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

A gentleman and I spoke this week. There are times when a mere pencil and the spread open spare envelope are not enough to record the thoughts of a person who has virtually the answer to several of the lingering questions left to be solved in Ottawa County. The words were flooding by me as my slowed down  spellchecker of a mind tried to figure out the correct spelling while the facts were getting left way behind.

My meager notes start out with a reference to a place on the north side of the BF Goodrich plant, where the deep soil should be sampled for the residue benzene that required an outside contractor to remove the floor after it gave way to deal with the line that must have been releasing those chemicals for years. The thing no one wanted to talk about was kept  hushed. How many others are left who will tell the things that were not told? And why does it matter and why don't we ask now while we can? while there are still those who can retell those happenings.

After taking a breath, his words on his work history took us over to the Eagle-Picher laboratory and the kinds of acids sent down the drains there right before he turned us to Tar Creek, the mine workings with the limestone formation and the flow going straight to Tar Creek and ending up in our Grand Lake.

He remembered the hope that John Micka and others had had about adding fly ash and how it might be the answer to containing the metals from being released into the aquifer. But he found fly ash is loaded with arsenic when sampled and we know it certainly could contain mercury. What kind of mess might we have made worse? The hope lives on to find the "what" that will be done to fix that flawed flow Mr. Micka so wanted corrected for us.

And without even asking he took me to the Roubidoux. Is it protected? Have all of the deep wells used by the most profitable mines been closed properly?  Workers were witness to the wrongs done here. The days are over. The bosses long gone. The time for loyalty is past.

Twenty-one years ago, LEAD Agency honored James Graves with one of our Mike Synar Environmental Excellence Awards for " leading the charge on ways to solve the problems with abandoned mine shafts."

It was during those years that James served as one of the Ottawa County Commissioners and had a long time involvement with what was known as the Picher Mining Museum.
 
Mining made a great impact on James. He told me about his father who had been a miner and had gotten sick with what was known locally as "Miner's Con"(Any of several lung diseases caused by inhalation of mineral particles or coal dust). He had gotten so sick that while he was sitting with  him, his dad coughed up his own lung.
 
Much of the way Mr. Graves relates a story allows my brain to construct his story into pictures. That image of his time with his father truly sat with me and has been an image time has not diminished.
 
After all these years here he is offering the low-down on the questions we as a community long to have answered. We will listen to him. We will listen to any of our people longing to give these bits of truth to the puzzle solvers, the question askers, the justice seekers.
 
There is a great honor in receiving this type of trust. To be given the grains of truth that might lead to better cleanups. This county has been damaged and every bit of it deserves to be healed and made right.
 
It is not wrong to want this. It is right.

What's  next?

As the Stories on Tar Creek come in as our registered voters line up to sign the initiative petition for the Clean Water Ordinance so do their memories of otters and horseback rides, graduation parties and fishing, cornfields and more fishing. These pleasant moments may also jostle and reveal those what-elses lying there hidden as we strive as a community to seek a return to nature as it was given to us to enjoy and now to protect.  We are finding our voices. We are hearing you.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Maryann Hurtt, Poet and friend to LEAD Agency has published a volume of persona poems, actually giving voice to the events, people, places and creatures who call Tar Creek and this area home.

Dedicated to the Tar Creek Monster, who as she writes “was the initial inspiration for this book.” Her poem begins with that line, " I didn't always look this way."  I know that feeling. After crossing that Neosho River for 43 years, it is certainly a thing I can truthfully say. My career in Miami started when Max Buzzard, then head of the Indian Education program listened to his Indian Parent Committee  recommendation to hire me as Indian Counselor. Lee Whitecrow and Kay Condren, were two of the members and I regret not remembering the rest of the slate who approved my application.

Crossing that river and then for the last 10 years in the Miami School system, I was required to cross Tar Creek to get to work at MHS. I have been crossing those waters all these years.

When I retired in 2002, it would have been simple to stay home on the prairie, but life has kept me crossing those waters since. Was it the water that kept me, like Maryann Hurtt would say, she was drawn to water? It was really the people and the needs for justice that kept me coming.

It is personal. Each of us have our own story. Mine? The children I got to see make it through school, or not make it through. Some succeeding beyond expectations, some longing to find peace and solace by making it through a single day. Now seeing them figure how to face another day often in pain or in  dialysis. Some now leading in elected positions, a few-some made professional positions.

Maybe it is the puzzle, the questions that need to be answered that keep me crossing these bridges, why are our community members sick? Why do so many die much younger than the national average age of death?

We figured out one of the reasons that made school hard for some of our children, why so many were identified with special needs, why so many needed Ritalin or some other prescribed medicine to help them deal with their ADD or ADHD and be more compliant and more able to listen and learn in school. It was and has been the exposure to lead for generations. That discovery is what got EPA to cross back over those bridges and come back to Ottawa County to reduce the numbers of our children being lead poisoned. EPA keeps sending the funds cross those bridges to remove contaminated soil from residential yards, playgrounds, parks and daycare, soil that was loaded with lead from our Tar Creek name-sake Superfund Site.

The last half of the years here have been spent in part encouraging EPA to keep coming because our kids are worth every penny spent to protect their futures and their grandchildren's children.

Once Upon A Tar Creek, Mining for Voices by Maryann Hurtt is a volume with our stories, generations of our stories are waiting for you to discover, to hear. This book should be read out loud, so our voices are heard. From the miners, to the Quapaw Indians who were wrongly institutionalized and ripped off. "Miner-con" and the military road came through these tribal lands, when ore was discovered, wealth was made and taken.

Ms Hurtt's poems are not her stories, they are her words written with our voices, our memories, our stories woven such you will long to read the next barely before you finish the first.

Maryann knocked on LEAD's front door and interrupted the last few minutes of a Toxic Tour with health professionals and students.  Maryann keeps coming back, returning to revisit our orange water and hopes to see her Tar Creek monster one last time, wondering what words told will be haunting her to write her next volume of poems.

What would she write now? She would be seeing the people lining up to sign the petition for Clean Water, empowered and passionate people wanting that orange to go away, the monsters to sleep and our lives to improve.
"I didn't always look this way." I was a young woman when I first came cross your bridges and now I am not. But now I am believing it was all worth it.

A creek is a terrible thing to abandon and now she has friends. Tar Creek will be saying what those who are my age know to be true, "she didn't always look that way."

Ms Hurtt knows us because she listens with heart and she has captured our voices and those who have gone from us already. Once Upon A Tar Creek, Mining for Voices is a treasure.

We are recommending this must read book!
 
Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

Elizabeth Elliot is a biologist and her work brought her into my life, into my fields, where we have walked the back edges of the property, marveling on the many cultivars that grow along side some of the invasive species she is attempting to assist me in removing. But Tuesday I took some time to join her in Tulsa for a Pollinator Walk along the Arkansas River parkway. It is after all National Pollinator Week.

It was only 14 years ago that the U.S. Senate unanimously approved and designated a week in June to bring awareness and be a critical step to address the decline in pollinators all across the world and to celebrate the benefits provided by the pollinator species. Bees and butterflies but also bats, small mammals, beetles and birds provide this vital work for our ecosystem. They sustain our ecosystems by helping plants reproduce to produce the natural resources we consume.

 “The evidence is overwhelming that wild pollinators are declining around the world. Most have already experienced a shrinking of range. Some have already suffered or face the imminent risk of total extinction. Their ranks are being thinned not just by habitat reduction and other familiar agents of impoverishment, but also by the disruption of the delicate “biofabric” of interactions that bind ecosystems together. Humanity, for its own sake, must attend to the forgotten pollinators and their countless dependent plant species.”– E.O. Wilson, The Forgotten Pollinators 

"Biofabric" was a term that took me to the ecosystems on our earth that clean the air, stabilize soils which help protect us from severe weather and even provide for the needs of wildlife we enjoy or know is out there as we listen to the birds in the morning and the insects singing through the night.

I hadn't thought to consider the value of pollinators to me personally but came to understand that these pollinators are responsible for one of every three bites of food we eat. Pollinators travel carrying pollen on their bodies from plant to plant creating the interaction that actually transfers genetic material necessary for reproduction. Think about the fruits, vegetables and nuts, but what about the fact that one half of the world's oils, fibers and raw materials depend on the little guys. Stream beds are protected from erosion because of the plants that survive along the course of their banks.
Pollination is the first step in providing the seeds for the future, which will be the next generation of the plants we need. Some plants self-pollinate, some with the help of wind and water, but the vast majority depend on the little ones. I hadn't known that means between 75% and 95% of all flowering plants on earth need pollinators!

Walking among you are pollinators. They are not flying by, just out of reach, they are knocking on the doors of their friends, they are smiling at you at the Farmer's Market, they are believing in a different kind of future. They are thinking of the future. They can see the future as they hope it to be. They want to reclaim the treasure Tar Creek was in the lives of the generations who had once enjoyed the cool refreshing touch of fresh flowing water running through town. Our Tar Creek is damaged, because of the efforts of these pollinators dropping by engaging with you and your neighbors, there will be a whole community watching out for her now. "Not on my watch" they will say to any NEW polluter.

This is important change. Rather than all of us looking the other way, like the creek wasn't there anymore, this little creek has been collecting friends from here to yonder. People do care and people have power.

The work of our pollinators moves pollen from bloom to bloom, our people are carrying a message in the gist of a proposed ordinance from person to person. Each can then plant the seeds that are produced, empowering us to think about the important work we all have in producing the kind of future that can happen for the people who follow us, the generations we will never know.

Conservation efforts are known to work to protect pollinators and can change the world and secure our future. Our Tar Creek and her pollinators have been degraded by pollution which we have watched through the last 4 decades. But the watchers have been paying attention and they are signing petitions.

Engage with the pollinators who are carrying the Clean Water Protection Ordinance, they are looking to the future, a future we had not thought to believe in reach. Plant some seeds for the little ones, plan on watching the flowers bring the butterflies.

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

Taking initiative means the ability to see something that needs to be done and deciding to do it out of your own free will without someone else telling you to do it.

Many people all over Miami, Oklahoma will be taking initiative. Every single person who picks up a pen, reads through the wordy document and signs an initiative petition that is currently being circulated as an eligible and registered city voter  will be demonstrating with their own free will-- doing the one thing not attempted before in the known history of the city. Citizens will be exercising the inherent right of the people of the City of Miami to make laws which recognize and expand criminal liability and environmental rights at the municipal level under the actual authority provided in the Oklahoma Constitution. Each will be responding to the title: A CITY OF MIAMI CLEAN WATER PROTECTION ORDINANCE to give what most believe to be a God-given right, the right to Clean water.

People all over the country have protested, marched and been jailed to stop the TransCanada's XL Pipeline. And this week the company gave it up on their own, they terminated the project. Also, this week EPA and Army Corps of Engineers took on making laws protecting the Waters of the US stronger, and the Arctic Refuge got rescued by Biden and the first ever Indigenous Secretary of the Interior.

We as a community have not fought the fight, have not been in the streets, gotten arrested for our Clean Water fight. We don't have to. All we have to do is sign a petition, asking as a Citizen of Miami, OK for Clean Water as a Right, your very own right. And the right for Tar Creek to be protected from added pollution. And for polluters to face fines and restitution to correct that damage be paid to the city for the victim, Tar Creek.

This ordinance cannot undo the damage Tar Creek has had with 42 years of a million gallons of acid mine water flowing through the city, some days much more is pouring out of the mines, at flood stage more of Tar Creek is spread vastly across the fields, parks and many residential yards. This ordinance does not charge or render blame on Tar Creek when that may occur.

With enough signatures on the petition, it will allow a special election to be held in the city, if the City Council does not on their own approve the ordinance. It could be easier for the City Counselors to do that with hundreds and thousands of registered voters saying, "Hey, clean water, I am for that" and demonstrating it with their signatures on the petitions we will walk into the meeting for them to see each time it might be on the agenda.

Sometimes taking initiative takes little energy, perhaps a call to a friend, an elbow nudge to a fellow standing next to you or someone sitting beside you in a pew, like before COVID made cozy abnormal.

What are the Rights of the People of the City of Miami  as stated in the ordinance?

The people of the City of Miami possess the right to clean water, which shall include the right to a healthy Tar Creek that is free from pollution, and the right to be free from activities or projects which violate that right.
 
What are the Rights of Tar Creek as stated in the ordinance?

Tar Creek possesses the rights to exist, regenerate, and flourish, which shall include the right to naturally recharge, the right to flow, the right to water quality necessary to provide habitat for native plants and animals, the right to provide clean water, the right to be free from pollution, and the right to restoration. Tar Creek shall also have the right to be free from activities or projects which violate those rights. The rights of the Creek secured within this Ordinance shall not be interpreted to confer liabilities, duties, obligations, or responsibilities on the Creek.

When Tar Creek is polluted, Tar Creek is harmed and becomes a victim with legal rights. “Tar Creek” as used within this Ordinance, shall include the Tar Creek ecosystem, which shall include, but not be limited to, tributaries of the Creek, and the Tar Creek watershed.
 
When I first read what rights Tar Creek has, it was like reading poetry. When reading the rights of the People in this ordinance, it reads like justice. Justice that can begin to be gained by the People of Miami, OK's long overdue claim to their Right to Clean Water.
 
Take some initiative.
 
Respectfully Submitted,
Rebecca Jim
 
 
 

We think of Nashville as the South, but San Miguel, Oaxaca, Mexico is really south. Two film makers came to capture the emotions felt for a wounded water by those hoping to stand for the environment, the other came because poetry brought poets to that water and to answer how that came to happen, how bad water can inspire.

If you can reach back to a time when you laid on your back and marveled at the sky and how quickly the clouds change and cover you in shade, the vastness of the sky above, or remember your first firefly, or the gift of holding a baby chick, the times you discovered the world around you, surrounded you and simply filled you with wonder.

A poem, a simple poem did that for me one afternoon as I listened to Angela Helmig read a poem in the setting it was written to depict. The flowing water seemed to rush by, but as she described a leaf on the water, I could see it and then as suddenly I could no longer see it. As her poem about water ends, I simply became that water.

There are magical places and one afternoon I heard a woman tell about when she was a little girl how her family would all go to Tar Creek to swim. I could see them there, I could see the joy water can bring in her eyes as she remembered.

I am the creek, we all are. We all can be. Those moments on the creek with Angela Helmig happened because Glenna Wallace had a vision. That vision was to capture the part of us that makes us Native, that thing that is our culture. Our culture is not our "Indian card" it is the stuff we do, what we make, how we do it, how we gather from our environment the pieces we need to use that our people were taught by their people to do. Culture is not always valued, but it is the stuff people study when our things are discovered  'neath some random earthen mound that sometimes stops the bulldozer long enough to remove a broken pot, a woven item, the things we left behind that told of what we did and who we might have been.

Glenna Wallace, Chief of the Eastern Shawnee believed our tribal cultures are alive and being lived by tribal people in Ottawa County, lived quietly by humble people, none seeking to be discovered, each carrying forward or finding anew the slivers of what our ancestors born to us. How do you capture those movements of the clouds you saw as a child? You seek out someone who can link the stories of place to people and that is how Chief Wallace came to draw Meredith Ludwig to believe in her dream. During the thirty years she taught at Crowder College, she had heard Meredith speak story to past, engagingly, because if you are capturing culture you have to have someone who doesn't try to put fireflies in a jar, but will muster other ways to gift the future with the talents that are present now.

With the structure of an ANA Grant, Cultural Tourism in a Nine Tribe County and a 3 year timeline in the midst of the COVID shutdown, Meredith has done it, and reached out to a lifelong friend Suzanne Carter to come with her video skills. It was these 2 women who valued Tar Creek this week and brought poetry to life there. First a Slam by Michael Scruggs, then hearing the true way words can change into art as Angela spoke of water in the  last words  In her poem,

Journey:
Carving destiny
Carry onward
Open to the sea
Become one with her
 
   Aloud, the words with the water flowing as it was, I too became one with the water and more committed to speak for Tar Creek and gather the people who speak for the creek. And Filo Gomez Martinez, the Ayuuk from Quetzaltepec, he heard and filmed misty-eyed grown men who long for justice and clean water.
 
The list is long, the tribes are all represented, each telling their stories and many artists like Patty Harjo-Shinn  tapped to demonstrate beading, quill work and birch bark basketry. What about Richard Zane Smith's pottery, and of course an inquisitive puppet, how to tap maple trees and make syrup, language, songs. These are our people and they are showing us and the world of tourists way into the future what culture looks like and who is living it.

When you have the vision like this, and the staff to engage and endear the reluctant talent living among us, fireflies don't even know they are captured, they are gently kept for those moments then released unharmed, yet leaving a legacy for the future, say it is for tourists. But it is for us, our grandchildren who will never know these fireflies, but they will see the culture in motion, hear it and learn the past is present for them.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

The Film Catchers made better with the help from Dana Jim, the apprentice Boom Operator.

Through the years I have learned a lot about lead. Our government has had to come out finally reporting there is just NO SAFE LEVEL of lead. Zero is safe, nothing.

Lead has changed the potential of lots of us. What we might have grown up to be and do is gone, but we are reducing the amounts we are exposed to. Our children will be better for it and their lives improved because of it. That is why EPA is still spending millions of dollars a year in this county, reducing the amount of lead our children will be exposed to in their lives.

But they are not working fast enough. The chat and the yards they are cleaning up have more than lead in them.  Our Tar Creek has more than lead in it.

Dig deeper. There is Arsenic. Manganese.

There is cadmium. I snuck in on a zoom mini-conference covering the relationship between cadmium and cardiovascular disease. By clicking the link I was sitting with a hundred health professionals, researchers and heart specialists, many who either treated patients with these conditions or others involved with the important research discoveries discussed that day revealing how the body deals with cadmium.

Our body needs some essential elements to function. We need calcium to build strong bones. But the sly heavy metal elements in our environment mimic what our body needs. For example: If exposed to lead, our body stores it, mistaking it for calcium and stores it in bones and in organs which can be damaged right away. When we don't have enough calcium, the body pulls it out of the bone into blood to circulate to vital organs, and if pregnant, can share lead with the fetus for the baby's bone development. I knew all that. Lead as an element, once in us it can stay and do great harm. That is why it is especially important to prevent lead exposure, so our bodies are not poisoned by it.

But what I learned about cadmium really bothered me. Our exposure to cadmium is relatively new. It was only discovered as part of zinc in the 1880's, and then only began to be put into product use in the 1930's. We need zinc to boost our immune system and metabolism function and help wounds to heal and insures your sense of taste and smell. What else? This conference went deeper with descriptions of how cadmium fools our bodies and mimics another essential element: zinc.  These two elements were found together when mined here in the Tri-State District.
 
I had looked at the ATSDR TOX Profiles years ago, finding the diseases known to be associated with each of the elements we know by living here we are exposed to and had learned that cadmium was linked to heart attacks and stroke. But lead got national attention. It became EPA's only Contaminant of Concern here, so did all of our focus, but our other elements remain concerning. Finally Congress and FDA are only now bringing forward proposed legislation, the Baby Food Safety Act, to cap the presence of inorganic arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury in baby food and cereal. So other harmful elements found here may gain their needed attention.
 
Dianne Le produced an image during the Harvard  University School of Design Studio, Tar Creek Remade which depicted children walking beside our Tar Creek and as that water flowed the symbols of these metals of concern, lead, arsenic, cadmium and manganese rested on the ripples( Mn-Cd-Pb-As). These elements float, flowing past us each day, but these metals flow through us as well. They are in Tar Creek's water, end up on soils when she leaves her banks. These elements of concern are in our air, when the dust from chat piles only a few miles away become airborne.
What if the water flowing through Miami no longer harbored the metals that can harm our lives, damage our hearts and kidneys, or become stored in our bones? Why can't we say we want it better?
Who wouldn't want clean air? And clean water.

Could our grandchildren's grandchildren wake to an elemental free water, no longer carrying heavy metals?

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” Robert F. Kennedy
 
Think about the legacy we can leave. Think of those tiny ripples we can create. We can speak for our water, in one voice, we can learn to love our Tar Creek. We can claim her. We can be her Water Protectors, whole families, whole neighborhoods can wear their "My Tar Creek" pins. Banners will go up in yards "hearting" this once disrespected free flowing stream. It is a powerful thought. Each person empowered to change the future, elementally. It is our time.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"All they will call you will be deportees"

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Everyone is here on earth as an artist; to tell his particular story or sing her irreplaceable song; to leave a unique creative signature.  ~  Leonard Wolf

A river, even a creek can have a signature, and just as yours is distinctly yours, from space our flowing waters can illustrate to scientists how climate has affected their shapes and has controlled their elevational profiles. https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2019/09/16/Climate-signature-detected-in-Earths-rivers/1071568656154/
During the last year, I have stayed for the most part out on the prairie's edge at home  but answered the invitation from GRDA to attend a technical meeting in Claremore on the  Upstream Hydraulic Model as my first real outing.
 
Once in the room, one of the first announcements was the signup sheet being on the back table. But the back table was devoid of anything but the red ballpoint pen. The table needed signup sheets, and I sat ours up, covering the whole table. Nearly a thousand people have signed LEAD Agency's  "We've flooded enough. We won't take it anymore" signs. And all of these folks came with me to this meeting. Their fates and their hopes were visible with their names, one after another covering these cardboard covered proclamations with one boldly saying STOP the FLOODING placed uniquely in the center.  The pen stayed on the table, just in case another person would be moved to add their signature.

There never was another mention of the "sign-in sheet" from the meeting organizers, or another announcement to be sure  each of us had signed in.

During the lunch break, I left the meeting for a quiet room to join Women's Earth Alliance and Sierra Club's virtual event in honor of Earth Day 2021 called Who CARES? A conversation on Feminist Climate Action. They explained that "For millennia, women have been the bedrock of the “care economy”—nurturing families, laboring to better our societies, and stewarding the Earth and its precious resources. But as the climate emergency intensifies, so does the burden on our world’s women. Yet from these frontlines, women leaders are designing solutions from the ground up" so with a few other women environmental activists, we spoke. Our efforts dove-tail, our hopes one: A clean and safe environment. Indigenous women spoke with me, speaking for our sacred places, our damaged water, our hopes for reparations, reclamation and renewal of these throw-away places, like our very own Tar Creek. Women have taken on these roles, as activists, as scientists, as writers to see, learn, experience the earth around us and share in every way we find.
 
Just as recently I had received a package Kathryn Savage had sent with a book she hadn't written but would be similar to the one she is writing. Rising is the title by Elizabeth Rush with each section following the author's firsthand account of the real evidence the ocean's water is already rising, already 9 inches since 1880.
I am learning vocabulary as it is used to describe the physical changes happening to the environment the author encounters. Rampike is the name for ghost trees along the coastlines, where salt water is reaching the roots and the trees cannot relocate themselves, trapped in soil saturated by the sea, until salt takes their life and leaves them leaflessly marking shorelines.

Tidal marshes around the world too near the rising seas are rotting. These living marshes have been sequestering carbon for millennium but are now dying due to saltwater encroachment. These wetlands are beginning to stink, because they are rotting and releasing methane which is dangerous to our climate. As the ocean rises, those who loved those coastlines, loved the tree lined vistas, loved exploring the coastal wetlands surprised by the diversity of birds and other wildlife found there, will cease going there as those coastal treasures begin to die with saltwater from the rising sea reaching the roots of the plants, killing them and exposing the once sequestered carbon.

We are the middle of this country and those millions of coastal residents will be seeking the middle. We would welcome them, but first we must stand together to stop the power allowing our own waters to rise.

Those of us listening to the GRDA's presenters this week, in the room and virtually heard men speak about water rising, flowing, and flood frequency. We heard words that brought images: overbank, vertical datums, bridge geometries, timing a floodwave, and river miles. We learned that USGS speaks in water years. But there was not a word from them with any tinge of empathy for how that rising trapped water might enter a home, put a business under, ruin a crop in the field, or change the flow of commerce through an upstream town we heard of little consequence to an agency bent on improving the summers of large boat lovers.

"Whisper to the flashing water your real name, write your signature in the sand, and shout your identity to the sky until it answers to you in thunder.  ~  Christopher John Farley

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

The answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything else                                        
       -- Douglas Adams' classic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

There have been many numbers associated with Tar Creek and her Superfund Site. It has been years since we were listed first on EPA's National Priorities List as a hazardous site in 1983. But it is about to happen again. Our Tar Creek will be number one again any day. First in the hearts of many, first to be forgotten, but the first will be last as it has seemed to have become Tar Creek's fate to be last for a real cleanup through EPA's Superfund Program.

Miami has a long relationship with Tar Creek, having nestled next to and built up between both a river and a creek. But that relationship soured when she began to bleed orange and the fish ceased to live and flourish. Miami turned her back on her, drove over, ignored the stains on the trees along her banks, failed to complain to EPA about the orange stains on the new bridges. Forgot to mention at open meetings that their creek had literally been stolen from them, even though she never quit flowing through town.

Tar Creek was abandoned by the EPA because her superfund site was "complicated" and is one of what they call a "mega" site. But mega became a thing in the last administration, and as such should have gotten us the attention and the funding to "get her done." Although some funding came this way, it has not done a thing as yet to deal with this creek's issue, the mine water discharge sending one million gallons of water contaminated with heavy metals every day for get this: forty-two years, that is over 15,000 days.

EPA is sending money this way, I am grateful. Any resident in Ottawa County can have their yard tested for lead and if found, that funding will pay for that to be removed and clean soil to be brought to replace it. But I do worry when our Tar Creek leaves her banks and heads to  your cleaned yard, she will leave heavy metals as she recedes, because it is her nature. She is loaded and gets dosed up everyday, like clockwork.

Chat piles we have been familiar seeing are going down in size, and some completely removed and green fields can be found growing where EPA, and State of Oklahoma and Quapaw Nation's efforts are evident. But chat along Tar Creek's watershed bleeds and meets the mine discharge and brings that on downstream through fields and into Miami, through neighborhoods, sides up beside the NEO campus before ducking under the Steve Owens bridge and heading out of town.

There was a time Tar Creek had another name. If you lived in Cardin, you would have seen it on street signs as Tar River, reminiscent of the mining camp by that name, where its water was used in the mill and provided drinking water for residents.  The creek was “a lovely stream, banked with luxuriant foliage and with water as clear as glass.  Its banks are favorite resting and recreation places, the children of Tar River delighting in its refreshing beauty.” (source: Ed Keheley)

She floods there, too and for many years there was a tall marker along the road with numbers indicating feet, so you might know how deep that water was, as a deterrent to those who might think first before trying to drive through it.
Your first impression in Miami when looking at Tar Creek, many would think it looks better, not so orange, but that is because it is green which is another kind of problem. But if you stand back and notice the trees along the banks, that familiar color remains and is re-deposited every time the rains bring high water.

All this brings me back to numbers. Yes, were first and worst. But this year, is our year. This year we have the answer. This year we have hope. This year we still have a damaged creek, in fact we have a once endeared creek that has become endangered.

And this will bring us to action. Why? Because the answer is 42, the answer to not only the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything else that you may have read about in Douglass Adams' classic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But 42 is how many years we have put up with, and waited for what Ryan Lovell called that "eternal flow of evil" to stop. And this year, we are going to stand up as a community and say, "We are not going to take it anymore." The action starts with us. The action to speak up, stand up, to want this creek back, once and for all, and for good.

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

“Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother."
― Chief Seattle, Suquamish Chief

A quarter century ago there was a crisis in Ottawa County. There was a toxic plague settling in on our children, a totally preventable disease was infecting one out of eight of the children in Miami and in the other towns north of us the numbers were higher and higher still. A seemingly invisible poison was stealing I.Q. points from our young before they reached first grade.

The EPA descended on us and began doing the big things they could do right away to protect our children. They were digging up lead mining waste from school yards, playgrounds and parks. But it would be decades before they could remove all the waste that children were exposed to each day.

The dilemma of the great unmet need to protect children could not be met by the Health Department's efforts alone. Two years before LEAD Agency was born,  Cherokee Volunteer Society members at Miami High School were doing what they could do. What was that? Defeating lead poisoning by education. Yes, teaching moms all they could do in their own homes to reduce exposure to their kids, but the next step was making sure the littlest of children knew what they could do to save their very own futures. They could learn how to wash their little hands. These messages were told and Susan Waldron wore her "bee antennas" during blood lead testing sessions.

Oklahoma University researchers took another approach with a federally funded program they titled TEAL: Tribal Efforts Against Lead. They hoped to engage the tribes in the massive effort to lower lead levels in children and hired a research assistant, Sally WhiteCrow to get that done.

It didn't take Sally long to figure out the way she would engage the tribes and what they would be called. She based back to her own culture, being a member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation, with Quapaw heritage, she understood the basic respect elders claimed in those tribes and how strong the clan structure has been. Seeking and receiving support from her own elders, TEAL's lay health advisors would become known as Clanmothers.

Sally recruited elders from each of the nine tribes, and was surprised when men asked to be allowed to join and would take the name Clanfathers.  Over 40 members were trained to understand lead poisoning and how to prevent exposures to our young. Then they were tasked with teaching their families and their neighbors what they had learned.
Ms WhiteCrow grew the confidence of the Clanmothers and Clanfathers by challenging them to think bigger, widen their circles, present information at powwows and tribal gatherings. The shyest elders became outspoken, competent community educators. Then Sally widened the circle even more and set the elders out to the general public and off they went to the county fair, day cares and grade schools.
 
Sally told me years later, "It was a wonderful, wonderful project. It was certainly more than I ever expected. When I went in I was just looking for a job. But it became a way of life. I loved all those people we worked with."
 
After awhile these elders were going public and speaking out at the County Commission meetings and presenting resolutions. They sat down together to develop teaching materials, wrote letters to senators, governors, and to the EPA.

I know this because I could not turn Sally down. I wanted to be a Clanmother too. So for nearly ten years over forty tribal elders had another mother. We would all claim her as our own and to this day, those of us still living know we lost our other mother last week when Sally left us orphaned.  What else she left behind are children who were able to grow up healthier and more competent because their lead levels had been reduced by the actions these elders did to educate them and their families.

Midway through the TEAL Project Miami High School students published an anthology and Sally came to the book signing party held downtown at the bookstore. I asked her if she would share her thoughts about the environment with the students. She paused only a moment and said they should respect our earth as our mother since we have only one mother.
 
And last week I was reminded of her words: Only one mother.
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

Kids used to chose their backpacks. Remember that? The stores were full of different colors, styles, sizes. I remember all my life waiting for the school supplies to start showing up at the stores at the end of summer. Brand new stuff. That stuff would later be carried to school and stashed into my desk or locker. They were the symbols, things that got my brain cogged back into the mode to learn.

Without those props, or prompts, the colors, the ritual, can we continue to learn? I wondered, then this week, I signed myself and 3 others for an on-line 3 day course on Bio-retention. Which is a word a year ago had never entered my vocabulary. But after  LEAD Agency partnered with Anthropocene Alliance 's Higher Ground,     the nation's largest coalition of front line communities fighting for climate and environmental justice, we began to understand how flooding unities many who will never meet.

Individuals struggle with uncontrolled water. These individuals are organizing and have been sought out by Higher Ground's founder Harriet Festing. She has been enlisting us and as such helping us all know we are stronger together. You have all seen her work right there on Main Street, for she funded the billboard we hoped would help our senator not to flood us.

And it is through her efforts LEAD Agency will be receiving a Fish and Wildlife grant to fund a small local project to manage a bit of stormwater. And because of this, we believed it was necessary to began to learn not only the language but also to begin to better understand how on earth water can be managed at all.

And taking this course got me thinking more about the habits we began to form back when we got those brand new boxes of crayons  and pencils that were packed into the cigar box we had laying around the house, which also always made we wonder how did it get there since we didn't know anyone who smoked cigars, ever. Pivotal for me was learning to read, and knowing books were a portal to enjoy, and by reading learning became, "my game" which is a term my son used to describe his own interests of the day.

That habit got me wondering what made other people be lifelong learners, since I am sure there are others, and sure enough there are articles, all sorts of them listing the characteristics or the habits needed to become one, or to identify others around you that are.

First I had to understand what on earth a habit is and how you get one started. I learned it is a process, starting with a first step, even "ridiculously small" ones and reinforcing it, then repeating. Also defined as: “ongoing, voluntary, and self-motivated." Learners have discovered: "It’s about learning to know, learning to do, and learning to be." 

I am not sure how one cultivates the real backbone of learners: curiosity, but there it is lies on all these lists. Being open-minded and following it will keep one learning, and experimenting, taking actions that may lead to progress that helps you succeed or edge closer to a goal. 
 
Only one article listed a habit I won't say I was born to, but was exposed to early in life and therefore picked up young. That was the habit of using nice words, and showing gratitude sincerely. It was my Aunt Jewel who could pull out a compliment when NO ONE ELSE saw one possible and leave you believing it came from the heart. She saw things differently and taught it effortlessly. As such she demonstrated words matter, and what we say to others, even what we say to ourselves has power.

Can our words help our young, or our neighbors begin their journeys to learning, questioning, getting hooked for the first time, or reviving that part of us where we stored our dormant curiosity? Will our words encourage whole federal and state agencies to value us as real people so they seek ways to clean up our county, rid us of that legacy mining waste, mend our Tar Creek, and help our water provide safe habitat for fish we might want to consume?

What if each of us took time in this one precious day to begin new habits, start thinking of how we can stretch our minds and help one other to be that generous soul who can change the world.

What if? Why not?    

 
Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

Andrew Taylor Still established the College of Osteopathic Medicine in Kirksville, MO in 1892 based on his belief the practice of medicine could also include a system of drugless, manipulative medicine.

"Doctor Bea" graduated from that training and practiced medicine at the Bradshaw Hospital in Welch throughout World War II, then married and moved to Texas with my dad hung up her stethoscope, put on an apron and raised a family.

I was thinking about my mother in a different way today, having awakened dizzy. The room seemed to spin, like the old TV sets we used to have to get out of our chairs to adjust, confirming I was experiencing vertigo for real. It was miserable, but not scary since that rarely is life-threatening. The Mayo Clinic explains vertigo as your brain trying to sort out the confusion your brain, your inner ear, your eyes and sensory nerves are receiving.

This caused me to be unable to attend the funeral of a man my mother brought into the world when she was practicing medicine in Welch during the war. He must have been one of the first babies she delivered. She had been so pleased to be remembered as his doctor when we met him for the first time with his friend Ann, while picking up pears at his home.

There have been many endings to loved lives this year and many who are laid to rest with the families not surrounded by friends as in our recent past. Though much had been written about organ donation prior to the pandemic, it and whole body donation has gone quiet.

There are times the dead can share their essence to teach those who will take care of the living. Today it is simple to donate your whole body to The University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center Willed Body Program with forms you can find online. And there must have been a system earlier since my mother remembered hers so clearly. She was assigned a cadaver to learn the techniques surgeons needed to refine before they begin practice on their own live patients.

Each of her classmates had one, and each had 2 ears. The prize, the proof for the surgeon in the making was to remove each of the 3 bones in the ear flawlessly and to wear them on a necklace as proof. Sometimes my mother told me things and I believed them, but growing up with my dad, the "boofer" I did sometimes doubt even her stories of the past.

The bones are tiny and enable us to hear the train going by, but also the gentle breeze, or the soft breathing of a child while they sleep. The three tiny bones in the middle ear of all mammals are the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup. They work together so we have the ability to enjoy and make our way through the world safer and enjoy our surroundings all the more. I grew up in a house with AT Still looking over my shoulder. My mother had a bust of him and only decades later did I ask who it was, having always thought it to be some general, or philosopher.

I never saw her ear bone necklace, and I rather think it was the "boof" in the story especially since none of the research I have done since do they ever claim this happened. But there was a time a man came to my house and swore he had a whole necklace of ears in his car. I imagined lots of these little bones sort of clinking together as a person wearing it would hear.

But it wasn't that at all. It was a war-trophy he had gathered during the Viet Nam war, ears he has wacked off the dead. I was so traumatized at his recounting the item never came into my home and he was asked to leave. That kind of abuse and dismemberment must never be condoned. Never seen, the image has yet to leave my memory and my only hope was it some sort of uncalled for "boof."

But it is the vertigo I have been experiencing the last few days that brought to mind the precious and precise ways we are engineered. Our fine tuning must be the miracle, when just one little jigger of issue with one's inner ear can bring the whole system into a day's long effort to find one's "sea-legs."

Hoping to right the course soon, and that you, too have firm footing through all that follows for us.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

There is a valley in northern Georgia where the Cherokees discovered De Soto in 1540. Along the stream running through the valley was a canebrake which provided the traditional materials used in a week long retreat I attended taught by Cherokees who still lived in our traditional homelands.

As the Indian Counselor for Miami, and before that Sapulpa, learning native based skills would allow me to be able to pass learned skills forward to students.

Before "discovery" the tribes in the Southeast found all they needed to survive within their surroundings, they used what they had and they had a lot of rivercane (Arundinaria gigantea). It was grown, managed and encouraged because it could provide the weapons needed for war, for hunting, could be made into baskets and even used to make music!

Through the week, I cut rivercane and made a knife, arrows, a blowgun, and the darts topped with the down from thistles and the flute I never tuned up.

All those years ago, I have longed to have access to this magical material, but the stands of rivercane are rare we are told within the Cherokee Nation boundaries. But I have kept my eye out for it none the less. This week barely out of Vinita on the north side of the road what ???? Rivercane.  Nothing is as tall and appears as proud. 

I walked down the steep incline and up to the fence line. From here to yonder, thick, healthy, tall and the most awesome sight. So much had been there some had been brush-hogged down.

All those years ago, at the Rivercane Roundup,  I also learned to use cattails to make mats, but more fun, I learned how to make cattail duck decoys. There is a special thing about these cattail duck decoys, once they are made, they have attitudes, the way they hold their head, tilting it just so, gives each one a personality.

So naturally when I got back, I started immediately looking for both rivercane and cattails. Rivercane has been rare to find but back then, boy cattails were everywhere I looked! They were growing in a bar ditch right in front of the Miami High School, they were growing in Commerce near George Mayer's brick factory, where he had kept his horses until acid mine water started shooting up out of the ground and got his horses all spattered with orange water. And the other place cattails grew like crazy was in the Tar Creek Superfund site, all around the mine water discharging and flowing into Tar Creek.

All the cattails we would ever need, and so many people who wanted to learn how to make cattail duck decoys of their own. The Cherokee Volunteer Society members were cleaver, always thinking of ways to bring awareness of the issues faced here, and they had been thinking about having a Duck Race and had already gotten permission from some authority at Grand Lake to hold a Grand Race, with our standard yellow rubber ducks, each numbered before being released at that bridge on Douthit, where that mine water enters Tar Creek, each with the message:
" I came from Tar Creek How Far Did My Pollution Go? "
There would be a grand prize for the person whose duck went further. It would be so much fun!

BUT then what if we used the handmade cattail duck decoys? And we based people back to their culture by creating a craft our ancestors made, using materials they would have used. It wouldn't get any better! 

By then we had learned from Niall Kirkwood, the co-author of PHYTO that some plants were hyper-accumulators, and as such could actually take up heavy metals into the plant tissue, and as such could expose all our craftspeople to heavy metals if the cattails we used were contaminated.

We took samples from those 3 places that the cattails were growing in such quantities and sent them to the Harvard School of Public Health to have analyzed and waited. It wasn't long until we received the results, all of the sites' cattails were loaded with heavy metals, in all parts of the plants.

All these years we have waited to be able to use local cattails and teach this skill and let those personality plus ducks loose in a big race. We can't do it yet. These places still are contaminated, with the exception of the Miami High School cattails. When EPA remediated that area, the cattails never returned.

But it is time, and LEAD Agency is gearing up for a regular rubber duck race. We have all waited 42 years to be able to reclaim our Tar Creek. 42. According to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe, 42 "is the answer to everything." And it is our year to begin the RACE for cleanup.

We are going to be launching practice runs and time our ducks to see how fast they are from one bridge to the next. Go ahead and get your duck into shape, start trimming your time, figure out which duck operates in your advantage. Or sponsor a duck. You still  have time.

Ducks, on your mark....

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim