the brand new life Tar Creek Gets because the people in Miami OK decided to speak up and protect her from further harm Our disabled creek gains from our ability to be those new dreamers.
(And for a time she won't look like a "Widow Woman's" )

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Ethel Cook is not a one-off. There are women leaders who will follow her. But she is our "break-through" phenomenon. when she was elected to lead the Ottawa Tribe there should have been more noise, about a woman elected to lead one of the tribes in Ottawa County but with her demeanor, it did not happen. She simply moved into a role she was raised to fill.

I remember sitting next to her at a public meeting focused on GRDA shortly after she was elected. What was she doing? She was busy taking notes, she was paying attention,knowing her tribe and the whole of the county named for her tribe would be impacted the things that were being said, affected into the decades to come.

Earlier this month she was surprised when presented with the MRCC Impact Award, though no one else should have been. Ethel embodies the essence of excellence and IMPACT. And when you are able to read the last stanza of May Angel's Phenomenal Woman:

Now your understand
Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing,
It ought to make you proud...
...'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally,
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

You will, like me, agree, she does make you proud. This county raises, leaders, changers, workers who want the best. Her cousin, Charles Todd who preceded her as Chief had a vision for Main Street USA and built their tribe's first business, the Otter Stop. Now catty-cornered is Ethel's installment of the Otter Cove, the newest and most eye-appealing cafe on Route 66 as it goes through this county.

This week LEAD Agency witnessed the end of an era with the passing of Louis "Red" Mathia, who had been our Board President for nearly our whole existence. And where is the laid to rest? With the Ottawas at their cemetery. With the beginning of their new enterprise the Otter Cove, and with the internment of our leader, my thought are with the Odawa.

Just as we celebrate new beginning and the life of LEAD's leader, I am reminded of the struggle that lingers, often not spoken, but a resentment that festers that boils up to intolerance and leaks out so very rarely, but rubs raw a sore that we thought had scabbed and we thought had truly healed.

There is a rare but real phenomenon in Ottawa County and it is racism. We rarely hear of it, we don't want to believe we have it, but it can surface at times because it is still here, buried deeply in the hearts of people who have not let it go. As an "other" myself, I have felt it. But in my lifetime, I never want another human to experience that feeling. There have been harsh words spoken and directed at my and your Phenomenal Woman and I want you to each take time to understand for the most part we are a blended stock of people. Full of the essences of the ancestors who lived so that we might also live. That mural I saw all those years ago on the island of Guadalupe, "First we fight, but then we blend" happened, is still happening here in this county. Non-Indian moms have tribal-membered children. A widowed man will mourn the loss of his Cherokee wife.

This community gains from the blend we are. We are the product of the generations who preceded us. What connects us? Our sameness. My mentor, Paula Englander-Golden reflected with me how much we are the same, our parts, our features, our needs, all the same.

What can bring our community together? What are we seeing bring us together? The first ever initiative Petition circulated in the city of Miami, OK has brought all types of people to make a statement as they sign their names, they want Clean Water and a Healthy Tar Creek and what and who helped in one of the first major supports the initiative received? A Resolution for the Intertribal Council passed unanimously, and signed by no other than our phenomenal Ethel Cook.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

We have rights, inalienable ones, constitutional ones: to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

People in Miami, OK are signing a petition to ask the City Council to put a proposed ordinance on the ballot for the citizens to vote on. What would it do? It would give the Citizens the Right to Clean Water and a Healthy Tar Creek. It would also give Tar Creek some Rights too.

When people see the title, when they read the words on the gist, they get it. That right to Clean Water was a reason the town was settled right here, because clean water flowed through it. This ordinance does not address all the wrongs this little stream has endured. It just gives the Citizens right here the right to make sure any new wrong does not go unattended. What's wrong with that?

Only one person has defended the right for a friend who might pollute, to have that right. Nobody else has seen that as a right to defend. The citizens want to give polluters Consequences: Polluters Pay.

The City has never cried out to EPA, stop that flow of evil coming through our town. The wrong coming down our Tar Creek has been flowing for 42 years. That is the entire lifespan of the average homeless man. We Are not homeless, we are creek-less. The mining companies took your creek. What can this ordinance do? It can make sure n o other person, or company, etc. gets away with adding to those woes. What else will it do? It will say to EPA, we are not waiting quietly anymore. We deserve Clean Water and a Healthy Tar Creek and by-golly (people really used to say things like that) we can make the next polluter pay. Wrongs can be righted. Right?

There are wrongs and some of it is floating right through town, spilling over into the homes of people I know and respect. The wrong is scattered throughout town in yards that have not yet been tested for mine waste and the heavy metals that it contains. We are slow to demand it all be cleaned up now, but when annual funding limits yard cleanup a year, and testing to cleanup takes years. People loss the "upm" to make those calls to be placed on the get -to -it list.

We have been exposed to the heavy metals associated with the mining of great wealth. Those exposures can have consequences, my new friend's heart attack? Low lead levels now, but was there a damage done because it can do that and haunt us later. There are people I have come to know well lately who are dealing with Parkinson's. There are young people I knew struggled in school who are finding middle age difficult to manage. My bestie is going to dialysis three times a week, and the place is full when she gets there. What about that young man struggling to have a future when each day brings the question if the whole day will be his without an ambulance ride?

Our hospital fills with un-vaccinated people.

There isn't a vaccine for lead poisoning. Why? Because if you remove the lead, no one gets poisoned.

Let's get this Clean Water Ordinance passed, let's holler about getting our Tar Creek clean from the source north of us and lets enjoy our new decision to exercise our rights, enjoy and ask for more, better stewardship, ownership, that is Our Tar Creek and we are going to all be Water Protectors, watching, minding her business to make sure her Rights to flow and regenerate to sustain life are regained and protected to the fullest.

I read a new study today touting how children have better mental health and cognition if they live near woodlands. We have children who live near our Tar Creek which is surrounded for the most part by woodlands. No one can encourage their children to go there, our woodlands, ,our trees are high-water-marked with orange stains showing those metals abound in our woodlands. Paying in our woodlands will not give our children better metal health and cognition, we can be putting them at risk for harm from exposure to our metals is they go there. This is wrong, Right?

Our watershed puts us at risk and while we are imposing Rights, be sure and let your Senator know that our watershed floods us with a toxic soup. That ain't right. The women who have been flooded with that soup will tell you exactly how high it marked their walls and ruined their homes.

Clean water. We start with this. Right?

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

People work toward retirement and some of them reach it.
Tim Kent retired this week with a simple, well attended event which included cake, which in my mind is about as good as it gets and was gifted 2 original pottery  pieces made by Quapaw member Betty Gaedtke.

After his twenty years with the Quapaw Nation's Environmental Department the Tar Creek Superfund site under his leadership gained national news as he lead the tribe's efforts to be the first Indigenous government to gain a contract with EPA to do cleanup on their own tribal lands.
Tim is a quiet man, not easy to anger, but steady and true to the words he offered at the gathering, always humble recognizing the work of his staff but also the honor he had felt having the opportunity to work for the Quapaw Nation.

Ken is featured in Making a Difference at the Tar Creek Superfund Site, Community Efforts to Reduce Risk and repeated his method of success at the site. "There are three components to consider about these sites: politics, science and policy." I give Tim Kent a lot of credit for using his 3 sided stool method and EPA's engagement with the tribe but he went on to say, "Making big changes takes money, and EPA has less money every year. You have to be the squeaky wheel, but you cannot be as squeaky as your senator can be. That is what it takes. It's worked for us." He never raiser his voice but he got EPA and the tribe to the table, and kept them there.

Retirement came to Dan Riley too this month.
He didn't get a cake. He had worked his whole life, the last ten years with Fed Ex after having worked also for UPS, and for the county. He had sold John Deere Tractors in Kansas and raised cattle, raised wheat, and raised a family. Bailing hay was how I came to know Dan Riley and to learn how really special it feels to work the land. I bought a tractor a number of years ago from him and just a week after retiring does he go on a vacation? buy a brand new comfortable chair and put his feet up? No, he comes to see my 4240 John Deere and tend to his needs.

There was a joy I saw when that guy peered into the side panel. It seemed like a brother to him. After a couple of trips to town, he had gotten the 2 front tires, 2 new2 batteries, the oil changed, Freon added, the seat pumped up to just my size, all of the zerts greased and the Hydraulic fluid checked, then he moved on to ensure the 3430 Kubota and the 2155 John Deere got the attention they deserved, too.

I watch, observing where and how zerts are serviced, learned how to operate a new air compressor and how to pump up the seat in that 2-storied tractor with basically a ladder on the side to climb to get into the cab. That 4240. I can see what draws Dan Riley back to it.

My brother Clark Frayser is a "car guy" with vintage Jaguars and a 60's Austin Healey, but he is not a Dan Riley kind of car guy who actually races his vintage mustangs and even placed second at Hallett Last month.

Not knowing if Tim Kent has tractors to tend in his retirement, I do know that biking has been a really big part of his life, even if he got bucked off his bike recently. He is up and doing and will surely do like Dan Riley and will be finding the things that starts his engine, knowing some of that will bring him back to assist the tribal efforts to make a difference at Tar Creek.
I am reminded of the lines from the poem To Be of Use by marge Piercy:

"The thing work doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident."

     The people I love the best jump into work head first...
     do that has to be done, again and again
     The work of the world is common as mud...
     But the thing worth doing well as a shape that satisfied, but were made to be used.
     The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim