“There are times, when the snow is covering the chat piles,

that this is one of the most beautiful places on earth. Please don’t make our town look ugly.”

–In conversation with the bartender, Picher, Oklahoma.

The Tar Creek Superfund Site in Oklahoma is the largest and most heavily polluted toxic site in the country. This forty square mile area of northeastern Oklahoma includes five cities with a combined population of over 30,000 and was designated a toxic Superfund Site by the government in 1983. At least half of the polluted land is on one of a dozen Indian reservations, foremost being the Quawpaw Nation. The air, ground and water is severely contaminated with heavy metals including lead, zinc, iron, cadmium, and arsenic among many others, due to more than eighty years of mining activity. Most of the children of the area have been tested to have excess levels of lead in their systems, which cause a multitude of problems including lower I.Q. scores and learning disabilities. In addition, the area is plagued with constant mine cave-ins. There are over one thousand documented open ventilation holes and mine shafts, in the area, few of which have been plugged or even fenced. Approximately 75 million tons of chat (mine tailings which contain dangerous levels of toxic metals) remains on the surface of the ground.

In the more than twenty years this area has been designated a Superfund Site over 100 million dollars has been spent to clean up Tar Creek, all to little avail. As a last resort for many of the people in the region, the towns of Cardin and Picher (both at the epicenter of the problem) have asked the government to relocate their cities out of harms way. This localized solution is at odds with the indigenous peoples of the region who for the most part want to stay and demand that their land be cleaned up.

I am attempting to document not only the current environmental problems found at Tar Creek but also to understand and demonstrate through my photographs the indigenous populations close relationship to this land, and that in spite of the obvious hazards, their reluctance to want to leave. I am interested in exploring the conceptual and personal themes of landscape photography, of trying to understand the relationship of land and its people (and especially in this case, its indigenous peoples) and the social, physical and emotional implications of living in a compromised environment, the idea of a sense of place, and “home”.

These images were shot using a digital Canon 1Ds Mark 2, processed in Photoshop and printed as 20x30” images using Epson Ultrachrome inks.

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