Summer King stands in front of her office, pouring bottled water into a dish for the feral cats roaming the area.
“I tell people, don’t eat the chat, don’t drink the water—you’ll be fine,” she says with a laugh.
The chat in question, mile-high piles of mining byproduct filled with lead, zinc and cadmium, tower in the distance. It’s in every crack and crevice in Picher.
According to the EPA, its toxins permeate the soil and, along with the thousands of flooded mines, contaminate the water within Ottawa County’s 25,000 acres with no clearly defined boundary.
The gravel-like substance is used in the driveways of the abandoned homes surrounding King’s office.
“This was a low-income housing area,” she says, stepping inside the air-conditioned building. “Now it’s our ‘headquarters’ of sorts.”
King is a Cherokee Nation citizen and an environmental scientist. She works for the Quapaw Nation, cleaning up the land and helping protect the soil. It’s a big job, she says it’s fulfilling.
“I feel like this is where I’m meant to be, cleaning this place up,” she says. “I’m hopeful that I may get to see the site three-quarters of the way cleaned up at some point. Maybe I’ll get to see Tar Creek not be orange.”
History of Picher
Picher is nicknamed ‘the most toxic ghost town in America.’ It received this title because it is the epicenter of one of the largest Superfund sites in the United States. Years of mining have left the ground unstable, creating collapsing mines and sporadic sinkholes.
The town and surrounding area were part of the Tri-State Mining District, a historic area mined for lead and zinc comprising Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma. Historically, the Quapaw Nation was pushed into Northeast Oklahoma and lived within and around this area.
At one time, Picher and the surrounding towns produced half the lead in bullets fired during both World Wars. As mining production decreased, the town’s population slowly dwindled until mining ceased in 1967.
In 2008, an F4 tornado blew through the town and weakened the already unstable earth. That following year, the EPA declared the area uninhabitable and bought out the land.
It was named the “Tar Creek Superfund Site” due to the orange and polluted creek seeping into the immediate and surrounding areas.
Years later, when remediation efforts were first discussed, the Quapaw Nation stepped up.
Quapaw’s connection to the land
King points out various plots of land as she drives around, telling stories of Quapaw families who own these sections, many of which are the descendants of the original allottees.
“This is Quapaw’s homeland, this is where they were relocated. This is the only reservation they’re ever going to have,” King says. “So let's clean it up, make it usable again. Because this is their land and it’s the only land they’re going to get.”
When lead and zinc ore were discovered under the Quapaw people’s land, companies came with the promise of fortune.
While Quapaws benefited initially by leasing their lands out to mining companies, the corporations eventually found ways around these agreements. Through federal court rulings, they deemed many of the landowners “incompetent” and seized control of their allotted land and subsequent wealth.
Those who retained their leases saw little profit and were given less than agreed upon.
After the mines were cleared out, the companies left, leaving the tribe with uninhabitable land that spans more than 80 percent of their reservation. Additionally, residents in the area suffered and continue to suffer adverse health consequences from the ecological destruction.
More recently, attempts to settle with the Quapaw Nation over environmental damage have stalled. House Bill 4715 would have provided settlement payments to tribal citizens, but it died in early 2022.
Now, a century later, their efforts have caused the area to begin to bristle with life once more.
Present Day Efforts
King says the tribe has been working for a decade on cleanup. Since starting at the end of 2013, the Quapaw Nation has moved seven million tons of waste over hundreds of acres with EPA funding.
The end goal is to make the land usable.
“Just because it won’t be residential, you know nobody’s ever going to move back in here, doesn’t mean it can’t be productive,” she says.
She believes the remediation effort is like healing a wound.
“I see the Quapaw doing cleanup as full-circle where we get to fix that injury,” she says.
Fixing the injury goes something like this: King’s team starts at a location and takes the chat, using it to fill the flooded mine from which it was harvested. Anything left over is either taken to a processor or used in asphalt. When the hole is filled, it's monitored for safety and then “capped” with dirt and Native Oklahoma plants.
“It just looks like a gentle mound. When the site grasses over, you don’t really notice them,” King says, pointing to a field teeming with green grass and white flowers.
Quapaw citizen Guy Barker is the former secretary-treasurer of the Quapaw Nation. He spent part of his childhood in Commerce, a town within the Superfund site, and later was part of remediation planning.
According to him, the area's hazards were ‘normal’ growing up.
“Once whenever I was a kid, there was an opening of an old mine shaft that had filled in with water and a lot of people swam in it as a swimming hole,” he said. “I remember one day it just… Opened back up and sucked all the water back in.”
He says the difference in what it looks like today is palpable.
“It was a very humbling process to be a part of that, during my tenure at the tribe,” he said. “Just being able to see such drastic changes right in front of your eyes.”
A Better Future
Barker believes that the Quapaw Nation is creating a blueprint for tribal nations to work alongside the federal government, righting the wrongs of the past.
“It has really created an unbelievable synergy that I don’t think that we’ve seen in a lot of Indian Country,” he said. “It has really served as a model in terms of what can be accomplished.”
The EPA shares a similar sentiment, writing in an email that the Quapaw Nation has been a first responder to the issue and is “integral at every ongoing source material cleanup action at the site.”
King stands near a small pond with a gazebo beside it. It’s part of a finished clean-up job, and her “proudest” work.
She explains how after an area is remediated, it is repurposed and monitored forever. Some cleaned areas grow crops and host animals. One area is even used as an ecological classroom.
Her favorite part is that the land is starting to look like it did over a century ago, with an abundance of Native Oklahoma plants.
While the total clean-up effort won’t be done in her lifetime, she’s hopeful that the area will one day be unrecognizable.
Looking at what’s been done so far, the scar of the past already seems to be fading into the distance.
“My goal is in a hundred years I want people to drive by and go. ‘Wow look at those pretty pastures,’” she says, motioning toward the water. “And not know that blood, sweat and tears were shed out here.”
This report was produced by the Oklahoma Public Media Exchange, a collaboration of public media organizations. Help support collaborative journalism by donating at the link at the top of this webpage.
