Cherokee Chat is an independent production and is not affiliated or endorsed by Cherokee Nation or any of its entities, businesses, government, or otherwise. Any views, opinions, or content express in this program are solely those of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of Cherokee Nation. Good morning, good morning, good morning, and I'm going to try this here, mister Weston O c O O c O. Tom Oh. There
we got souna lee, which is good morning. And another word phrase we like to use on today, especially is osto chunky losi losti, which just means happy wash day. Okay, I think it's hinting I might need a bath. Uh. It's Cherokee Chat. And you brought friends, as you always I did, I did. I brought with me that kind of commissioner, Mitch antl Uh, And we just want to welcome everyone to another edition
of Cherokee Chat. Everyone's having a good morning out there. I was driving around the other day around Barnesville, and I noticed that we seem to be doing pretty well with our cleanup efforts here. And I've noticed a few ward up windows still and things like that. But it seems like we're starting to get things back on track, so that's always encouraging. Sign to see my guest this morning. We'll have a little more to say about that here in
a bit. As always, would like to extend our thanks to our sponsor, Cooperative Preyer Unit located at three thirteen West ninth Street in Coffeeville. They're all about providing you with great personal financial services. They want to remind you that when life happens, a little extra money can help and who doesn't need that right and unexpected car repair, home repair, medical bills can really add up. They want to remind you they're here to help you. And Cooperative
Prayer Union it's where you belong. Check them out today on Facebook or their website at Cooperative COOPERATIVECU dot com insured by NCUA. So I mentioned Washday at the top of the broadcast. That's what it translates to in Cherokee when we say Happy Friday. Today's day when everyone would get together, well before we had washing machine machines and basically the women would get to there and wash everyone's
clothes with the tribe of the towns. It started me thinking about another tradition we have in Cherokee Nation, and that's the going to water ceremony, and
that's something that's very important to us in daily life. The Cherokee acknowledged the spiritual significance of our local rivers and our streams and ponds with the ritual ritual called going to water, and each morning at daybreak, a party at Cherokee would be let out to it by a healer down to a running stream, where the group would face the rising sun and immerse themselves completely in the flowing water, which was sort of a kind of a rebirth. This ceremony of
a communion touched on nearly all spheres of social life. Going to water was part of the ritual for obtaining long life, for winning the affections of a woman, for recovering from an illness, and for calling down prosperity upon the family at each return of the new moon, and for century before the force will removal back east. The Tennessee River was so closely associated with them that English, Spanish, and French settlers often referred to the waterway simply as the
Cherokee River. It stood not just as the political and an economic center of much of the Cherokee world, but also the spiritual center. And the Cherokee word for river in fact is longman or more literally person long heat, which evokes something of the sacred essence of these bodies of water, which the Cherokees saw living as entities and now with their own unique personalities and attributes. And while a lot of American settlers they would see it sort of as an economic
opportunity, we've viewed it as a sacred aspect of our culture. And from the Cherokee perspective, when you radically transformed a river or a body of water, you were basically killing it, because when the water stand still, they often become stagnant and are considered dead waters. And that's why today we still have going to water ceremonies, but we will never use just a standing body of water for that ceremony because those are considered dead waters. And so today
I have with me District one County Commissioner Mitchannel. Mitch is a member of Washington County Cherokee Association. I'll mention that, and he's been a great ally to the Cherokee people. Mitch, how are you today? I'm well, John, you great, great. It's great to have you here with us. I understand your little road where you've been out working hard for the people
of Washington County and it's been a week. It's been a week. Yeah, absolutely, So you know, one of the things that I always like to bring home if we're talking about the border commissioners or a county commissioner's position is people often equate it with the office or with the office of maintaining roads and bridges and infrastructure things like that, which, yes, that's a very important part of what you do. But would you elaborate on some of the
other responsibilities you take on being a commissioner because there may be a few people out there listening that really have no idea what your function is. Sure, I don't want to oversimplify the roads and bridges section. Yeah, but that's about ten percent of what I'm responsible for. And honestly, we've got road crews. Each district has a road foreman. Yes, each district has an assistant to that that position, if you will, that kind of handles the
monetary side of things. So I've got one person that makes sure they've got money to operate and one guy that actually handles the day to day operations. And then we have those road crews. Our road crews handle most of that and it's almost seamless to us. So because we've got a crew under you absolutely worry quite as much about being taken care of. Absolutely. Yeah, And my road crew District one is exceptional. We're the smallest road crew out
of the three districts. But we also have the fewest road miles. We've got about one hundred and sixty miles give or take that we maintain in fifty two bridge structures, so that's quite a bit. A lot of those are farmed market roads, these smaller roads that just gets you out to a major collector, which gets you out to a highway. So there's a system behind all of this that I wasn't aware of. The funding is even more of
a system. But that's that's usually administratively where we we in Washington County put our focus. But apart from that, the committees, groups, organizations that we're a party two simply by the auspices of the office have just floored me. I mean, there are so many organizations that we're involved in and regions or region the regional concept of governance is nothing new County government has seen through the years. Hey, we need to consolidate county government. We need to
do things differently. And every time those measures, you get them before the people and they fail. So that's something that's been pushed for years. But what we're now seeing in light of our in exchange with that concept of consolidation is a regionalization. So Washington County participates on several organizations and committees and other entities that place us in anywhere between a seven and an eleven county region in the northeastern corner of the state. So we have to interact if we want
the citizens of Washington County to have benefit of those programs. Things like your Council of Government. Ours is Grand Gateway Economic Development Association over in Big Cavern, So I'm back and forth to Big Caven several times. Our Circuit Engineering District is an eleven county conglomerate. UH Workforce Development is a seven county conglomerate, and and then the list just goes on and on and on, card
services, pre k service. There's so many things that I had no idea we were we were tasked with, and a lot of these things are our mandates that that we're we're tasked with through the legislature by way of statute. I know that. I go to church with Commissioner Bovia. We were just talking one day after church and he mentioned that he felt extremely lucky. And the crazy thing is, I've heard this, you know. I don't think
he was just speaking a good line. I've heard this from other people that are county officials, and they said that we have one of the best counties as far as inter office relationships, communications, working together, and everyone in the commission, you know, gets along really well. From what I understanding, You're all working for the benefit the citizens here, you know. And I think that's wonderful because he pointed out that not all counties are like that.
That is absolutely correct. They are not all like that. Yeah, And to that point that that's the thing that a lot of people don't understand about leadership is it's about relationship, it's not about policy. That's exactly right. And in Washington County, we've ate that the eight of us have come together and done that. I think that's made easier by the fact that we're managed financially by a budget board, which consists of those eight elected officials.
So instead of us being the board of county commissioners. That says, Okay, tell us what you need in your budget, and we're gonna, you know, we'll split the pie up. The three of us aren't beholden to just that project. We've got all eight elected officials around a table making those decisions because the electorate elected all eight of us, So it makes sense.
It's difficult for some counties to do that. And most times when I hear problems from other counties or issues that are going on, they're not policy issues. It's relationships. Relationships exactly. Yeah. Well, I read recently that about twelve hundred phone was homes where our damaged right here and Barzel's thanks to
the tornado. What amount of damage occurred not only in Barzweil, but across Washington County And what steps in the count as the county taking to help those folks out or help the situation, which was interestingly confined to Bartlesville itself. We had very little damage out in the county. I believe District two had a couple of trees down that they worked. We had one up in District one that we worked on a dead end road, So we really didn't see
that damage extend. And I'm sure you've taken a look at some of that tornado path data. So the Weather Service is a nice little map up that shows that bath absolutely and well, one of the one of the employees here at the radio station put something up from Noah Nathan. Yes, that's who it was, and I was able to capture that and use that. So maps to me communicate a lot better than words and statistics and numbers. So when you put it on a map, suddenly people can visualize it and that
makes sense. So anyway you look at that damage path and that damage string, we had two major pockets that kind of fit within the districts of Washington County. A lot of people are, well, what are county are what are county personnel doing in the city limits. They're still in our district. As far as the county is concerned, we certainly don't self deploy. I'm going to reach out to the City of Artlesville and say, hey, District one has some damage over here, and I know you guys are working to
clean it up. What can we do to help? How can we make this process go a little more smooth for you guys, Because it's that's a lot of material that ends up moving even even in our case, and I consider us lucky and blessed because of the fact that this this particular event was kind of rotating above us. When we look to our our neighbors to the
west and see the devastation in Barnsdall, we were just genuinely blessed. Yes, So it's easy for us to take this large amount of material and reduce it to a a chipped form versus the loose material form, and that reduction ratio is about fifteen to one. So I've got a crew of four guys that went out, primarily four guys some days. It was three over six days, and we moved one hundred and sixty two cubic yards of chipped material,
which translates to about twenty four hundred qubic yards of loose material. When I use the term loose material, I mean stacking brush at the edge of your property allows us to come by collect it and reduce that waste substantially. So we moved a lot. District three was moving it with dump trucks, so they were just taking the loose material and moving that. They moved over
one thousand yards qubic yards of material over five days. So those pockets of damage that we saw Osage twenty third Street area, and then over here north and north of Tuxedo, east of Highway seventy five, that's where District run work, District three was working down here. Annuinely, we were just in town to help help out help the City of Bartlesville do what they are continuing
to do. We knew it was going to be a long process for everybody, and Keith Henry at the City of Bartlesville, he's run a great show with this. You had mentioned at the outset, watching these recovery methods play out and getting back to normal, and they're having in a very orderly manner, you know. And in fact, well I still notice that we have State farm officials out at the lowest parking lot where a satellite link up, you know, which I think is very interesting. They're staying out there in
a travel trailer. But I think that's wonderful thing. And we offer the community here. Government moves intentionally slow on most things because we want to make sure we're expending taxpayer funds correctly. In a disaster recovery mode, we need to step that game up. So that's what we were doing. Sure and make it move faster in it. Okay, Well, I wanted to thank
you for coming on the air today, Mitch. It's been a great having you on and kind of explaining everything that's going on with the county and our efforts there. I just wanted to mention everyone to follow us on the Cherokee Community Facebook pages for the latest event news and meetings. Just to also remind everyone, we're going to have the fifty ninth Annual Delaware Powow coming up May
this weekend May twenty fourth, twenty fifth, and twenty six. That's on Road six hundred, just three miles east the Highway seventy five, just about a nine mile north of Copan. Just also want to touch on this. This month's prize giveaway is two coffee cups and blazing with the Cherokee Nation Seal. For those that don't know, the Cherokee word for coffee is cawie. We're going to go ahead and drop the emoji in the comments section. We can go ahead and do that, and we are going to be back with
you here on the air on June third at nine to forty five. We'll discussing the upcoming election in Cherokee. Nation whether or not we should hold a constitutional convention. You can follow us on Facebook a Cherokee Chat or catch us on the Barcel Radio Facebook page. You're on the band of the Barzel Radio app, available on the Apple Store. A big waldo to my guest Mitch Channel and to all of you. Go to the goha e until we meet
again. Cherokee Chat is an independent production and is not affiliated or endorsed by Cherokee Nation or any of its entities, businesses,