As tribes shoulder most of the harm, hope for full remediation of Tar Creek continues

Written By Trista Vaughn, Brittany Harlow and Russell Sun Eagle

(MIAMA, Okla.) “EPA… won’t you come and take the chat piles away… so we can swim, fish, and play…”

A chorus of LEAD Summer Campers sings out the end of their “Save Our Creek” documentary, produced in the summer of 2024. It’s a bittersweet folk song with a serious message. And they’re not the only filmmakers continuing to bring attention to the toxic area more than 40 years after it received its Superfund site designation.

Award-winning filmmaker Loren Waters (Cherokee/Kiowa) provided training to the campers following production of her own documentary “Meet Me at the Creek”, which she directed and produced in 2023.

“When I was making this film, I was trying to think of a way to approach it to where it left the audience with hope,” Waters said. “And being Indigenous and living in Oklahoma is definitely a complex feeling because a lot of us were forcibly removed from our homelands to be here. In northeastern Oklahoma, there's a lot of really dense Indigenous communities from different tribes that surround that area. And not only are they dealing with the loss of their culture, but also now environmental devastation to their waters.” 

About 40 acres of Ottawa County were designated part of the Tar Creek Superfund site, which impacts the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, the Seneca-Cayuga Nation, Wyandotte Nation, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and the Quapaw Nation. The last of which has been impacted the most. 

Waters’ documentary shares the story of Tar Creek impacts through the eyes of Cherokee Elder Rebecca Jim, who founded the LEAD Agency in 1997. 

“She really inspired me through her work and she had such a positive attitude towards trying to tackle this really big environmental issue in northeastern Oklahoma,” Waters said. “And facing it every single day and inspiring people to join her in this movement to clean it up. And of course, she wasn't the only one, but she has a big role in continuing the efforts to clean Tar Creek.” 

A Lead Disaster 

The LEAD in LEAD Agency stands for “Local Environmental Action Demanded”, an organization 20 years in the making. The demands for action at Tar Creek began pouring in during the late 1970s, about the time Jim came to work for Miami Public Schools. That was a decade after the local lead and zinc mines ceased operation nearby.

“I was an Indian counselor here in Miami and had been here 15 years working with students that were having difficulty learning, crying when they could not make grades, frustrated,” Jim said. “Kids that had been sent to the office because they simply could not sit still. All those behavioral and learning issues. And it was 15 years later that I understood that some of that could have been caused by lead poisoning, caused by the issues around Tar Creek and the Superfund site.” 

Jim said acid mine water started coming out of the mines in 1979 and continues to do so, poisoning the surface water and sediments. Meanwhile, the chat piles that remain continue to poison the water during flood times, as well as the soil and air. 

Hundreds of millions of tons of toxic mining waste, known as chat, were left behind from lead and zinc mining from the 1870s to the 1960s.  The chat piles were also moved around. Houses were built on former chat pile locations and the chat itself was used to build roads and driveways. 

Experts say children are at a higher risk for lead exposure, since they typically put their hands in their mouths more and wash their hands less than adults. 

According to a 1994 health consultation conducted by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) study, chat piles were located near baseball fields, picnic grounds, other public areas, and even used for sledding, general play and off-roading. 

ATSDR also analyzed blood data of 190 residents in the Tar Creek area, gathered by the Indian Health Service from February 1992 to May 1993. The tests were mostly conducted on children, with a few teenagers and adult women included.   

35% of the Tar Creek individuals tested had blood lead levels greater than 10 μg/dL:

51 patients had blood lead concentration of 10-14 μg/dL

11 patients had blood lead concentration of 15-19  μg/dL

4 patients had blood lead concentration of 20-44 μg/dL

At that time, 10 μg/dL was the threshold for level of concern, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). But, the above test results would be even more concerning today, as the CDC’s level of concern threshold has been steadily lowering for decades.   

μg/dL translates to how many micrograms of lead are in each deciliter of blood. In the 60s, the threshold of concern was above 60 μg/dL. In the 70s, it was 30 μg/dL. In the 80s, it was 25 μg/dL. It was lowered to 10 μg/dL in 1991. And the CDC didn’t stop there. 

The CDC lowered the threshold of concern to 5 μg/dL in 2012, and then again in 2021. It currently stands at 3.5 μg/dL, allowing those meeting that threshold to be “identified to receive prompt actions to mitigate health effects and control potential exposure sources”.

Experts say those with a blood level of 10 μg/dL, such as the 66 people from the IHS testing, may experience decreased intelligence, impaired neurobehavioral development, decreased growth, decreased hearing, and decreased ability to maintain a steady posture, as well as premature birth and reduced birthweight for expectant mothers. 

For Native Americans in the Tar Creek area, the risk is much higher.

Native Americans impacted disproportionately

Representatives from Quapaw Nation say they have removed over 7 million tons of mine waste and remediated more than 600 acres of land since the Quapaw Nation Environmental Department was established in 1998.

Craig Kreman, Environmental Engineer and former Director and Assistant Director of the Quapaw Nation Environmental Department, told us they are committed to full ecological and cultural restoration of Tar Creek. 

“The disaster has deeply impacted Quapaw cultural traditions,” Kreman said. “Contamination has limited access to traditional lands and natural resources used for food, medicine, and ceremonies. The degradation of the environment has disrupted traditional lifeways and spiritual connections to the land.” 

A Record of Decision produced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2008 states “There is concern that, by practicing their traditional lifestyles within the Site, Native Americans may ingest COCs (chemicals of concern) in quantities that result in unacceptable risks.” 

These risks were tied to fish and other aquatic life, plants such as asparagus, willow and cattail, and grazing animals and wild game.

More than 15 years later, birds make their nests in the chat piles and people still fish in the flooded parks downstream from Tar Creek.

“Riverview Park will back up, everything that's come down Tar Creek backs up,” Jim said. “And so in that Tar Creek water are all these heavy metals. So they back up and they lay in your backyard and they sit there for five days and they absorb. Are you going to grow a garden for every plant you eat? What about your blackberries that are ripe now along the creek bed? All of that gets poisoned and lays there.” 

Kreman says recontamination is an issue the Nation is trying to address, as floodwaters can redistribute legacy-mining laden sediments from remaining chat piles into the watersheds and elsewhere. 

“The Environmental Department continues to monitor water quality and advocate for the complete removal of chat to mitigate this risk,” Kreman said. “The Quapaw Nation Environmental Department also continues to be actively involved in Operable Unit 5 (OU5), which focuses on the broader watershed and ecological restoration.” 

The Quapaw Nation owns agricultural lands nearby and while they don’t currently conduct routine lead testing on crops, Kreman said, they do recognize the importance of this issue and are exploring ways to expand monitoring in flood-prone agricultural zones, with technical assistance from the EPA.

“Do you think I was lead poisoned as a child?”

After the 1994 health consultation, Jim said, they did several other health studies on their own. 

“The first one we did was a tooth fairy project,” Jim said. “We collected teeth from many of the residents here, young and old. We worked with dentists, we worked with mothers that looked through their jewelry boxes to find their kids' teeth. And we did that because of one student that I had asked, "Do you think I was lead poisoned as a child?" 

Jim recalled reading about a scientist who linked the study of teeth to learning issues and lead exposure. 

“And so I got his number at the Harvard School of Public Health,” Jim said. 

That scientist was Howard Hu, MD, MPH, ScD, now a professor of Preventive Medicine in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine, at the University of Southern California. 

Knowing the community couldn’t afford to send their children to Boston, Jim and others collected the baby teeth to send to Boston instead. 

“Sure enough, that one young girl, hers was the highest of all of the teeth that we got,” Jim said. 

After getting Harvard’s attention, Jim said, the public health school was interested in doing more testing. They tested community hair samples and began doing testing on the environment, part of a broader initiative that went on for 10 years, aided by millions of dollars of grant funding awarded to Harvard to support their work. 

Jim said they are still waiting on the comprehensive report from Harvard’s decade of research. 

“We've got interim reports from them on some of what they were finding,” Jim said. “Many of these esteemed researchers published journal articles, so there are some findings out there. One of the things we want is to have those journal articles translated for citizens and residents and impacted people to know. What does that say? And is there any gleaming information there that could help someone here understand how to live differently, what foods to eat differently, what supplements they might take that might help them?”

Jim said she doesn’t harbor any anger over the situation, but she does have some resentment. 

“We were let down and they never finished tying the knot,” Jim said. “There's no bow on the work that was done. And that's what I'm feeling.” 

We reached out to Hu for his thoughts on the decade-long research nearly 20 years later. He said he remembers the first time he came out to Tar Creek.

“I remember sitting in the car as we were driving from the airport to pick me up, Rebecca and her companion, Earl Hatley,” Hu said. “And I said, wow, on the map it looks like this is pretty flat, so, I didn't know there were mountains here. And she said, oh, those aren't mountains, those are chat piles.” 

It would be the first of many trips. Hu created a community advisory board in partnership with the LEAD Agency and flew down every now and then to make a presentation to the board on the project’s progress.

“Which is what happened the first couple of years,” Hu said. “But we got that grant in 2003, I think, 2004, but by 2006, I had been recruited to the University of Michigan.” 

Though he was not there when the project concluded, Hu told us he would contact his colleagues to see if he could get his hands on the end-of-grant summary and help the community make sense of it, despite funding for the project being long gone.

“Nowadays NIH is in chaos,” Hu said. “What Trump is doing to NIH… And, of course, EPA was in fact the co-funder of our children's center through the Office of Research and Development that the Trump administration last week just got rid of. I mean, it's just a total massacre. So I don't think we can count on, unfortunately, federal support for any additional activity or summary or conclusion activity. We just have to do it on our own.” 

As for new data, when we reached out to the Indian Health Service for recent blood lead level data from the Tar Creek Superfund site, we were told they were not aware of any such data and referred us to the Northeastern Tribal Health System. 

The Northeastern Tribal Health System said they do not have recent blood lead level data either.

Jim said the LEAD Agency is also not aware of any current studies, but they would like to do more. 

Restoration Continues Amidst Recontamination

In May of this year, the Office of Management and Enterprise Services (OMES) reported the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) was leading a “major step forward in removing toxic contamination that has impacted Ottawa County for decades”.  

Ottawa County residents are able to take part in DEQ’s voluntary cleanup program, which includes free yard sampling and remediation services. The DEQ said more than 650 properties have been tested and 125 remediated from contamination but thousands remain. 

And remediating sites with chat piles in a shared floodzone may not be entirely effective.

A map created by a Siena professor and two of her students a few years ago shows when Tar Creek floods, it’s not just the toxic creek water that travels. The remaining chat piles, some 200 feet tall, are also flooded, potentially retoxifying areas that have already been remediated.

DEQ Director of Communications and Education Erin Hatfield told us 85 chat bases and 40 chat piles have been removed through the efforts of DEQ, EPA, and the Quapaw Nation. 19 chat bases and eight chat piles remain. 

As cleanup continues, local tribes are doubling down on cultural and ecological preservation. 

The Tar Creek Apprenticeship Program (TCAP), sponsored by several local tribes, teaches tribal youth about their individual tribal heritage, language, cultural processes and natural resource restoration. 

“These seven Tribes have worked for nearly a decade to design and implement this program which aims to reconnect students with natural resources used in cultural practices and educate them on the impacts of mining in the Tar Creek area,” the TCAP webpage states.  

After a successful pilot in 2024, their apprenticeship program returned in 2025, wrapping in July.

Today, they are the children of the children of the Tar Creek chat piles, as are the campers LEAD welcomes every year.

Jim hopes they can be more vocal than their parents, who likely couldn’t talk even if they wanted to. 

“They've been gagged by these compensation settlements that they've received,” Jim said. “And so they can't talk. But what I'm thinking is, their kids can talk. And their neighbors can talk. The ones that weren't in these studies, they can talk. They can say this community has been wronged in a lot of different ways.”  

The EPA estimates it will take 50 additional years to fully remediate the Tar Creek superfund site. 

“We want to swim in Tar Creek. We want to play in Tar Creek. We want to fish in Tar Creek.
Maybe someday…”