May 9, 2023 • 30 mins
Since “In Trust” aired, we’ve heard more stories about how Native wealth was exploited. Not far from Osage County, citizens of the Quapaw Nation tell eerily similar accounts of unexplained deaths and mismanaged mineral resources. Lead and zinc mining around Picher, Oklahoma, provided bullets for two world wars, but left Native families to restore land that looks more like the surface of the moon than the prairie.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi. I'm Alison Era. You might remember me from the
previous episode of Intrust. I helped Rachel report some of
the stories we told you about in this series. I'm
also the Indigenous Affairs correspondent for KOSU, a public radio
station in Oklahoma. Since Interest came out, I've been hearing
from a lot of people who say that what happened
(00:22):
to the O Sage wasn't isolated. I've heard from citizens
of other tribal nations all over Oklahoma with their own stories,
their own land with big mineral deposits, their own ancestors
who were victims of exploitation or died suspicious deaths, and
I thought it was important for you to hear some
of those stories too, So I'm taking the lead on
(00:45):
two bonus episodes. The first about a reservation not too
far from the O Sage Nation. That's today on Intrust.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Okay. We are in Picture Oklahoma, and and it is
basically I mean, if you can just picture mountains or
sand dunes, very large sand dunes, just a little bit
different color, that's what it looks like. And this large
one behind is it looks like a small mountain.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
That's Martha Barker, a Quapas citizen from Miyama, Oklahoma. She
was the first Miss Indian USA, and with that title,
she helped raise money and awareness for Native causes. Whenever
she can, she draws attention to what happened to her
family and their land on the Quapaw Reservation. That's why
I went out to visit her on that land. And
(01:37):
Picture Oklahoma in the northeastern part of the state, about
one hundred miles east of Osage County, and that mountain
she's describing.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
It's the tailings from them running the orange stuff that
they mine out of the ground. They run it through
these big crushers to get the lead and zinc out
of it, and then this is the leftovers.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
More than a century ago, a massive amount of lead
and zinc was discovered in this area, and those minerals
were extremely valuable. A lot of the bullets fired in
World War One and World War Two came from here.
But that mining brought environmental destruction and toxic pollution two
Now Picture and the surrounding towns are effectively abandoned.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
It looks like a moonscape. It was on the list
of the number one superfund sites in the United States,
and its lead contamination, you know, in the water, soil, everywhere.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
A superfund site is a place with so much hazardous
pollution that the government has to come in to oversee
the cleanup. This one's called the Tar Creek Superfund Site.
You may be familiar with this area from news reports
talking about a ghost town. One headline read, take a
tour of America's most toxic town. This superfund site is
(03:18):
sprawling covering Picture nearby Carden and Quapaw Land near the
Kansas border, about forty square miles. Mining companies dug so
much here that sinkholes dot the landscape, and some parts
are blocked off with wire fences to keep people from
going near there. But what often gets lost in all
(03:38):
the stories about Picture is whose land this is? Quapaw
Land and what happened to those Quapaw families whose land
held some of the greatest mineral wealth America's ever seen.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
When you drive into Picture, everything on the left hand
side of the main drag and going all the way
to Cardon is basically my family's cousins, families, uncles, aunts
and stuff. It's all of our allotments. But you know,
the lead and zinc is still down there. And it
(04:16):
bubbles up, and the streams and wells and creeks and everything.
When it rains, the water is orange and it foams.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
I've been there and seen it. There's lead and zinc
still in all those piles. After it rains, streams look
slick like oil has been spelled around tar creek plants,
and the trunks of trees are orange.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
I have no idea what we can do with the land,
but it's what we've inherited. So we've inherited a big mess,
you know.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
I want to back up here to say something about
the Quapa and how they ended up in Oklahoma. Like
a lot of tribes, they were forcibly removed from their
ancestral homelands in the eighteen thirties. The US government forced
them from Arkansas and Mississippi to what's now Oklahoma. Before long,
allotment came. That was the US policy to take communally
(05:15):
owned land from tribal nations and divide it up and
sell what was left to white settlers. Knowing that allotment
was coming whether they wanted it or not, the Quapot
decided to do it themselves. Martha said that process was corrupt.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
There was a gentleman that came from New York City.
He was Mohawk Indian, and he ingratiated himself into the
tribe and kind of took over control of our council
and befriended the BIA and took it upon himself to
a lot the land. He added in his children, his wife,
(05:52):
his in laws, anybody that would pay him two hundred dollars,
he would add him into the tribe.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
The BIA. The Bureau of Indian Affairs rejected the list
several times, but Martha says the man befriended bureaucrats there too.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
And so he lauded the land, all the good quality land,
farming land, to his families and to the families that
bought into the tribe. There's probably about eight of us,
eight big families that couldn't speak English. We were given
the land that was poor soil conditions, couldn't grow anything on.
My grandmother tells stories about how when they first moved there,
(06:32):
they couldn't drink the water. That's where the lead and
zinc mines were discovered.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
A lot of the mining on Martha's land was overseen
by the US government like it did o sage mineral
wealth as a trustee. Quapaw families say it wasn't managed
well and that a lot of times it was mismanaged.
The quapaus mineral rights belonged to whoever owned the land,
so that wealth it wasn't evenly distributed. Some Quapasa citizens
(07:00):
hardly got anything. Martha's family allotments had a lot of
leaden zinc under them. One rich deposit was on the
land of her great great grandmother named Anna Slagel. Martha
told me a story that was similar to those I'd
heard in Osage County. Anna at one point was married
to a Quapa man, and when he died, she inherited
(07:22):
his wealth. What happened after Anna inherited it, Martha says
it was suspicious.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
She owned several homes down here along the Spring River
area and just kind of went back and forth between them.
She went to the BIA to get a choffur because
they had to pray everything.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
You have to remember that a lot of Quapaw families
couldn't spend any of their money without permission from the
Bureau of Indiana Affairs.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
She came back with this homeless man. He was non Indian,
He's a white man, and he's like thirty years younger
than her. She's an old lady. He's like a young
young man. They wound up being married, and so she
was killed by him. I don't know how else to
say it, any other nice way. He drove She was
(08:12):
asleep in the backseat of the car, and it was
a big touring car, and he drove her off a
cliff and he got out. He survived. She did not,
and he inherited her money and her land. Luckily, she
did have a will drawn up, so some of her
children did get some of that land and money.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Do you have the death certificate?
Speaker 2 (08:33):
I do not, but I have an article in a
newspaper that tells the story about it. How she was
any investigation, No, why no, No, are you kidding me? No? No,
because he was a white man and she was full
blood Indian.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
The article Martha Mentions, from November of nineteen thirty four,
says Anna Slagel was seventy when she died and had
interests in seven mining leases. And according to Martha, some
of Anna's wealth went to her driver and some of
it to her children. But even the land her family
did hold on to, it's not in great shape.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
I'm sure This land was probably, you know, somewhat pretty
before the mines went in, but now it's just forgotten.
It's forgotten, just like a lot of the tribes are forgotten,
a lot of the people are forgotten.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
So how did the mining go as far as to
turn a once pristine prairie into such a toxic wasteland.
And if this was one of the biggest mining operations
in the country, where did all the money go? It
turns out there's a guy in town who knows the
history of the mining industry better than anyone.
Speaker 4 (09:47):
When you grow up in a small town like Pitcher,
that's really all you know. There may be a town
next to it, but really all you know is a
small town.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
This is at Kahili, even though picture is on the
Quapaw Reservation. A lot of non native families moved here
in the early to mid nineteen hundreds to work in
the mines. Ed's family was one of them. That's next.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
I was born in Flippin', Arkansas. My father was a
sharecropper in Flippin' and in nineteen forty three he heard
that there was work in Pitcher, Oklahoma. In the mind,
my mother packed everything we had in a suitcase and
(10:33):
cardboard boxes, and we caught the train to job in Missouri,
and somehow we made it from jobling the wonderful Pitcher.
And so I lived in Picture until I was a
sophomore in high school.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
Ed Kaheely is like a walking encyclopedia. He has boxes
and boxes of old receipts, maps, photographs. Started as a
retirement project. Before he moved back to Oklahoma, he lived
in California, where he was a nuclear engineer for the
government at the height of the Cold War. But Ed says,
even with all the projects he had going on back
(11:14):
in California, he couldn't stop thinking about Pitcher.
Speaker 4 (11:17):
I had always kept ties with the area back here,
maintained friendships and made a couple of trips a year.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
So in the nineties Ed and his wife packed up
their things and headed back to Oklahoma.
Speaker 4 (11:31):
We live about nine miles east of here along the
Spring River, and we built a home out there, raised cattle.
I wanted to be nearby, but I did not want
to live in Pitcher. You know, there's not a lot
of lawns and parks and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Ed's been researching, digging deep into the history of the
mining industry. Ed's father worked for the biggest mining company
in Pitcher, called Eagle Pitcher. At first, I assumed the
company was named after the town. It wasn't until I
started talking to Ed that I realized that town was
actually named after the company.
Speaker 4 (12:06):
And so they began to expand in nineteen fourteen, and
they needed a town because this was open prairie for miles,
and they needed employees, So they needed people. Eagle Pitcher
built a first church in town, and they built a
few homes for some of their their internal staff, and
(12:30):
they built first water tower, and they did everything they
could do to support the town, including providing law enforcement
in a while, and crazy Town.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
By the nineteen twenties, eleven thousand miners were living in
and around Pitture. This was all happening on Couapa allotments,
mining companies releasing and sometimes buying land outright from Quapaw families.
And remember this was a time when thousands of Native
Americans were deemed incompetent to handle their own affairs. So
(13:05):
those leases and deeds they were going through the BIA.
Speaker 4 (13:08):
They began to drill in downtown picture here just two
blocks over from here, and discovered the mother load of
the entire Picture mining field was beneath the city of Pitcher.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Ed says the BIA and the mining company would negotiate
leases with the verbal agreement from the Quapa landowner, and.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
Then the Bureau of Innan Affairs then was supposed to
collect that money from the mining companies and then pay
that to the Indian owner.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Ed's looked at thousands of these leases, and what he
found was that the US government wasn't collecting the money
they should have been for Quapaw landowners. Millions of dollars,
he says, should have ended up with Couapa a lattes
that mining companies kept for themselves. But it wasn't just
the mining companies that were getting rich of the Quapaw land.
(14:01):
As Ed was digging through all these documents at the
Ottawa County Courthouse, he started to notice something else that
there were way more leases than there needed to be.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
There was a ponzi scheme that lasted for the lifetime
of the mining fuel.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
What Ed found was that Quapaw landowners would enter into
an agreement to get a royalty rate for their land
save five percent of the proceeds. But whoever got that
lease they could release the land to someone else at
a higher rate, and then someone may package that lease
up with others and lease it to the mining company
for even more Basically middlemen layers of investors and companies
(14:47):
in between the quapaw a lattie and the mine operator
taking their cut. But this scheme it not only cheated
the Quapaul landowners, it also ate into the profits of
the mining companies themselves, and slowly smaller companies started going
(15:09):
bankrupt or selling to the big players like Eagle Pitcher.
Eventually only a couple of companies had control of all
the mining here, and those companies they got more and
more desperate to extract as many minerals as they could.
They went back to old mines and dug some more
closer to the surface, and even dug into what they
(15:31):
call pillars, the places that miners leave underground to keep
the surface from collapsing. In the nineteen sixties, there were
three bad collapses in one neighborhood. Those residents moved, but
the ground kept collapsing and the toxic piles kept growing.
Those giant piles they're called chat. While Ed and I
(15:54):
were talking, he offered to take us to the top
of one to see what it looks like today.
Speaker 4 (16:00):
We are on top of one of the last tailing
piles in the Pitcher mining field in downtown Pitcher. This
particular pile is about one hundred and seven feet high
and about a quarter mile in diameter. And from here
we can get a panoramic view of the old mining
field and you can see a large number of tailings
(16:21):
mill tailings that are still in existence, you know, three
hundred and sixty degrees from here, to give you some
sense of the extent of the mining.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
It was a clear and cold day up on the pile.
You can see Kansas to the north, Missouri to the east,
with chat piles stretching for miles between like giant sand dunes.
There was a beat up plastic sled at the top
of the chat pile. A lot of people who grew
up here remember sledding down. These chat piles are shooting
bottle rockets.
Speaker 4 (16:50):
See those buildings down there. Those are in the worst zone,
and the old reunion park where we used to have
the annual reunion is severely undermined. It was the worst
area that we found in all of the areas that
we that we.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Studied, ed was hired in the early two thousands to
examine the risk of cave ins, back when a lot
of people were still living in and around Pitcher. His
job was to figure out which parts of picture were
most likely to collapse. We have read the report he
submitted to the Army Corps of Engineers. The risk of
cavens was so bad that one of their recommendations was
(17:28):
to reroute school buses so kids weren't at risk of
the ground collapsing from beneath them on their way to school.
And there was lead in the soil and the water,
which is a serious health risk because it can cause
nerve and brain damage. At one point, the Indian Health
Service took blood samples from kids around here and found
(17:50):
elevated lead levels in thirty five percent of the children
they tested. Eventually, the cavens and the lead pollution were
so bad the state and the federal government came in
to buy people out of their homes. That was about
fifteen years ago. Most families didn't want to leave their community,
a few refused. The buyout process was fraught with all
(18:14):
sorts of allegations of corruption all the way up to
the federal government. Ed said he spent a lot of
time back then trying to advocate for local families. He
was frustrated they weren't being given enough money to move
ed wanted us to see one of those cavans up.
Speaker 4 (18:31):
Close, this particular area. This is the third time this
has collapsed. It has been filled and collapsed three times,
so that you know, you can stand here and you
can look in all directions and it looks like a
pristine prairie, and then all of a sudden you get
(18:53):
something like this and you say, no, wait a minute,
is this really? Is this land really safe?
Speaker 1 (19:01):
The hole was deep, maybe fifty or sixty feet. There
was another a few hundred yards away.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
Anybody want to go closer and look good? Yeah, I
don't know. This is a small collapse. Yes, this is
about sixty seventy feet across. As I mentioned, we logged
one hundred and four that were over one hundred feet across.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
As we drove around, we saw trash aerund, the base
of some chat piles, beer bottles, children's toys, the skeleton
of an old hotel. It was mid afternoon. If this
was any ordinary town, school would be letting out people
heading home from work. But this is picture it's quiet, eerie.
Speaker 4 (19:48):
Okay, we're going to hop out here real quickly.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
There was one other thing and wanted us to see.
He took us to another place here The ground wasn't
even ed, says he has a personal connection to this spot.
Speaker 4 (20:01):
Okay, now, let me explain to you. During the buyout,
they were trying to figure out where do we put
all of the debris from these homes were destroyed. They
came up with this bright idea that instead of taking
all of that material to a sanitary landfill and paying
for it, why don't we just put it in a
hole in one of the big cave ins and you know,
(20:23):
market complete and along with everything went in. Here is
my old childhood home. His is in here, so I
have a private stake in the in this place.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
During the buyout, remnants of his home and the homes
of others were put in a sinkhole. According to Ed,
this land is going to collapse again with all the
stuff that's wet and decomposing. At one point, the mining
company Eagle Pitcher was on the hook for almost two
million dollars for cleanup, but it filed for bankruptcy and
ended up paying a lot less. Now it's owned by
(20:56):
a private equity firm in Chicago. We contacted the firm, GTCR,
but they declined to comment. We asked ed why he
spends so much time on all this, Why not just
leave his childhood home in the.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
Hole and move on everything. We've wasted it, we've messed up.
We have an obligation to fix and you know, and
it's that simple. It is so easy to mess things up,
you know. We've proven that time and time and time again.
But it's a whole different thing to try to fix it.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Fixing picture fixing the Quapaw reservation won't come cheap or easy.
But the Quapaw Nation is working on that on the
ground and in the courts, and Martha Barker and other
Quapaw citizens are doing their own reclamation. Those chat piles
we've been talking about, they're more than just hills of rubble.
(21:51):
They actually have value today. It's all raw material for
making roads, lots of roads. That's next.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Different. Asphalt comes in different the chunks come in different sizes,
and this is a very very sought after size.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
That's Martha Barker again. She took us out to her
family's land to show us one of the big chat piles.
Right as we were standing there talking about the value
of the piles, a truck drove up next to us.
Martha weaved it down.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Oh, by Martha Martner.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Okay, there are you with the tribe or the remediation.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
The guy told Martha he was with an asphalt company.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
How friackin weird was that running into an asphalt guy, right?
You know, that's the way it is. It's like when
my mom, when she came down one time.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
I couldn't help notice Martha's suspicions of this man. That's
because there's a long history here between asphalt companies and
landowners and Martha's mom she was right in the middle
of it. Her name was Ardina Rivard Moore. She lived
in Miama, a town about fifteen minutes south of Pitcher,
were she taught Quapau language classes.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
She would drive back and forth, and she kept noticing
when she'd drive by picture that the chat piles were
going down and down and down. And so she drove
out there and she noticed there's just dump bload trucks
lined up sixteen deep, just hauling off the chat.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
When Martha's mom saw all those trucks, hauling off Chat
from her land. It made her wonder how much money
she was getting for it.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Her IM account hadn't changed in years, and I.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Am an individual Indian money account holds the money the
government manages for Native Americans. If companies were taking Chat
off her land, it should be showing up there.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
No income was coming in, but obviously they were hauling
Chat off. So she called her cousin. They went out
the next day and they had a little pocket and
stomatic camera and they started taking pictures of these big,
huge trucks hauling off all this Chat. And she took
her pictures. Armed with her pictures, went to the Bureau
(24:05):
of Indian Affairs in Miama and they told her, do
not make trouble for this office. Yeah. While that just
lit her fire.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Those pictures she took, they gave her the proof she needed.
Chat being sold from her land wasn't being paid for.
So in the early to mid two thousands, Quapas citizens
boiled two lawsuits related to the sales of Chat. Both
alleged that their trustee, the federal government, wasn't keeping track
of all the sales and accused them of mismanagement. The
(24:46):
one filed by Martha's Mom, Ardina and other plaintiffs was
over piles that disappeared in recent years. A second case
was over piles that disappeared decades earlier. The US has
actually agreed to settle both lawsuits, though without admitting it
did anything wrong. We reached out to the BIA and
they said they're working to protect the trust assets of
(25:08):
all Native Americans and Alaska Natives. They said that includes
helping people who own mineral rights achieve economic self sufficiency
through developing their resources. After the US settled those cases,
one of them paid out, that's the one Martha's mom brought.
But the other one needs an Act of Congress before
(25:29):
the government can release the money.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
It has been stuck in committee for the last year
and a half will not make its way out.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
This is Guy Barker. He's the former secretary treasurer for
the Quapa Nation and he's an attorney who worked on
both lawsuits. He's also Martha's son.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
It is a true responsibility, you know, the same way
as you and I have to pay for our electric
bill or you know, make your house payment. This is
a debt owed by the federal government and they continue
to sit on it.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
The payout they're waiting on. It's one hundred and forty
million dollars to the Quapaw families involved in the settlement.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
So there's a possibility and given the environment that we're
looking at right now, with extraordinary expenses and quite a
lot of debate over government spending, they could make a
decision not to make good on their promise. And that's
something that kind of continues to terrify some individuals that
(26:32):
have worked on this for so well.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
That money is important enough for quapaf families to pay bills,
cover expenses, maybe help send their kids to college. But
Guy says it doesn't even come close to the amount
of wealth that was extracted from Quapaw land.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
And so to imagine that amount of money that could
have gone to a community, it's hard to wrap your
head around, and to see what good kind of really
could have come from it as impossible. But I know,
(27:08):
having grown up around that area, we're very far from
that in terms of reality. The unbelievable majority of our
tribal members live under the poverty line and to see
where that has kind of happened, and purely from a
responsibility standpoint, is it's frustrating.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
I asked Guy what he sees when he pictures the
Quapa Reservation in the future. He says, just look at
the part of the reservation that wasn't mined.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
There's a huge piece of fresh water in a river
that runs right through the center of the reservation. And
there's an area where mining practices were never conducted, right
and you drive through there and it's heavily wooded. It's
very green, it's extraordinarily lush. It's beautiful, very hilly, you know,
picturesque all over the place.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
The Quapoun nation is currently working with the EPA to
clean up the polluted land. Guy says it will take
a long time, but an end it'll be worth the work.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
And so hopefully in thirty forty years, you know, we
can kind of see a completely remediated area. It's going
to be a long process. I'm looking forward to it.
I can't wait to watch an unfold come into the
decades come. But it's certainly not going to happen overnight.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
We've been telling you the story of the Quappa and
the fight for their land. It's just one of the
many stories I've heard about the taking of land, the
taking of wealth. That part of Indigenous history is rarely
taught in classrooms, and for decades, native stories have been
written out of the narrative in popular culture, obscured by
a shinier version of Oklahoma and the West that reduces
(29:00):
Native people to relics or caricatures and places settlers in
a more heroic light, or doesn't include Native people at all.
One of the most known stories is a musical set
in Oklahoma, with singing cowboys and dancing farmers, a big
song about statehood, and a bright golden haze on the meadow.
(29:21):
Except that's not the whole story. That's on the next
bonus episode of Intrust. For more about the show, go
(29:54):
to Bloomberg dot com slash Intrust. Intrust is a production
of bloom and iHeartMedia. This episode was reported and hosted
by me Alison Errera, Additional reporting by Rachel Adams Hurd.
Victor Eveyas is our senior producer. Jeff Grocott is our
senior editor. Stage Bowman as our executive producer and head
(30:17):
of Podcasts. Additional support from Katie Boyce, Gilda Decarley, and
Kathleen Quillion. Sound engineering by Blake Maples. Our fact checking
was done by Molly Nugent. Theme music by Laura Ortman,
Photography by Shane Brown.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
You can email us at.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Podcasts at Bloomberg dot net. Find Intrust anywhere you get
your podcasts.
Hi. I'm Alison Era. You might remember me from the
previous episode of Intrust. I helped Rachel report some of
the stories we told you about in this series. I'm
also the Indigenous Affairs correspondent for KOSU, a public radio
station in Oklahoma. Since Interest came out, I've been hearing
from a lot of people who say that what happened
(00:22):
to the O Sage wasn't isolated. I've heard from citizens
of other tribal nations all over Oklahoma with their own stories,
their own land with big mineral deposits, their own ancestors
who were victims of exploitation or died suspicious deaths, and
I thought it was important for you to hear some
of those stories too, So I'm taking the lead on
(00:45):
two bonus episodes. The first about a reservation not too
far from the O Sage Nation. That's today on Intrust.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Okay. We are in Picture Oklahoma, and and it is
basically I mean, if you can just picture mountains or
sand dunes, very large sand dunes, just a little bit
different color, that's what it looks like. And this large
one behind is it looks like a small mountain.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
That's Martha Barker, a Quapas citizen from Miyama, Oklahoma. She
was the first Miss Indian USA, and with that title,
she helped raise money and awareness for Native causes. Whenever
she can, she draws attention to what happened to her
family and their land on the Quapaw Reservation. That's why
I went out to visit her on that land. And
(01:37):
Picture Oklahoma in the northeastern part of the state, about
one hundred miles east of Osage County, and that mountain
she's describing.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
It's the tailings from them running the orange stuff that
they mine out of the ground. They run it through
these big crushers to get the lead and zinc out
of it, and then this is the leftovers.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
More than a century ago, a massive amount of lead
and zinc was discovered in this area, and those minerals
were extremely valuable. A lot of the bullets fired in
World War One and World War Two came from here.
But that mining brought environmental destruction and toxic pollution two
Now Picture and the surrounding towns are effectively abandoned.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
It looks like a moonscape. It was on the list
of the number one superfund sites in the United States,
and its lead contamination, you know, in the water, soil, everywhere.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
A superfund site is a place with so much hazardous
pollution that the government has to come in to oversee
the cleanup. This one's called the Tar Creek Superfund Site.
You may be familiar with this area from news reports
talking about a ghost town. One headline read, take a
tour of America's most toxic town. This superfund site is
(03:18):
sprawling covering Picture nearby Carden and Quapaw Land near the
Kansas border, about forty square miles. Mining companies dug so
much here that sinkholes dot the landscape, and some parts
are blocked off with wire fences to keep people from
going near there. But what often gets lost in all
(03:38):
the stories about Picture is whose land this is? Quapaw
Land and what happened to those Quapaw families whose land
held some of the greatest mineral wealth America's ever seen.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
When you drive into Picture, everything on the left hand
side of the main drag and going all the way
to Cardon is basically my family's cousins, families, uncles, aunts
and stuff. It's all of our allotments. But you know,
the lead and zinc is still down there. And it
(04:16):
bubbles up, and the streams and wells and creeks and everything.
When it rains, the water is orange and it foams.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
I've been there and seen it. There's lead and zinc
still in all those piles. After it rains, streams look
slick like oil has been spelled around tar creek plants,
and the trunks of trees are orange.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
I have no idea what we can do with the land,
but it's what we've inherited. So we've inherited a big mess,
you know.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
I want to back up here to say something about
the Quapa and how they ended up in Oklahoma. Like
a lot of tribes, they were forcibly removed from their
ancestral homelands in the eighteen thirties. The US government forced
them from Arkansas and Mississippi to what's now Oklahoma. Before long,
allotment came. That was the US policy to take communally
(05:15):
owned land from tribal nations and divide it up and
sell what was left to white settlers. Knowing that allotment
was coming whether they wanted it or not, the Quapot
decided to do it themselves. Martha said that process was corrupt.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
There was a gentleman that came from New York City.
He was Mohawk Indian, and he ingratiated himself into the
tribe and kind of took over control of our council
and befriended the BIA and took it upon himself to
a lot the land. He added in his children, his wife,
(05:52):
his in laws, anybody that would pay him two hundred dollars,
he would add him into the tribe.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
The BIA. The Bureau of Indian Affairs rejected the list
several times, but Martha says the man befriended bureaucrats there too.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
And so he lauded the land, all the good quality land,
farming land, to his families and to the families that
bought into the tribe. There's probably about eight of us,
eight big families that couldn't speak English. We were given
the land that was poor soil conditions, couldn't grow anything on.
My grandmother tells stories about how when they first moved there,
(06:32):
they couldn't drink the water. That's where the lead and
zinc mines were discovered.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
A lot of the mining on Martha's land was overseen
by the US government like it did o sage mineral
wealth as a trustee. Quapaw families say it wasn't managed
well and that a lot of times it was mismanaged.
The quapaus mineral rights belonged to whoever owned the land,
so that wealth it wasn't evenly distributed. Some Quapasa citizens
(07:00):
hardly got anything. Martha's family allotments had a lot of
leaden zinc under them. One rich deposit was on the
land of her great great grandmother named Anna Slagel. Martha
told me a story that was similar to those I'd
heard in Osage County. Anna at one point was married
to a Quapa man, and when he died, she inherited
(07:22):
his wealth. What happened after Anna inherited it, Martha says
it was suspicious.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
She owned several homes down here along the Spring River
area and just kind of went back and forth between them.
She went to the BIA to get a choffur because
they had to pray everything.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
You have to remember that a lot of Quapaw families
couldn't spend any of their money without permission from the
Bureau of Indiana Affairs.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
She came back with this homeless man. He was non Indian,
He's a white man, and he's like thirty years younger
than her. She's an old lady. He's like a young
young man. They wound up being married, and so she
was killed by him. I don't know how else to
say it, any other nice way. He drove She was
(08:12):
asleep in the backseat of the car, and it was
a big touring car, and he drove her off a
cliff and he got out. He survived. She did not,
and he inherited her money and her land. Luckily, she
did have a will drawn up, so some of her
children did get some of that land and money.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Do you have the death certificate?
Speaker 2 (08:33):
I do not, but I have an article in a
newspaper that tells the story about it. How she was
any investigation, No, why no, No, are you kidding me? No? No,
because he was a white man and she was full
blood Indian.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
The article Martha Mentions, from November of nineteen thirty four,
says Anna Slagel was seventy when she died and had
interests in seven mining leases. And according to Martha, some
of Anna's wealth went to her driver and some of
it to her children. But even the land her family
did hold on to, it's not in great shape.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
I'm sure This land was probably, you know, somewhat pretty
before the mines went in, but now it's just forgotten.
It's forgotten, just like a lot of the tribes are forgotten,
a lot of the people are forgotten.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
So how did the mining go as far as to
turn a once pristine prairie into such a toxic wasteland.
And if this was one of the biggest mining operations
in the country, where did all the money go? It
turns out there's a guy in town who knows the
history of the mining industry better than anyone.
Speaker 4 (09:47):
When you grow up in a small town like Pitcher,
that's really all you know. There may be a town
next to it, but really all you know is a
small town.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
This is at Kahili, even though picture is on the
Quapaw Reservation. A lot of non native families moved here
in the early to mid nineteen hundreds to work in
the mines. Ed's family was one of them. That's next.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
I was born in Flippin', Arkansas. My father was a
sharecropper in Flippin' and in nineteen forty three he heard
that there was work in Pitcher, Oklahoma. In the mind,
my mother packed everything we had in a suitcase and
(10:33):
cardboard boxes, and we caught the train to job in Missouri,
and somehow we made it from jobling the wonderful Pitcher.
And so I lived in Picture until I was a
sophomore in high school.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
Ed Kaheely is like a walking encyclopedia. He has boxes
and boxes of old receipts, maps, photographs. Started as a
retirement project. Before he moved back to Oklahoma, he lived
in California, where he was a nuclear engineer for the
government at the height of the Cold War. But Ed says,
even with all the projects he had going on back
(11:14):
in California, he couldn't stop thinking about Pitcher.
Speaker 4 (11:17):
I had always kept ties with the area back here,
maintained friendships and made a couple of trips a year.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
So in the nineties Ed and his wife packed up
their things and headed back to Oklahoma.
Speaker 4 (11:31):
We live about nine miles east of here along the
Spring River, and we built a home out there, raised cattle.
I wanted to be nearby, but I did not want
to live in Pitcher. You know, there's not a lot
of lawns and parks and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Ed's been researching, digging deep into the history of the
mining industry. Ed's father worked for the biggest mining company
in Pitcher, called Eagle Pitcher. At first, I assumed the
company was named after the town. It wasn't until I
started talking to Ed that I realized that town was
actually named after the company.
Speaker 4 (12:06):
And so they began to expand in nineteen fourteen, and
they needed a town because this was open prairie for miles,
and they needed employees, So they needed people. Eagle Pitcher
built a first church in town, and they built a
few homes for some of their their internal staff, and
(12:30):
they built first water tower, and they did everything they
could do to support the town, including providing law enforcement
in a while, and crazy Town.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
By the nineteen twenties, eleven thousand miners were living in
and around Pitture. This was all happening on Couapa allotments,
mining companies releasing and sometimes buying land outright from Quapaw families.
And remember this was a time when thousands of Native
Americans were deemed incompetent to handle their own affairs. So
(13:05):
those leases and deeds they were going through the BIA.
Speaker 4 (13:08):
They began to drill in downtown picture here just two
blocks over from here, and discovered the mother load of
the entire Picture mining field was beneath the city of Pitcher.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Ed says the BIA and the mining company would negotiate
leases with the verbal agreement from the Quapa landowner, and.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
Then the Bureau of Innan Affairs then was supposed to
collect that money from the mining companies and then pay
that to the Indian owner.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Ed's looked at thousands of these leases, and what he
found was that the US government wasn't collecting the money
they should have been for Quapaw landowners. Millions of dollars,
he says, should have ended up with Couapa a lattes
that mining companies kept for themselves. But it wasn't just
the mining companies that were getting rich of the Quapaw land.
(14:01):
As Ed was digging through all these documents at the
Ottawa County Courthouse, he started to notice something else that
there were way more leases than there needed to be.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
There was a ponzi scheme that lasted for the lifetime
of the mining fuel.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
What Ed found was that Quapaw landowners would enter into
an agreement to get a royalty rate for their land
save five percent of the proceeds. But whoever got that
lease they could release the land to someone else at
a higher rate, and then someone may package that lease
up with others and lease it to the mining company
for even more Basically middlemen layers of investors and companies
(14:47):
in between the quapaw a lattie and the mine operator
taking their cut. But this scheme it not only cheated
the Quapaul landowners, it also ate into the profits of
the mining companies themselves, and slowly smaller companies started going
(15:09):
bankrupt or selling to the big players like Eagle Pitcher.
Eventually only a couple of companies had control of all
the mining here, and those companies they got more and
more desperate to extract as many minerals as they could.
They went back to old mines and dug some more
closer to the surface, and even dug into what they
(15:31):
call pillars, the places that miners leave underground to keep
the surface from collapsing. In the nineteen sixties, there were
three bad collapses in one neighborhood. Those residents moved, but
the ground kept collapsing and the toxic piles kept growing.
Those giant piles they're called chat. While Ed and I
(15:54):
were talking, he offered to take us to the top
of one to see what it looks like today.
Speaker 4 (16:00):
We are on top of one of the last tailing
piles in the Pitcher mining field in downtown Pitcher. This
particular pile is about one hundred and seven feet high
and about a quarter mile in diameter. And from here
we can get a panoramic view of the old mining
field and you can see a large number of tailings
(16:21):
mill tailings that are still in existence, you know, three
hundred and sixty degrees from here, to give you some
sense of the extent of the mining.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
It was a clear and cold day up on the pile.
You can see Kansas to the north, Missouri to the east,
with chat piles stretching for miles between like giant sand dunes.
There was a beat up plastic sled at the top
of the chat pile. A lot of people who grew
up here remember sledding down. These chat piles are shooting
bottle rockets.
Speaker 4 (16:50):
See those buildings down there. Those are in the worst zone,
and the old reunion park where we used to have
the annual reunion is severely undermined. It was the worst
area that we found in all of the areas that
we that we.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Studied, ed was hired in the early two thousands to
examine the risk of cave ins, back when a lot
of people were still living in and around Pitcher. His
job was to figure out which parts of picture were
most likely to collapse. We have read the report he
submitted to the Army Corps of Engineers. The risk of
cavens was so bad that one of their recommendations was
(17:28):
to reroute school buses so kids weren't at risk of
the ground collapsing from beneath them on their way to school.
And there was lead in the soil and the water,
which is a serious health risk because it can cause
nerve and brain damage. At one point, the Indian Health
Service took blood samples from kids around here and found
(17:50):
elevated lead levels in thirty five percent of the children
they tested. Eventually, the cavens and the lead pollution were
so bad the state and the federal government came in
to buy people out of their homes. That was about
fifteen years ago. Most families didn't want to leave their community,
a few refused. The buyout process was fraught with all
(18:14):
sorts of allegations of corruption all the way up to
the federal government. Ed said he spent a lot of
time back then trying to advocate for local families. He
was frustrated they weren't being given enough money to move
ed wanted us to see one of those cavans up.
Speaker 4 (18:31):
Close, this particular area. This is the third time this
has collapsed. It has been filled and collapsed three times,
so that you know, you can stand here and you
can look in all directions and it looks like a
pristine prairie, and then all of a sudden you get
(18:53):
something like this and you say, no, wait a minute,
is this really? Is this land really safe?
Speaker 1 (19:01):
The hole was deep, maybe fifty or sixty feet. There
was another a few hundred yards away.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
Anybody want to go closer and look good? Yeah, I
don't know. This is a small collapse. Yes, this is
about sixty seventy feet across. As I mentioned, we logged
one hundred and four that were over one hundred feet across.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
As we drove around, we saw trash aerund, the base
of some chat piles, beer bottles, children's toys, the skeleton
of an old hotel. It was mid afternoon. If this
was any ordinary town, school would be letting out people
heading home from work. But this is picture it's quiet, eerie.
Speaker 4 (19:48):
Okay, we're going to hop out here real quickly.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
There was one other thing and wanted us to see.
He took us to another place here The ground wasn't
even ed, says he has a personal connection to this spot.
Speaker 4 (20:01):
Okay, now, let me explain to you. During the buyout,
they were trying to figure out where do we put
all of the debris from these homes were destroyed. They
came up with this bright idea that instead of taking
all of that material to a sanitary landfill and paying
for it, why don't we just put it in a
hole in one of the big cave ins and you know,
(20:23):
market complete and along with everything went in. Here is
my old childhood home. His is in here, so I
have a private stake in the in this place.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
During the buyout, remnants of his home and the homes
of others were put in a sinkhole. According to Ed,
this land is going to collapse again with all the
stuff that's wet and decomposing. At one point, the mining
company Eagle Pitcher was on the hook for almost two
million dollars for cleanup, but it filed for bankruptcy and
ended up paying a lot less. Now it's owned by
(20:56):
a private equity firm in Chicago. We contacted the firm, GTCR,
but they declined to comment. We asked ed why he
spends so much time on all this, Why not just
leave his childhood home in the.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
Hole and move on everything. We've wasted it, we've messed up.
We have an obligation to fix and you know, and
it's that simple. It is so easy to mess things up,
you know. We've proven that time and time and time again.
But it's a whole different thing to try to fix it.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Fixing picture fixing the Quapaw reservation won't come cheap or easy.
But the Quapaw Nation is working on that on the
ground and in the courts, and Martha Barker and other
Quapaw citizens are doing their own reclamation. Those chat piles
we've been talking about, they're more than just hills of rubble.
(21:51):
They actually have value today. It's all raw material for
making roads, lots of roads. That's next.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Different. Asphalt comes in different the chunks come in different sizes,
and this is a very very sought after size.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
That's Martha Barker again. She took us out to her
family's land to show us one of the big chat piles.
Right as we were standing there talking about the value
of the piles, a truck drove up next to us.
Martha weaved it down.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Oh, by Martha Martner.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Okay, there are you with the tribe or the remediation.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
The guy told Martha he was with an asphalt company.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
How friackin weird was that running into an asphalt guy, right?
You know, that's the way it is. It's like when
my mom, when she came down one time.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
I couldn't help notice Martha's suspicions of this man. That's
because there's a long history here between asphalt companies and
landowners and Martha's mom she was right in the middle
of it. Her name was Ardina Rivard Moore. She lived
in Miama, a town about fifteen minutes south of Pitcher,
were she taught Quapau language classes.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
She would drive back and forth, and she kept noticing
when she'd drive by picture that the chat piles were
going down and down and down. And so she drove
out there and she noticed there's just dump bload trucks
lined up sixteen deep, just hauling off the chat.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
When Martha's mom saw all those trucks, hauling off Chat
from her land. It made her wonder how much money
she was getting for it.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Her IM account hadn't changed in years, and I.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Am an individual Indian money account holds the money the
government manages for Native Americans. If companies were taking Chat
off her land, it should be showing up there.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
No income was coming in, but obviously they were hauling
Chat off. So she called her cousin. They went out
the next day and they had a little pocket and
stomatic camera and they started taking pictures of these big,
huge trucks hauling off all this Chat. And she took
her pictures. Armed with her pictures, went to the Bureau
(24:05):
of Indian Affairs in Miama and they told her, do
not make trouble for this office. Yeah. While that just
lit her fire.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Those pictures she took, they gave her the proof she needed.
Chat being sold from her land wasn't being paid for.
So in the early to mid two thousands, Quapas citizens
boiled two lawsuits related to the sales of Chat. Both
alleged that their trustee, the federal government, wasn't keeping track
of all the sales and accused them of mismanagement. The
(24:46):
one filed by Martha's Mom, Ardina and other plaintiffs was
over piles that disappeared in recent years. A second case
was over piles that disappeared decades earlier. The US has
actually agreed to settle both lawsuits, though without admitting it
did anything wrong. We reached out to the BIA and
they said they're working to protect the trust assets of
(25:08):
all Native Americans and Alaska Natives. They said that includes
helping people who own mineral rights achieve economic self sufficiency
through developing their resources. After the US settled those cases,
one of them paid out, that's the one Martha's mom brought.
But the other one needs an Act of Congress before
(25:29):
the government can release the money.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
It has been stuck in committee for the last year
and a half will not make its way out.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
This is Guy Barker. He's the former secretary treasurer for
the Quapa Nation and he's an attorney who worked on
both lawsuits. He's also Martha's son.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
It is a true responsibility, you know, the same way
as you and I have to pay for our electric
bill or you know, make your house payment. This is
a debt owed by the federal government and they continue
to sit on it.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
The payout they're waiting on. It's one hundred and forty
million dollars to the Quapaw families involved in the settlement.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
So there's a possibility and given the environment that we're
looking at right now, with extraordinary expenses and quite a
lot of debate over government spending, they could make a
decision not to make good on their promise. And that's
something that kind of continues to terrify some individuals that
(26:32):
have worked on this for so well.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
That money is important enough for quapaf families to pay bills,
cover expenses, maybe help send their kids to college. But
Guy says it doesn't even come close to the amount
of wealth that was extracted from Quapaw land.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
And so to imagine that amount of money that could
have gone to a community, it's hard to wrap your
head around, and to see what good kind of really
could have come from it as impossible. But I know,
(27:08):
having grown up around that area, we're very far from
that in terms of reality. The unbelievable majority of our
tribal members live under the poverty line and to see
where that has kind of happened, and purely from a
responsibility standpoint, is it's frustrating.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
I asked Guy what he sees when he pictures the
Quapa Reservation in the future. He says, just look at
the part of the reservation that wasn't mined.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
There's a huge piece of fresh water in a river
that runs right through the center of the reservation. And
there's an area where mining practices were never conducted, right
and you drive through there and it's heavily wooded. It's
very green, it's extraordinarily lush. It's beautiful, very hilly, you know,
picturesque all over the place.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
The Quapoun nation is currently working with the EPA to
clean up the polluted land. Guy says it will take
a long time, but an end it'll be worth the work.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
And so hopefully in thirty forty years, you know, we
can kind of see a completely remediated area. It's going
to be a long process. I'm looking forward to it.
I can't wait to watch an unfold come into the
decades come. But it's certainly not going to happen overnight.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
We've been telling you the story of the Quappa and
the fight for their land. It's just one of the
many stories I've heard about the taking of land, the
taking of wealth. That part of Indigenous history is rarely
taught in classrooms, and for decades, native stories have been
written out of the narrative in popular culture, obscured by
a shinier version of Oklahoma and the West that reduces
(29:00):
Native people to relics or caricatures and places settlers in
a more heroic light, or doesn't include Native people at all.
One of the most known stories is a musical set
in Oklahoma, with singing cowboys and dancing farmers, a big
song about statehood, and a bright golden haze on the meadow.
(29:21):
Except that's not the whole story. That's on the next
bonus episode of Intrust. For more about the show, go
(29:54):
to Bloomberg dot com slash Intrust. Intrust is a production
of bloom and iHeartMedia. This episode was reported and hosted
by me Alison Errera, Additional reporting by Rachel Adams Hurd.
Victor Eveyas is our senior producer. Jeff Grocott is our
senior editor. Stage Bowman as our executive producer and head
(30:17):
of Podcasts. Additional support from Katie Boyce, Gilda Decarley, and
Kathleen Quillion. Sound engineering by Blake Maples. Our fact checking
was done by Molly Nugent. Theme music by Laura Ortman,
Photography by Shane Brown.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
You can email us at.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Podcasts at Bloomberg dot net. Find Intrust anywhere you get
your podcasts.
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.