A Warm Handshake and Plate from NAICCO

Life moves fast, and we often forget to ask ourselves, “What am I doing for future generations?” Well, the Native American Indian Center of Central Ohio (NAICCO) is sustaining their community by centering around the universal love and need of food.

Preserving and revitalizing does not solely rely on physical efforts, while they are important, there is a cultural component of preservation that leads to physical revitalization projects.

In 2011, Ty and Masami Smith took management roles NAICCO, an urban Indian center based in Columbus. Since that time, they have focused on building up the local Native American community and preserving and restoring their peoples’ cultures, heritages, and traditions. Mr. and Mrs. Smith are a husband-and-wife duo who value family and are focused on giving back to their fellow Native American people, who they now serve as Project Director and Executive Director respectively. Their goal has been to engage the community and to create a sustainability program for the people who personify their mission work at NAICCO.

The Project

The result is NAICCO Cuisine, a food trailer that serves Native American street food. This project has been eight years in the making and came to fruition on Indigenous Peoples Day in 2020. NAICCO Cuisine has come together through the dedication of NAICCO leadership in connecting with their community’s wants and needs. After the NAICCO team collaborated with community elders, NAICCO Board of Trustees, the families and the youth involved in NAICCO they wrote a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Native Americans grant proposal and received funding for NAICCO Cuisine.

Native American street food was an instant hit and soon NAICCO Cuisine was invited to take their food trailer to other places around Central Ohio. They never thought this would be possible so soon, or at all for that matter during the pandemic. Originally, they had only planned to operate out of the NAICCO parking lot. 

By the end of November, Ohio’s weather had turned cold and there was a spike in COVID-19 cases. NAICCO had to put the trailer away.

After the success from the food trailer, they knew NAICCO Cuisine could not come to an end so soon. Mrs. Smith, Executive Director, pitched the idea for curbside pickup­– a way to spread culture and food while be socially distant. The food platters had different themes: Intertribal, Southwest, Oklahoma, Northern Plains and Northwest. Highlighting different areas of food is important for NAICCO to do since the community is intertribal. These platters could be picked up right in NAICCO’s parking lot.

The Effect

“NAICCO is focused on writing a new chapter in Native American history,” Ty Smith, Project Director, notes.

NAICCO Cuisine is about much more than food. It is about teaching, learning, family, visibility, pride and so much more. Ohio does not have any federally recognized tribes which leads to a lack of resources for the indigenous peoples residing here.  NAICCO Cuisine provides sustainability to pave the way for future Native American programs to take place at NAICCO and highlight the possibilities for all Native Americans going forward.

From the outside, NAICCO Cuisine looks like a food trailer, or a warm platter of food, but it provides more than sustenance. It provides social and economic development for the people NAICCO represents while preserving Native American culture here in Ohio.

The Possibilities

The food trailer was able to be brought back out in May of this year and was in such high demand that they were booked throughout 2021. NAICCO Cuisine intends to travel throughout Central Ohio and beyond in 2022 and can be tracked on NAICCO’s website and Street Food Finder. Now that the weather has gone cold, the trailer is being stored for winter again and the platters will pick back up again like last winter. They have received stellar reviews and high praise and won the Whitehall Food Truck & Fun Fest Runner-Up Foodie Food Truck Award this summer. Such a successful first year is unprecedented and NAICCO is ready to not only continue but expand this program for the future generations of Native Americans in Ohio and across the United States. 

Ty Smith says it best, “NAICCO Cuisine is a warm handshake unto the rest of society.”

There is more to Indigenous culture than what is visible on the surface. It goes deeper. It is a belief system. It is a way of life. It is thinking of future generations. It is self-assurance. It is so much more than words can possess. NAICCO Cuisine gives the Indigenous Peoples of central Ohio the opportunity to connect with one another and find confidence in their identity, while introducing this way of life to the rest of the population.

By Kenzie Hahn

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2021 issue of Revitalize Ohio. All rights reserved.