In the hills above Tenkiller reservoir, shrouded in forest on a blustery April morning, Casey Camp-Horinek (Ponca) addressed a circle of visitors. Camp-Horinek stood in a black and red hoodie, red ribbon skirt and traditional beadwork. Beneath swaying Blackjacks and Post Oaks, she opened Convening of the Four Winds, the second in a series of intertribal water protection forums at rivers across Oklahoma.
“Oo dah wi’ bthaha,”1 Camp-Horinek said. “We say thank you to all of the waters. The waters within us. The waters above us. Around us, surrounding us, in every way, coming up through our Mother Earth.”
A global ambassador for Indigenous sovereignty and environmental stewardship, Camp-Horinek has spoken to the United Nations and testified before Congress about restoring just and sustainable relationships with Indigenous people and the planet.
“We are her, and she is us,” Camp-Horinek said of water. “We were born into this earth in that water, within the water of the woman.”
Travelers streamed into the circle with water they’d carried from shores as far as the Whanganui River, Standing Rock, Treaty 4 and the Rio Grande.
Uncapping bottles, jars and to-go containers, they called each source by name before pouring the waters into one vessel: Spavinaw. Sasakwa. Spring Creek. The Arkansas River.
“As this water is joined back together, I want us all to remember that the water within us is guiding us,” Camp-Horinek said, “and guiding us in this ceremony as well as in this gathering, and in this lifetime. But as this water is defiled, … she is also talking to you about how she wants you to change things.”
In 2022, Ponca Nation codified the rights of rivers, and responsibilities to protect them, with a statute recognizing the inherent rights of all Ponca water bodies to thrive and evolve without violation or degradation.2 The statute specifically named Ní’skà (the Arkansas River) and Ni’ží’dè (the Salt Fork River).3
Camp-Horinek said bringing Indigenous worldviews into the Western legal framework propels human laws and culture toward alignment with the laws of nature.
“Our human species [is] to blame for the imbalances of the natural law,” Camp-Horinek said. “So the floods happen. So the fires happen. So the earthquakes happen. So the volcanoes erupt. All of those things are part of the rebalancing. …
“It has to be considered that the water itself has rights, as it always has. That's the natural law. And that right is to be free to be nurtured, and to nurture, and to sustain all living things that are dependent on the water. That's all of us. That's every thing.”
Inside the desiccated, crater-like construction zone of the new Zink Dam, George Theron (G.T.) Bynum IV is beaming.
“This generation of Tulsans is building the city we want to leave to future generations!” the cheerful, bookish Tulsa mayor announced in a Facebook post July 26, 2021.
Weeks before, the Arkansas River turned this site into a reflecting pool when it breached the city’s cofferdam for the second time. In the photo accompanying the mayor’s post, the river is invisible, relegated somewhere beyond the concrete and gravel.
July midday sun presses Bynum’s shadow to his feet as his arms dangle near the pockets of his navy slacks. A neon yellow safety vest drifts off one shoulder, listing to the same side as his hard hat.
“Tulsans have been planning for this since 1964,” he wrote, “but right now a lake that will change the way we enjoy the Arkansas River is under construction!”
Building another cosmetic dam in Tulsa’s Great Plains prairie stream flouts the warnings of scientists, engineers and public health experts and puts the city decades behind the times in terms of smart, sustainable development.
Around the world, communities are removing dams to restore wildlife habitat, protect tribal sovereignty, prevent drownings, beautify landscapes, eliminate costly maintenance and build climate resilience.4 Since 1990, more than 1,400 dams have been removed from rivers across the U.S.56
Tulsa voters rejected proposals for low-head dams in 1969 and 1979, wary of known water contamination from decades of dumping in the Arkansas River.7 In the early ‘80s, then-Mayor Jim Inhofe built one anyway with the help of developers and private money, impounding the river between the oil mansions of Maple Ridge and the refineries that made them.89
The original Zink Dam lived a short, disappointing life and a long, destructive death.10 Little more than a concrete curb the height of a stacked washer-dryer, it had three 50-foot gates and two small sluices to manage a prairie river more than 1,200 feet wide.11
For the better part of four decades, Zink Dam fragmented a delicate ecosystem, evaporating the life histories of untold thousands of animals that depend on the river. The dam drowned at least 17 people before it was demolished in 2020.12
The Association of State Dam Safety Officials describes the hydraulic roller effect of low-head dams, named for their comparatively low height, as similar to a washing machine:
As the water flow crests and falls to the base of the dam, it creates a recirculating current that pushes anything caught in it to the bottom of the stream, dragging it along the stream bed, then releasing it up to the surface of the water, then sucking it back into the face of the dam. This circulation can keep people, boats, and other objects trapped for an extended amount of time, repeatedly slamming them against the dam wall. These forces are brutal and largely inescapable.
Before the former mayor could make good on his plan for two additional dams, Tulsans voted him out of office. In 2013, Inhofe said he was “still very proud” of Zink Dam.13
Enmeshed in a boundaryless web of influence from the George Kaiser Family Foundation,14 the City of Tulsa and its representatives have gone to great lengths to ensure that the new Zink Dam will not be the last of its kind in the Arkansas River. In January, Bynum announced plans to move forward with another low-head dam, to be installed downstream at Jenks.15
Often described as “putting water in the river,” the dams are a relic of midcentury development ambitions that survived the administrations of Bynum’s grandfather and uncle, both former Tulsa mayors. They are so poorly planned that officials are now scrambling to mitigate, deflect or distance themselves from a constellation of errors surrounding the projects, including their own public statements.
Civic leaders’ relentless campaign to develop the river perpetuates a flood of distraction, denial and bad information that is drowning Tulsa. The cycle has little-understood consequences the city is unprepared to face.
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2—The Known Unknowns
Just west of midtown Tulsa, three 1940s-era sand levees stand between the Arkansas River and hundreds of acres of refining and chemical hazards. The Tulsa-West Tulsa Levee System failed inspection in 2007. After Tulsa narrowly escaped disastrous flooding in 2019, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers quietly sealed the fate of the levees with a
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Translated from Ponca: “This is good, thank you.”
With a series of broken treaties, the federal government forced Ponca people from their homelands along the Niobrara and Missouri rivers to the land now occupied by the State of Oklahoma. Beset by thousands of earthquakes and environmental contamination from more than a century of oil and gas activity, Ponca Nation recognized the rights of nature as law in 2017. The action is part of a global movement to give ecosystems and non-human species the legal protections of personhood.
“We're not just protecting nature,” Camp-Horinek said. “We are nature, protecting itself. … Human rights are a very narrow viewpoint and certainly have to be considered. But without looking at us as part of the ecosystem instead of separate and above it, we're gonna cease to exist as a species.“
Camp-Horinek said the Ponca names for the rivers describe their appearance when Ponca people reached their confluence in 1877: “Red Water” for the Salt Fork River, and “Crystal Clear Water” for the Arkansas.
“When we were forcibly removed here, that’s how beautiful [the Arkansas River] was,” Camp-Horinek said. “The Salt Fork had a reddish hue from the red clay of Oklahoma.”
In 2020, the European Union announced a plan to remove dams, restore freshwater ecosystems and return more than 15,000 miles of rivers to free-flowing by 2030.
About 78 percent of all dam removals in the U.S. over the past century have occurred since 1999, according to American Rivers.
In Tulsa, officials often bypass the anachronism of the Arkansas River dams with the assertion that years of studies preceded their construction. In-depth interviews and extensive document review suggests that civic leaders and project engineers have ignored or are not aware of the contents of several of these studies.
I asked Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum why the city is building new cosmetic dams when other communities are tearing them out. Bynum said the city is impounding the river “to try and restore some of the opportunities from a recreational standpoint that we lost when Keystone was built.”
The Arkansas River suffered from sewage and industrial dumping during much of the 20th Century, before and after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Keystone Dam 15 miles upstream of Tulsa. It continues to be polluted by numerous sources of contamination.
I told Bynum that habitat fragmentation by dams threatens native prairie stream species, who depend on long distances of unobstructed flow to thrive and reproduce.
“Mmmm, okay,” Bynum replied. “I didn’t say I’m trying to restore the prairie river. What I said is that I’m trying to restore the recreational opportunities that were lost when Keystone Dam was built."
Tulsa World reporter Chuck Wheat spoke to the moment in a 1967 article slugged, “Park Plans Moot.”
“Tulsans’ dreams to play in the Arkansas River seem like a nightmare when you take a look at that tortured stream,” Wheat wrote. “Various schemes to puff up rubber dams to make the Arkansas a series of recreational lakes running through Tulsa turn to ashes when you see the trash, garbage, sewage and chemicals dumped in the river between here and Keystone Dam.”
Inhofe began his political career in 1966 and served three terms as Tulsa mayor, from 1978 to 1984. He was elected to four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and served as U.S. Senator from 1994 until his resignation in 2023. He died in 2024.
Inhofe secured city money, and Tulsa Urban Renewal Authority sold two tracts of riverfront land to Lincoln Property Company, to partially fund the $8 million dam. The founding chair of River Parks Authority, Leonard Eaton, led private fundraising efforts for the remainder, according to Janet Kendall, who has worked for River Parks Authority since 1974.
The dam is named for a million-dollar gift from the fortune of hydrocarbon combustion magnate John Steele Zink. The division of Lincoln Property Company involved with the sale became a separate entity, Property Company of America, in 1984.
Maintenance issues rendered the original Zink Dam inoperable for much of its tenure.
Engineering consultant Bill Smith said two additional 100-foot gates planned for the original Zink Dam were omitted because “River Parks Authority did not have the funds to do that.”
A similar dam was later demolished in the upstream suburb of Sand Springs after drowning 16 people in as many years.
Inhofe was unreachable for comment.
City and county officials often cite billionaire oilman and philanthropist George Kaiser’s investment in Gathering Place, a $465 million riverfront park near one of Tulsa’s wealthiest neighborhoods, as a reason to build dams in the Arkansas River. George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF) donated the Gathering Place project to Tulsa’s River Parks Authority in 2014.
Kaiser’s interest in altering the river dates back to at least 2007, when he told Tulsa World that “we have to unite the braided streams” to make the river more attractive for public use areas and development. At the time, GKFF proposed engineering the river to capture low flows in a four-mile, 500-foot-wide channel between Zink Dam and 71st Street. The idea appeared in Tulsa World days after the foundation announced an unprecedented gift of $12.4 million to River Parks Authority for new trails.
About 8.9 acres of Gathering Place was built in the Arkansas River floodway, according to Josh Miller, an officer of GKFF who has been closely involved with the park.
Kaiser system executives, trustees and other close connections are heavily represented among decision-makers involved with the low-head dams, including Councilor Phil Lakin Jr. and River Parks Authority’s Board of Trustees. I will describe these dynamics in greater detail in future articles.
Bynum posted about the Jenks dam a day after Tulsa World reported that Councilor Phil Lakin Jr. and County Commissioner Karen Keith, officials closely involved with the dams, were “thinking about” running to succeed him as mayor in 2024. Lakin later said he would not enter the race. Keith announced her candidacy August 13, 2023.
Fantastic work. May it spread far and wide.
Thank you for this revelatory and important article. A lifelong Tulsan, I applaud your extensive research and perseverance to bring this information to light. This story must be told.