Spilyay Tymoo, Warm Springs, Oregon
January 11, 2023
Page 5
Land Buy Back to create a Native home in Ohio
A
half-hour drive outside
Columbus, Ohio, are 20 acres of
forest and prairielands. The land-
scape buzzes with the familiar
sounds of cicadas and cardinals,
and there is an occasional sighting
of white-tailed deer. A trickling
stream evokes a peaceful sigh from
Ty Smith as he gazes at a territor y
that was once the home of over 10
different autonomous Native tribes.
Mr. Smith is a member of the
C o n f e d e r a t e d Tr i b e s o f Wa r m
Springs. He moved to Ohio some
years ago from the Warm Springs
R e s e r va t i o n . Ty a n d h i s w i f e,
Masami, are on a mission to return
this land to Native hands.
The fate of the land
Ohio was once the homeland of
many tribes who were systemati-
cally removed from the area. These
include the Shawnee, Potawatomi,
Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca,
Wyandot, Ottawa, and Kaskaskia.
After centuries of displacement
and genocide, Native people make
up just 0.3 percent of the Ohio
population. Those who now find
themselves in the state have mainly
migrated to Ohio from other parts
of the continent following the be-
ginning of the Bureau of Indian
Affairs urban relocation program
in the late 1950s. The program pro-
vided incentives to Native people
to move from reservations to cit-
ies.
Bereft of a tangible access point
for community and culture for
Native people in Ohio, ‘urban In-
dian centers’ popped up in the state
in the 1960s and ’70s.
The last of those that remains
today is the Native American In-
dian Center of Central Ohio—
NAICCO—which serves a state-
wide intertribal Indigenous commu-
nity.
NAICCO has offered space to
more than 100 different tribes—
including Lakota, Navajo, and
Alaska Natives—since its concep-
tion in 1975. The group’s mem-
bership has worked for a decade
to bring their dream campaign into
reality: Land Back NAICCO.
Ty Smith is the NAICCO pro-
gram director: “We know the atroci-
Masami and Ty Smith, originally from Warm Springs, are
now executive director, and program director of NAICCO.
ties that our people faced,” he says.
“Some of that has even played for-
ward into today. It’s time we started
to heal from the past. Connection
to place is essential to our healing
journey, and this is what we are
seeking to accomplish here in
Ohio.”
The United States is built on sto-
len land. Science reports that Na-
tive peoples have lost 99 percent
of their land. How can land be re-
turned to its rightful stewards?
For many Native communities
grappling with this question, Land
Back is a call to action.
Land Back NAICCO
NAICCO launched a Land
Back campaign in 2022 after col-
lective visioning sessions with its
Native community members, dur-
ing which images of Native land
kept surfacing.
This prompted a plan for the
organization to purchase at least 20
acres of land of the highest qual-
ity possible, “land worth building
NAICCO has big
plans for the home it
wants to create. The
organization intends
to create a space to
foster and deepen a
connection to Native
identity through cul-
tural teachings.
the future of our Native People
upon.”
It set a fundraising goal of
$250,000. NAICCO has raised
over $170,000 entirely through
community support. According to
Ty Smith, “The goal is that this
land becomes a home for our Na-
tive people in Ohio.”
A home outside of NAICCO’s
current space, that is. Its existing
building is located on Columbus’s
industrial south side, and Smith
Veterans: Service officer always here to help
(from page 4)
Mission 22, Project 22, and 22
Warriors are all organizations that
focus on reducing suicide among
Veterans because it is understood
that 22 Veterans Commit Suicide
every day. Below are some re-
sources for you to do some re-
search or help your Service Mem-
ber/ Veteran.
People need people, and even
though they were Soldiers, Marines,
Sailors, Airmen and had duties, re-
sponsibilities and experiences most
people will never have (beyond
understanding and comprehension),
they are still our children, grand-
children, brothers and sisters, still
young enough not to have experi-
enced certain emotions; forgiveness,
acceptance, recovery, just to name
a few.
They are at the end of one life
and in the beginning of another
journey, and they haven’t had a
break, time to breathe, a chance to
rest or the place to do those things.
They will need our help. I am al-
ways an option to contact for help.
I understand what we can go
through after discharge.
Okay... Whew! Switching gears...
In the military we have our own
vernacular. We speak in acronyms,
abbreviations and Mil-speak. Now,
I am not trying to give those ‘Sto-
len-valor’ types some ammo to bol-
ster their lies, I thought you might
just like to know where some of
your commonly heard phrase come
from.
‘Balls to the wall’:
This expression comes from pi-
lots in military aviation. In most air-
planes, control levers have a ball-
shaped grip at the end. One of
these is the throttle and to get maxi-
mum power from your engine, you
push it all the way forward towards
the front of the cockpit, where the
pilot is, to the firewall—it’s called
this because it prevents an engine
fire from coming inside the cock-
pit.
Another control is the joystick—
pushing it forward sends a plane
into a dive. So, literally, pushing the
balls to the (fire)wall would put your
fighter plane into a maximum-speed
dive, and figuratively going balls to
the wall is doing something all-out,
with maximum effort.
The phrase is essentially the
aeronautical equivalent of the au-
tomotive ‘pedal to the metal.’ Next
time we will cover the phrase ‘Go-
ing flat out.’
Community notes...
The Warm Springs Point in
Time Homeless Count will
take place on Tuesday, January
24 from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m.
Individuals and families ex-
periencing homelessness should
stop by to compete a survey,
enjoy a meal and earn incentives
for participating.
If you living in transitional
housing, have no home at all; if
you live rough or if you couch
surf, please stop by the Warm
Springs Family Resource Cen-
ter on Tuesday, January 24 for
I know the frustration and
confusion of military paperwork
very well. Please bring in your
DD-214. Don’t have it? I can
help you get it. If you haven’t
brought your DD-214 in for
archiving, please do so.
I would hate for you to have
that ‘inked’ copy lost or de-
stroyed without a backup copy...
I can be that archive. Also, if you
have your 2-A/2-1/201 file on
disk, or other storage device, and
want it in hard copy form? Too
easy, bring it in.
I hope these articles in our news-
paper help you and your veteran(s).
My contact information is below,
feel free to call me with your ques-
tions, Thank you!
Rain Circle, CTWS-TVSO,
1144 Warm Springs St., Warm
Springs, OR 97761. Cell: 541-460-
8971. Office: 541-553-2234.
the Point in Time Count.
Buffalo Skywalkers bas-
ketball is during weekday af-
ternoons at the Warm Springs
Community Center.
Tuesday practices are for
fifth- through sixth-grades from
4-5 p.m. Wednesday practice
is for kindergarten though sec-
ond grades from 4-5 p.m.; and
the third- through fourth grade
team practices are from 5-6
p.m.
Thursday practice is for
fifth- through sixth grades from
4-5 p.m. Call 541-553-3243 if
you have questions.
wants to find land as close as pos-
sible to their current center that
also provides access to nature.
“This building is home, but we
need more than just a building and
a small yard. We want to be able
to spread our wings, have that con-
nection with nature and one an-
other, in a place that we can call
ours.”
Ty and Masami Smith entered
NAICCO leadership after the or-
ganization experienced a period of
relative struggle. It is a small op-
eration that, according to Smith,
is run like a “mom-and-pop shop.”
NAICCO is composed of two paid
staff, a voluntary Board of Trust-
ees, and individual members.
NAICCO received a SAMHSA
Circles of Care grant in 2011,
which allowed the organization to
engage in a three-year planning
project to reimagine its program-
ming, financial model, and long-
term goals.
After partnering with Ohio
State University to implement a
comprehensive needs assessment,
NAICCO tasked itself with find-
ing out what needs and concerns,
for present and future generations,
are most important to Native
people in Ohio.
After several rounds of focus
groups, surveys, and interviews,
three main pillars emerged that
guide NAICCO today: Cultural
preservation and restoration, com-
munity development, and eco-
nomic
development
and
sustainability.
NAICCO is unable to access
administrative infrastructure avail-
able in states with Native reserva-
tion lands. For example, reserva-
tion areas have greater access to
federal agencies like the Bureau of
Indian Affairs and the Indian
Health Service.
Native peoples living on or near
reservations also have more bar-
gaining power to manage their own
lands by working with government
agencies that have large national
landholdings, like the U.S. Forest
Service.
Without reservations to work
with, NAICCO has to look out-
side state governance structures to
achieve its goals of owning prop-
erty. While this may sometimes
seem like a barrier, it also allows
NAICCO to think outside a sys-
tem that is ultimately failing Na-
tive people across the continent.
“As a small population,” Mr.
Smith says, “in a state with little to
no infrastructure in place for Na-
tive Americans, we know that we
are often thought of as invisible,
which puts us in place of being
out of sight and out of mind and,
more so, misunderstood.”
Programs at NAICCO are
geared to the Native community
and include cultural events, prac-
tice of ancestral belief systems,
ceremonies, and educational
events facilitated and guided by
champions from various parts of
Indian Country.
The organization also hosts
hands-on programming like drum
practice, which helps reconnect
Native community members to
their cultural identity. One of
NAICCO’s longest-standing pro-
grams focuses on Native youth de-
velopment and outdoor engage-
ment.
A home to grow
NAICCO has big plans for the
home it wants to create. The orga-
nization intends to create a space
to foster and deepen a connection
to Native identity through cultural
teachings.
In their roles as project and ex-
ecutive directors, Ty and Masami
Smith describe themselves as care-
takers, positioned to positively pre-
serve and restore balance to the
lives of Native Americans in Ohio.
Having a place of their own would
allow this dedication to preserva-
tion and restoration to grow.
NAICCO is unique among Na-
tive groups in that it is an inter-
tribal nonprofit organizing without
the backing of reservation land or
enforceable treaties.
“We don't know of any other
urban effort, initiative, or campaign
that is striking out in the fashion
that we are, let alone in a state that
has basically zero infrastructure in
place for Native Americans,” Smith
says.
It represents a model that other
groups may emulate or modify to
meet their own community’s needs.
For groups not knowing where to
start, the NAICCO blueprint
might provide useful guidance.
For NAICCO, Land Back is
about creating home. The organi-
zation asks, “How do we move for-
ward today and write a new chap-
ter by way of our own hand—one
built around success, around
strengths, around forward think-
ing, experiential knowledge, wis-
dom—and one that is honoring the
voice of our ancestors?”
Outside Columbus, the hum of
cicadas follows Smith across a
ridge overlooking an Ohio valley.
He and Masami share a last glance
at the landscape, wondering aloud
when the day will come that they
can let the community know the
good news. A new home is within
reach, buzzing with life, waiting.
This article appears courtesy of
The Sierra Club Magazine. Stor y
by Victoria Abou-Ghalioum; photo
by Taylor Dorrell.