Quapaw Nation celebrates 10 years of progress at Superfund site

John Hacker, The Joplin Globe, Mo.
·4 min read

Oct. 4—QUAPAW, Okla. — A decade ago, the Quapaw Nation was concerned about the EPA's plans to clean mining chat and debris from a 40-acre site just east of the town of Quapaw.

This site was known to the Quapaw Nation as the Catholic 40 and was a place where many Quapaw children went to a Catholic-run school from the 1890s to the 1920s.

The EPA had been working for over three decades to clean up mining waste in the Tar Creek Superfund site, and some progress had been made, but when the agency said in 2012 it was ready to clean up the Catholic 40, the tribe was concerned.

Tim Kent, a member of the Quapaw Nation's Environmental Commission, said the tribe demanded some level of oversight at the Catholic 40, fearing that a contractor could damage the cultural sites.

"We said we need a historic expert out there, an archaeologist, because we think you're going to uncover artifacts, and they did," Kent said. "We cleaned up the chat around the old buildings by hand, and now those old buildings, the walls, are still sticking up, and the tribe has preserved them. We're cutting the weeds around them, and hopefully maybe a historical monument could be built there.

"We didn't trust contractors to do that, so that was the impetus for us to say, 'Hey, we want to at least be supervising the work.' and EPA said, 'Why don't you just do the work.' We had been overseeing some of the work anyway, so that's where it all got started."

Celebration

Members of the tribe, environmental agencies such as the EPA and the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, and others gathered Wednesday at the Quapaw Nation Fitness Center in Quapaw to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the Catholic 40's cleanup and its impact.

The Quapaw Nation removed 108,000 tons of chat from the Catholic 40 in less than a year, ahead of schedule and under budget, prompting the ODEQ to approach the tribe about continuing that work on a plot of land immediately north of the Catholic 40 that was not part of the reservation.

From that point on, the EPA, ODEQ and other agencies contracted with the Quapaw Nation to take over cleanup of the entire Tar Creek site, which covers about 40 square miles of abandoned lead and zinc mines and chat piles with tons of waste rock from the mining around the former communities of Picher and Cardin in Ottawa County.

"This is a 10th anniversary to celebrate the Quapaw Nation's lead of the remediation work," said Craig Kleman, environmental director for the Quapaw Nation. "The tribe had a vested interest in the land they were cleaning up. A lot of it is Quapaw land. It's the tribe's in trust, or its individual members or family."

"This is the first tribe in a nation to ever take over a Superfund site cleanup," Kent said. "That's why it's so notable. When the EPA is gone and the trucks are gone and equipment's gone, the tribe will still be here. We've got a vested interest in making sure it's done right."

Impact

Cliff Villa, deputy assistant administrator for the EPA Office of Land and Emergency Management, traveled from Washington, D.C., to attend the celebration.

"We should absolutely be celebrating this because there's been a lot of cleanup completed which has direct impacts on public health and the environment," Villa said. "There's almost no greater threat to human health than the threat of lead exposure to children, which can have lifelong impact. We have significantly reduced high blood lead levels here. We've significantly improved the chances for healthy childhoods and healthy lives, and it's great to see that success right off the bat."

Wena Supernaw, chairwoman of the Quapaw Nation's Business Community, said cleanup effort has had three big effects:

—Reduced the lead levels in residents, especially children, leading to healthier children.

—Reduced heavy metals in the environment around Tar Creek.

—Made once useless land usable once again.

"That's why a 10-year commemoration is so important, because so much progress has been made," Supernaw said. "Even though we're not done, let's at least acknowledge the accomplishments, the efforts, the commitment that everyone has shown together to get us to where we are right now because it gives us the ability to envision a very different future than 10 years in the past."