Felix Clary 
ICT + Tulsa World

The Bureau of Indian Affairs decided to leave 30 million tons of toxic chemicals on the Quapaw reservation after a 1920s mining-boom, and the tribe is still cleaning it up.

The Quapaw Nation has spent 11 years remediating the ghost town Picher, Oklahoma, which covers 80 percent of their reservation, in an effort to give their land an agricultural future.

“It will never be residential. It will never be commercial, but it can still be usable” said Cherokee Environmental Scientist Summer King, who joined the clean-up project in 2016.

Since 2013, the tribe has removed around 8 million tons of chat, lead and zinc, from the ground. Chat is a term for fragments of siliceous rock.

Last year was the project’s 10-year-anniversary.

King works in Picher for the Quapaw Nation and said that lead and zinc have several human health risks, such as inhibiting brain development for children under six, leading to learning delays that can last a lifetime for adults.

“My personal physician runs my blood lead levels every year,” said King.

The Environmental Protection Agency started the clean-up in 1983, when they first realized the red-orange color of a creek in Picher was caused by toxic amounts of iron in the stream that rusted. The EPA named the stream “Tar Creek” because of its unusual color and made it a superfund site.

Credit: Summer King with the Quapaw Nation Enviromental Office views Tar Creek Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024 in Picher, Ok. (Photo by Mike Simons, Tulsa World)

King said that with the EPA’s work on Tar Creek, and her own creation of a one-acre wetland, the creek is almost clean today, but the water, she said, was not the biggest problem in Picher. She said that the EPA initially missed the biggest issue: chat piles.

The chat was initially presumed to be harmless limestone brought to the surface by miners looking for ore used to build ammunition and aircraft during WWI and WWII. The land they were mining under was the Quapaw reservation, where the tribe was relocated after being removed from their homeland in Arkansas.

The mining companies paid tribal members to let them mine under their land, and if allottees did not consent to the mining, the miners would have the BIA declare them “incompetent” and sign the lease for them.

The BIA then told the miners to leave the limestone on the surface for the Quapaw tribe to sell for gravel, even though miners would typically bring left-over materials like that back underground.

When the tribe tried to sell the material, they soon found they were unable to, as it had toxic materials in it.

Not only did the miners leave the chat on the surface, they left caverns underground that have created sinkholes on the surface.

This, King said, is why the town will always be uninhabitable for humans. The sinkholes can be filled, but are often “repeat offenders” and fall through again, swallowing up whatever was above them.

Only two elderly couples live in town, despite the risks, as almost everyone else was bought-out by the State of Oklahoma with a trust fund the Environmental Protection Agency set aside. Even residents who didn’t want to take the buy-out and move had their homes destroyed by an F4 tornado in 2008 and took the buy-out option.

The tribe sued the Department of the Interior in 2002 for the damage caused by the BIA’s decisions. After nearly 20 years of litigation, the case was settled in 2019 with a payout of $137.5 million to be split between all enrolled Quapaw Nation members.

King manages the Quapaw Nation’s construction services crew of 100 workers, as well as the five main sites they work at daily. The team scrapes the dirt with their backhoes and excavators, removing the chat, and continuing until the ground tests clear of lead and zinc. The chat they remove is used for making asphalt, which has built many roads in Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and part of Arkansas.

The Western mound of chat is 200 feet tall and is the largest mound left in the whole superfund site, according to King. The Howe pile was once 70 feet tall but is now nearly gone, and King is turning the area into a wet-land. Remnants of an old mine shaft can be seen at this site today.

Credit: Summer King with the Quapaw Nation Enviromental Office views the Howe site where the office removed a 70 foot chat pile Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024 in Picher, Ok. (Photo by Mike Simons, Tulsa World)

King and her crew are also working on cleaning a chat pile at Blue Goose, a 200-acre site, as well as the dried-up Elm Creek bed at a site called “Bird Dog.”

“We did a study about metals uptake and what we found is that the pasture grasses and row crops are now safe for consumption,” King said.

There are three types of agriculture the land is already used for: row crops like corn, winter wheat, and soybeans; cattle grazing; and grass pastures. King said some of the crops and cattle are owned by the Quapaw Nation and some are owned by people who live outside of Picher and lease their property.

King has hand-sewn thousands of seeds to grow Native plants that promote shelter and food for the wildlife currently living there: deer, raccoons, bobcats, beavers, other small mammals, eagles, other raptors and migratory birds, and a small amount of fish and other macroinvertebrates.

Credit: A common buckeye butterfly lands on a wildflower in an area that used to have a smelter Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024 in Picher, Ok. The Quapaw Nation Enviromental Office has worked to turn the area into a tallgrass prairie. (Photo by Mike Simons, Tulsa World)

The pasture that King garnished with Native plants used to be a smelter site, where metal and contaminants were separated from each other. Today it is lush with plants and wildlife that butterflies and grasshoppers swarm in. King pointed out an eagle nest nearby, as a blue heron swooped into the pond to pick one of the fish that King said she had delivered in two shipments.

“Welcome to my classroom,” said King as she stepped onto a Gazebo in the middle of the field. This is where she brings students and researchers to show them what all of Picher can look like in 100 years from now.

King said she is training a newly hired scientist now to take her spot and continue the project when she retires.

“Hopefully, in 10 or 15 years, I’m not still out there digging holes,” she said.

This story is co-published by the Tulsa World and ICT, a news partnership that covers Indigenous communities in the Oklahoma area.

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