Speaker 1: Hi. I'm Alison Era. You might remember me from the
Speaker 1: previous episode of Intrust. I helped Rachel report some of
Speaker 1: the stories we told you about in this series. I'm
Speaker 1: also the Indigenous Affairs correspondent for KOSU, a public radio
Speaker 1: station in Oklahoma. Since Interest came out, I've been hearing
Speaker 1: from a lot of people who say that what happened
Speaker 1: to the O Sage wasn't isolated. I've heard from citizens
Speaker 1: of other tribal nations all over Oklahoma with their own stories,
Speaker 1: their own land with big mineral deposits, their own ancestors
Speaker 1: who were victims of exploitation or died suspicious deaths, and
Speaker 1: I thought it was important for you to hear some
Speaker 1: of those stories too, So I'm taking the lead on
Speaker 1: two bonus episodes. The first about a reservation not too
Speaker 1: far from the O Sage Nation. That's today on Intrust.
Speaker 2: Okay. We are in Picture Oklahoma, and and it is
Speaker 2: basically I mean, if you can just picture mountains or
Speaker 2: sand dunes, very large sand dunes, just a little bit
Speaker 2: different color, that's what it looks like. And this large
Speaker 2: one behind is it looks like a small mountain.
Speaker 1: That's Martha Barker, a Quapas citizen from Miyama, Oklahoma. She
Speaker 1: was the first Miss Indian USA, and with that title,
Speaker 1: she helped raise money and awareness for Native causes. Whenever
Speaker 1: she can, she draws attention to what happened to her
Speaker 1: family and their land on the Quapaw Reservation. That's why
Speaker 1: I went out to visit her on that land. And
Speaker 1: Picture Oklahoma in the northeastern part of the state, about
Speaker 1: one hundred miles east of Osage County, and that mountain
Speaker 1: she's describing.
Speaker 2: It's the tailings from them running the orange stuff that
Speaker 2: they mine out of the ground. They run it through
Speaker 2: these big crushers to get the lead and zinc out
Speaker 2: of it, and then this is the leftovers.
Speaker 1: More than a century ago, a massive amount of lead
Speaker 1: and zinc was discovered in this area, and those minerals
Speaker 1: were extremely valuable. A lot of the bullets fired in
Speaker 1: World War One and World War Two came from here.
Speaker 1: But that mining brought environmental destruction and toxic pollution two
Speaker 1: Now Picture and the surrounding towns are effectively abandoned.
Speaker 2: It looks like a moonscape. It was on the list
Speaker 2: of the number one superfund sites in the United States,
Speaker 2: and its lead contamination, you know, in the water, soil, everywhere.
Speaker 1: A superfund site is a place with so much hazardous
Speaker 1: pollution that the government has to come in to oversee
Speaker 1: the cleanup. This one's called the Tar Creek Superfund Site.
Speaker 1: You may be familiar with this area from news reports
Speaker 1: talking about a ghost town. One headline read, take a
Speaker 1: tour of America's most toxic town. This superfund site is
Speaker 1: sprawling covering Picture nearby Carden and Quapaw Land near the
Speaker 1: Kansas border, about forty square miles. Mining companies dug so
Speaker 1: much here that sinkholes dot the landscape, and some parts
Speaker 1: are blocked off with wire fences to keep people from
Speaker 1: going near there. But what often gets lost in all
Speaker 1: the stories about Picture is whose land this is? Quapaw
Speaker 1: Land and what happened to those Quapaw families whose land
Speaker 1: held some of the greatest mineral wealth America's ever seen.
Speaker 2: When you drive into Picture, everything on the left hand
Speaker 2: side of the main drag and going all the way
Speaker 2: to Cardon is basically my family's cousins, families, uncles, aunts
Speaker 2: and stuff. It's all of our allotments. But you know,
Speaker 2: the lead and zinc is still down there. And it
Speaker 2: bubbles up, and the streams and wells and creeks and everything.
Speaker 2: When it rains, the water is orange and it foams.
Speaker 1: I've been there and seen it. There's lead and zinc
Speaker 1: still in all those piles. After it rains, streams look
Speaker 1: slick like oil has been spelled around tar creek plants,
Speaker 1: and the trunks of trees are orange.
Speaker 2: I have no idea what we can do with the land,
Speaker 2: but it's what we've inherited. So we've inherited a big mess,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 1: I want to back up here to say something about
Speaker 1: the Quapa and how they ended up in Oklahoma. Like
Speaker 1: a lot of tribes, they were forcibly removed from their
Speaker 1: ancestral homelands in the eighteen thirties. The US government forced
Speaker 1: them from Arkansas and Mississippi to what's now Oklahoma. Before long,
Speaker 1: allotment came. That was the US policy to take communally
Speaker 1: owned land from tribal nations and divide it up and
Speaker 1: sell what was left to white settlers. Knowing that allotment
Speaker 1: was coming whether they wanted it or not, the Quapot
Speaker 1: decided to do it themselves. Martha said that process was corrupt.
Speaker 2: There was a gentleman that came from New York City.
Speaker 2: He was Mohawk Indian, and he ingratiated himself into the
Speaker 2: tribe and kind of took over control of our council
Speaker 2: and befriended the BIA and took it upon himself to
Speaker 2: a lot the land. He added in his children, his wife,
Speaker 2: his in laws, anybody that would pay him two hundred dollars,
Speaker 2: he would add him into the tribe.
Speaker 1: The BIA. The Bureau of Indian Affairs rejected the list
Speaker 1: several times, but Martha says the man befriended bureaucrats there too.
Speaker 2: And so he lauded the land, all the good quality land,
Speaker 2: farming land, to his families and to the families that
Speaker 2: bought into the tribe. There's probably about eight of us,
Speaker 2: eight big families that couldn't speak English. We were given
Speaker 2: the land that was poor soil conditions, couldn't grow anything on.
Speaker 2: My grandmother tells stories about how when they first moved there,
Speaker 2: they couldn't drink the water. That's where the lead and
Speaker 2: zinc mines were discovered.
Speaker 1: A lot of the mining on Martha's land was overseen
Speaker 1: by the US government like it did o sage mineral
Speaker 1: wealth as a trustee. Quapaw families say it wasn't managed
Speaker 1: well and that a lot of times it was mismanaged.
Speaker 1: The quapaus mineral rights belonged to whoever owned the land,
Speaker 1: so that wealth it wasn't evenly distributed. Some Quapasa citizens
Speaker 1: hardly got anything. Martha's family allotments had a lot of
Speaker 1: leaden zinc under them. One rich deposit was on the
Speaker 1: land of her great great grandmother named Anna Slagel. Martha
Speaker 1: told me a story that was similar to those I'd
Speaker 1: heard in Osage County. Anna at one point was married
Speaker 1: to a Quapa man, and when he died, she inherited
Speaker 1: his wealth. What happened after Anna inherited it, Martha says
Speaker 1: it was suspicious.
Speaker 2: She owned several homes down here along the Spring River
Speaker 2: area and just kind of went back and forth between them.
Speaker 2: She went to the BIA to get a choffur because
Speaker 2: they had to pray everything.
Speaker 1: You have to remember that a lot of Quapaw families
Speaker 1: couldn't spend any of their money without permission from the
Speaker 1: Bureau of Indiana Affairs.
Speaker 2: She came back with this homeless man. He was non Indian,
Speaker 2: He's a white man, and he's like thirty years younger
Speaker 2: than her. She's an old lady. He's like a young
Speaker 2: young man. They wound up being married, and so she
Speaker 2: was killed by him. I don't know how else to
Speaker 2: say it, any other nice way. He drove She was
Speaker 2: asleep in the backseat of the car, and it was
Speaker 2: a big touring car, and he drove her off a
Speaker 2: cliff and he got out. He survived. She did not,
Speaker 2: and he inherited her money and her land. Luckily, she
Speaker 2: did have a will drawn up, so some of her
Speaker 2: children did get some of that land and money.
Speaker 3: Do you have the death certificate?
Speaker 2: I do not, but I have an article in a
Speaker 2: newspaper that tells the story about it. How she was
Speaker 2: any investigation, No, why no, No, are you kidding me? No? No,
Speaker 2: because he was a white man and she was full
Speaker 2: blood Indian.
Speaker 1: The article Martha Mentions, from November of nineteen thirty four,
Speaker 1: says Anna Slagel was seventy when she died and had
Speaker 1: interests in seven mining leases. And according to Martha, some
Speaker 1: of Anna's wealth went to her driver and some of
Speaker 1: it to her children. But even the land her family
Speaker 1: did hold on to, it's not in great shape.
Speaker 2: I'm sure This land was probably, you know, somewhat pretty
Speaker 2: before the mines went in, but now it's just forgotten.
Speaker 2: It's forgotten, just like a lot of the tribes are forgotten,
Speaker 2: a lot of the people are forgotten.
Speaker 1: So how did the mining go as far as to
Speaker 1: turn a once pristine prairie into such a toxic wasteland.
Speaker 1: And if this was one of the biggest mining operations
Speaker 1: in the country, where did all the money go? It
Speaker 1: turns out there's a guy in town who knows the
Speaker 1: history of the mining industry better than anyone.
Speaker 4: When you grow up in a small town like Pitcher,
Speaker 4: that's really all you know. There may be a town
Speaker 4: next to it, but really all you know is a
Speaker 4: small town.
Speaker 1: This is at Kahili, even though picture is on the
Speaker 1: Quapaw Reservation. A lot of non native families moved here
Speaker 1: in the early to mid nineteen hundreds to work in
Speaker 1: the mines. Ed's family was one of them. That's next.
Speaker 4: I was born in Flippin', Arkansas. My father was a
Speaker 4: sharecropper in Flippin' and in nineteen forty three he heard
Speaker 4: that there was work in Pitcher, Oklahoma. In the mind,
Speaker 4: my mother packed everything we had in a suitcase and
Speaker 4: cardboard boxes, and we caught the train to job in Missouri,
Speaker 4: and somehow we made it from jobling the wonderful Pitcher.
Speaker 4: And so I lived in Picture until I was a
Speaker 4: sophomore in high school.
Speaker 1: Ed Kaheely is like a walking encyclopedia. He has boxes
Speaker 1: and boxes of old receipts, maps, photographs. Started as a
Speaker 1: retirement project. Before he moved back to Oklahoma, he lived
Speaker 1: in California, where he was a nuclear engineer for the
Speaker 1: government at the height of the Cold War. But Ed says,
Speaker 1: even with all the projects he had going on back
Speaker 1: in California, he couldn't stop thinking about Pitcher.
Speaker 4: I had always kept ties with the area back here,
Speaker 4: maintained friendships and made a couple of trips a year.
Speaker 1: So in the nineties Ed and his wife packed up
Speaker 1: their things and headed back to Oklahoma.
Speaker 4: We live about nine miles east of here along the
Speaker 4: Spring River, and we built a home out there, raised cattle.
Speaker 4: I wanted to be nearby, but I did not want
Speaker 4: to live in Pitcher. You know, there's not a lot
Speaker 4: of lawns and parks and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Ed's been researching, digging deep into the history of the
Speaker 1: mining industry. Ed's father worked for the biggest mining company
Speaker 1: in Pitcher, called Eagle Pitcher. At first, I assumed the
Speaker 1: company was named after the town. It wasn't until I
Speaker 1: started talking to Ed that I realized that town was
Speaker 1: actually named after the company.
Speaker 4: And so they began to expand in nineteen fourteen, and
Speaker 4: they needed a town because this was open prairie for miles,
Speaker 4: and they needed employees, So they needed people. Eagle Pitcher
Speaker 4: built a first church in town, and they built a
Speaker 4: few homes for some of their their internal staff, and
Speaker 4: they built first water tower, and they did everything they
Speaker 4: could do to support the town, including providing law enforcement
Speaker 4: in a while, and crazy Town.
Speaker 1: By the nineteen twenties, eleven thousand miners were living in
Speaker 1: and around Pitture. This was all happening on Couapa allotments,
Speaker 1: mining companies releasing and sometimes buying land outright from Quapaw families.
Speaker 1: And remember this was a time when thousands of Native
Speaker 1: Americans were deemed incompetent to handle their own affairs. So
Speaker 1: those leases and deeds they were going through the BIA.
Speaker 4: They began to drill in downtown picture here just two
Speaker 4: blocks over from here, and discovered the mother load of
Speaker 4: the entire Picture mining field was beneath the city of Pitcher.
Speaker 1: Ed says the BIA and the mining company would negotiate
Speaker 1: leases with the verbal agreement from the Quapa landowner, and.
Speaker 4: Then the Bureau of Innan Affairs then was supposed to
Speaker 4: collect that money from the mining companies and then pay
Speaker 4: that to the Indian owner.
Speaker 1: Ed's looked at thousands of these leases, and what he
Speaker 1: found was that the US government wasn't collecting the money
Speaker 1: they should have been for Quapaw landowners. Millions of dollars,
Speaker 1: he says, should have ended up with Couapa a lattes
Speaker 1: that mining companies kept for themselves. But it wasn't just
Speaker 1: the mining companies that were getting rich of the Quapaw land.
Speaker 1: As Ed was digging through all these documents at the
Speaker 1: Ottawa County Courthouse, he started to notice something else that
Speaker 1: there were way more leases than there needed to be.
Speaker 4: There was a ponzi scheme that lasted for the lifetime
Speaker 4: of the mining fuel.
Speaker 1: What Ed found was that Quapaw landowners would enter into
Speaker 1: an agreement to get a royalty rate for their land
Speaker 1: save five percent of the proceeds. But whoever got that
Speaker 1: lease they could release the land to someone else at
Speaker 1: a higher rate, and then someone may package that lease
Speaker 1: up with others and lease it to the mining company
Speaker 1: for even more Basically middlemen layers of investors and companies
Speaker 1: in between the quapaw a lattie and the mine operator
Speaker 1: taking their cut. But this scheme it not only cheated
Speaker 1: the Quapaul landowners, it also ate into the profits of
Speaker 1: the mining companies themselves, and slowly smaller companies started going
Speaker 1: bankrupt or selling to the big players like Eagle Pitcher.
Speaker 1: Eventually only a couple of companies had control of all
Speaker 1: the mining here, and those companies they got more and
Speaker 1: more desperate to extract as many minerals as they could.
Speaker 1: They went back to old mines and dug some more
Speaker 1: closer to the surface, and even dug into what they
Speaker 1: call pillars, the places that miners leave underground to keep
Speaker 1: the surface from collapsing. In the nineteen sixties, there were
Speaker 1: three bad collapses in one neighborhood. Those residents moved, but
Speaker 1: the ground kept collapsing and the toxic piles kept growing.
Speaker 1: Those giant piles they're called chat. While Ed and I
Speaker 1: were talking, he offered to take us to the top
Speaker 1: of one to see what it looks like today.
Speaker 4: We are on top of one of the last tailing
Speaker 4: piles in the Pitcher mining field in downtown Pitcher. This
Speaker 4: particular pile is about one hundred and seven feet high
Speaker 4: and about a quarter mile in diameter. And from here
Speaker 4: we can get a panoramic view of the old mining
Speaker 4: field and you can see a large number of tailings
Speaker 4: mill tailings that are still in existence, you know, three
Speaker 4: hundred and sixty degrees from here, to give you some
Speaker 4: sense of the extent of the mining.
Speaker 1: It was a clear and cold day up on the pile.
Speaker 1: You can see Kansas to the north, Missouri to the east,
Speaker 1: with chat piles stretching for miles between like giant sand dunes.
Speaker 1: There was a beat up plastic sled at the top
Speaker 1: of the chat pile. A lot of people who grew
Speaker 1: up here remember sledding down. These chat piles are shooting
Speaker 1: bottle rockets.
Speaker 4: See those buildings down there. Those are in the worst zone,
Speaker 4: and the old reunion park where we used to have
Speaker 4: the annual reunion is severely undermined. It was the worst
Speaker 4: area that we found in all of the areas that
Speaker 4: we that we.
Speaker 1: Studied, ed was hired in the early two thousands to
Speaker 1: examine the risk of cave ins, back when a lot
Speaker 1: of people were still living in and around Pitcher. His
Speaker 1: job was to figure out which parts of picture were
Speaker 1: most likely to collapse. We have read the report he
Speaker 1: submitted to the Army Corps of Engineers. The risk of
Speaker 1: cavens was so bad that one of their recommendations was
Speaker 1: to reroute school buses so kids weren't at risk of
Speaker 1: the ground collapsing from beneath them on their way to school.
Speaker 1: And there was lead in the soil and the water,
Speaker 1: which is a serious health risk because it can cause
Speaker 1: nerve and brain damage. At one point, the Indian Health
Speaker 1: Service took blood samples from kids around here and found
Speaker 1: elevated lead levels in thirty five percent of the children
Speaker 1: they tested. Eventually, the cavens and the lead pollution were
Speaker 1: so bad the state and the federal government came in
Speaker 1: to buy people out of their homes. That was about
Speaker 1: fifteen years ago. Most families didn't want to leave their community,
Speaker 1: a few refused. The buyout process was fraught with all
Speaker 1: sorts of allegations of corruption all the way up to
Speaker 1: the federal government. Ed said he spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time back then trying to advocate for local families. He
Speaker 1: was frustrated they weren't being given enough money to move
Speaker 1: ed wanted us to see one of those cavans up.
Speaker 4: Close, this particular area. This is the third time this
Speaker 4: has collapsed. It has been filled and collapsed three times,
Speaker 4: so that you know, you can stand here and you
Speaker 4: can look in all directions and it looks like a
Speaker 4: pristine prairie, and then all of a sudden you get
Speaker 4: something like this and you say, no, wait a minute,
Speaker 4: is this really? Is this land really safe?
Speaker 1: The hole was deep, maybe fifty or sixty feet. There
Speaker 1: was another a few hundred yards away.
Speaker 4: Anybody want to go closer and look good? Yeah, I
Speaker 4: don't know. This is a small collapse. Yes, this is
Speaker 4: about sixty seventy feet across. As I mentioned, we logged
Speaker 4: one hundred and four that were over one hundred feet across.
Speaker 1: As we drove around, we saw trash aerund, the base
Speaker 1: of some chat piles, beer bottles, children's toys, the skeleton
Speaker 1: of an old hotel. It was mid afternoon. If this
Speaker 1: was any ordinary town, school would be letting out people
Speaker 1: heading home from work. But this is picture it's quiet, eerie.
Speaker 4: Okay, we're going to hop out here real quickly.
Speaker 1: There was one other thing and wanted us to see.
Speaker 1: He took us to another place here The ground wasn't
Speaker 1: even ed, says he has a personal connection to this spot.
Speaker 4: Okay, now, let me explain to you. During the buyout,
Speaker 4: they were trying to figure out where do we put
Speaker 4: all of the debris from these homes were destroyed. They
Speaker 4: came up with this bright idea that instead of taking
Speaker 4: all of that material to a sanitary landfill and paying
Speaker 4: for it, why don't we just put it in a
Speaker 4: hole in one of the big cave ins and you know,
Speaker 4: market complete and along with everything went in. Here is
Speaker 4: my old childhood home. His is in here, so I
Speaker 4: have a private stake in the in this place.
Speaker 1: During the buyout, remnants of his home and the homes
Speaker 1: of others were put in a sinkhole. According to Ed,
Speaker 1: this land is going to collapse again with all the
Speaker 1: stuff that's wet and decomposing. At one point, the mining
Speaker 1: company Eagle Pitcher was on the hook for almost two
Speaker 1: million dollars for cleanup, but it filed for bankruptcy and
Speaker 1: ended up paying a lot less. Now it's owned by
Speaker 1: a private equity firm in Chicago. We contacted the firm, GTCR,
Speaker 1: but they declined to comment. We asked ed why he
Speaker 1: spends so much time on all this, Why not just
Speaker 1: leave his childhood home in the.
Speaker 4: Hole and move on everything. We've wasted it, we've messed up.
Speaker 4: We have an obligation to fix and you know, and
Speaker 4: it's that simple. It is so easy to mess things up,
Speaker 4: you know. We've proven that time and time and time again.
Speaker 4: But it's a whole different thing to try to fix it.
Speaker 1: Fixing picture fixing the Quapaw reservation won't come cheap or easy.
Speaker 1: But the Quapaw Nation is working on that on the
Speaker 1: ground and in the courts, and Martha Barker and other
Speaker 1: Quapaw citizens are doing their own reclamation. Those chat piles
Speaker 1: we've been talking about, they're more than just hills of rubble.
Speaker 1: They actually have value today. It's all raw material for
Speaker 1: making roads, lots of roads. That's next.
Speaker 2: Different. Asphalt comes in different the chunks come in different sizes,
Speaker 2: and this is a very very sought after size.
Speaker 1: That's Martha Barker again. She took us out to her
Speaker 1: family's land to show us one of the big chat piles.
Speaker 1: Right as we were standing there talking about the value
Speaker 1: of the piles, a truck drove up next to us.
Speaker 1: Martha weaved it down.
Speaker 2: Oh, by Martha Martner.
Speaker 3: Okay, there are you with the tribe or the remediation.
Speaker 1: The guy told Martha he was with an asphalt company.
Speaker 2: How friackin weird was that running into an asphalt guy, right?
Speaker 2: You know, that's the way it is. It's like when
Speaker 2: my mom, when she came down one time.
Speaker 1: I couldn't help notice Martha's suspicions of this man. That's
Speaker 1: because there's a long history here between asphalt companies and
Speaker 1: landowners and Martha's mom she was right in the middle
Speaker 1: of it. Her name was Ardina Rivard Moore. She lived
Speaker 1: in Miama, a town about fifteen minutes south of Pitcher,
Speaker 1: were she taught Quapau language classes.
Speaker 2: She would drive back and forth, and she kept noticing
Speaker 2: when she'd drive by picture that the chat piles were
Speaker 2: going down and down and down. And so she drove
Speaker 2: out there and she noticed there's just dump bload trucks
Speaker 2: lined up sixteen deep, just hauling off the chat.
Speaker 1: When Martha's mom saw all those trucks, hauling off Chat
Speaker 1: from her land. It made her wonder how much money
Speaker 1: she was getting for it.
Speaker 2: Her IM account hadn't changed in years, and I.
Speaker 1: Am an individual Indian money account holds the money the
Speaker 1: government manages for Native Americans. If companies were taking Chat
Speaker 1: off her land, it should be showing up there.
Speaker 2: No income was coming in, but obviously they were hauling
Speaker 2: Chat off. So she called her cousin. They went out
Speaker 2: the next day and they had a little pocket and
Speaker 2: stomatic camera and they started taking pictures of these big,
Speaker 2: huge trucks hauling off all this Chat. And she took
Speaker 2: her pictures. Armed with her pictures, went to the Bureau
Speaker 2: of Indian Affairs in Miama and they told her, do
Speaker 2: not make trouble for this office. Yeah. While that just
Speaker 2: lit her fire.
Speaker 1: Those pictures she took, they gave her the proof she needed.
Speaker 1: Chat being sold from her land wasn't being paid for.
Speaker 1: So in the early to mid two thousands, Quapas citizens
Speaker 1: boiled two lawsuits related to the sales of Chat. Both
Speaker 1: alleged that their trustee, the federal government, wasn't keeping track
Speaker 1: of all the sales and accused them of mismanagement. The
Speaker 1: one filed by Martha's Mom, Ardina and other plaintiffs was
Speaker 1: over piles that disappeared in recent years. A second case
Speaker 1: was over piles that disappeared decades earlier. The US has
Speaker 1: actually agreed to settle both lawsuits, though without admitting it
Speaker 1: did anything wrong. We reached out to the BIA and
Speaker 1: they said they're working to protect the trust assets of
Speaker 1: all Native Americans and Alaska Natives. They said that includes
Speaker 1: helping people who own mineral rights achieve economic self sufficiency
Speaker 1: through developing their resources. After the US settled those cases,
Speaker 1: one of them paid out, that's the one Martha's mom brought.
Speaker 1: But the other one needs an Act of Congress before
Speaker 1: the government can release the money.
Speaker 3: It has been stuck in committee for the last year
Speaker 3: and a half will not make its way out.
Speaker 1: This is Guy Barker. He's the former secretary treasurer for
Speaker 1: the Quapa Nation and he's an attorney who worked on
Speaker 1: both lawsuits. He's also Martha's son.
Speaker 3: It is a true responsibility, you know, the same way
Speaker 3: as you and I have to pay for our electric
Speaker 3: bill or you know, make your house payment. This is
Speaker 3: a debt owed by the federal government and they continue
Speaker 3: to sit on it.
Speaker 1: The payout they're waiting on. It's one hundred and forty
Speaker 1: million dollars to the Quapaw families involved in the settlement.
Speaker 3: So there's a possibility and given the environment that we're
Speaker 3: looking at right now, with extraordinary expenses and quite a
Speaker 3: lot of debate over government spending, they could make a
Speaker 3: decision not to make good on their promise. And that's
Speaker 3: something that kind of continues to terrify some individuals that
Speaker 3: have worked on this for so well.
Speaker 1: That money is important enough for quapaf families to pay bills,
Speaker 1: cover expenses, maybe help send their kids to college. But
Speaker 1: Guy says it doesn't even come close to the amount
Speaker 1: of wealth that was extracted from Quapaw land.
Speaker 3: And so to imagine that amount of money that could
Speaker 3: have gone to a community, it's hard to wrap your
Speaker 3: head around, and to see what good kind of really
Speaker 3: could have come from it as impossible. But I know,
Speaker 3: having grown up around that area, we're very far from
Speaker 3: that in terms of reality. The unbelievable majority of our
Speaker 3: tribal members live under the poverty line and to see
Speaker 3: where that has kind of happened, and purely from a
Speaker 3: responsibility standpoint, is it's frustrating.
Speaker 1: I asked Guy what he sees when he pictures the
Speaker 1: Quapa Reservation in the future. He says, just look at
Speaker 1: the part of the reservation that wasn't mined.
Speaker 3: There's a huge piece of fresh water in a river
Speaker 3: that runs right through the center of the reservation. And
Speaker 3: there's an area where mining practices were never conducted, right
Speaker 3: and you drive through there and it's heavily wooded. It's
Speaker 3: very green, it's extraordinarily lush. It's beautiful, very hilly, you know,
Speaker 3: picturesque all over the place.
Speaker 1: The Quapoun nation is currently working with the EPA to
Speaker 1: clean up the polluted land. Guy says it will take
Speaker 1: a long time, but an end it'll be worth the work.
Speaker 3: And so hopefully in thirty forty years, you know, we
Speaker 3: can kind of see a completely remediated area. It's going
Speaker 3: to be a long process. I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 3: I can't wait to watch an unfold come into the
Speaker 3: decades come. But it's certainly not going to happen overnight.
Speaker 1: We've been telling you the story of the Quappa and
Speaker 1: the fight for their land. It's just one of the
Speaker 1: many stories I've heard about the taking of land, the
Speaker 1: taking of wealth. That part of Indigenous history is rarely
Speaker 1: taught in classrooms, and for decades, native stories have been
Speaker 1: written out of the narrative in popular culture, obscured by
Speaker 1: a shinier version of Oklahoma and the West that reduces
Speaker 1: Native people to relics or caricatures and places settlers in
Speaker 1: a more heroic light, or doesn't include Native people at all.
Speaker 1: One of the most known stories is a musical set
Speaker 1: in Oklahoma, with singing cowboys and dancing farmers, a big
Speaker 1: song about statehood, and a bright golden haze on the meadow.
Speaker 1: Except that's not the whole story. That's on the next
Speaker 1: bonus episode of Intrust. For more about the show, go
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Speaker 1: of bloom and iHeartMedia. This episode was reported and hosted
Speaker 1: by me Alison Errera, Additional reporting by Rachel Adams Hurd.
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Speaker 1: was done by Molly Nugent. Theme music by Laura Ortman,
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