“We are losing our ways,” said Ty Smith, project director for Native American Indian Center of Central Ohio (NAICCO).
“Unfortunately, as each generation passes, the less and less of our identity is there and exists as it once did. We’re even at a point in time where you know we talk about putting our elders to rest with tears in their eyes. And those tears represent their concern as to what’s going to happen, what’s going to become of the next generations to follow,” Smith continued. “And [the elders] see so much in terms of how native people have conformed to mainstream society, how we’ve become more and more assimilated, how the campaigns of ‘kill the Indian and save the man’ have actually been successful and are still playing themselves out today. And it becomes very concerning.”
As a means of preserving these ways, in 2019 NAICCO launched a Land Back fundraising campaign aimed at purchasing property it could call its own. At the time, leadership stressed the importance of having a home, which would allow the organization to strengthen its programming and maintain a greater sense of ownership over its future. “What our people have talked about is how awesome it would be to call a place home, here in Central Ohio. A place where we could gather, where we could be ourselves, and where we can be open to expressing the parts of our lives that are important to us,” Smith told Matter News in 2022.
In the run up to Native Heritage Month, which continues through the end of November, NAICCO’s Land Back campaign surpassed the $250,000 goal set by organizers. The center has continued to fundraise, though, with an aim of purchasing at least 20 acres of land as a home base centered on conservation and the preservation of Native traditions. These traditions, Smith said, are essential to preserving Native culture, and Indigenous people have “put everything on the line – even their own lives – to make sure that these ways [are] carried on.”
The term “Land Back” emerged about a decade ago, according to Nick Tilsen, president and CEO of NDN Collective. First used by Indigenous artists, the mantra has since evolved into a wider anti-colonial stance and a call for Native sovereignty. Its roots, however, run far deeper, stretching back centuries to when Natives were first forced off of ancestral lands. “Our people have been fighting … to reclaim lands since colonization,” Krystal Two Bulls, director of NDN Collective’s Land Back campaign, said in a 2021 interview with Teen Vogue.
But Smith said the Land Back NAICCO campaign differs from the broader movement both in scale and approach. “We can’t operate like a nation. We aren’t a tribe. We’re a humble little, non-profit, urban Indian center in Columbus. And so, everything that we’re going to do is by way of our own hand,” he said.
Smith said that what’s most meaningful to the organization is continuing to write a new, successful chapter so that urban Native people in Ohio can feel a deeper connection to their cultural roots, while also building a greater sense of inter-tribal community.
“Some people will think, originally, Land Back is about just that in itself. And a big part is that it is about reparations – now, rightfully so. There are nations that live in their ancestral homelands, and they have all the right and reason to seek Land Back to these sacred sites, these ceremonial grounds and places that have been there since time and memorial,” Smith said. “We understand that we have to live in a modern way. It’s been about planting seeds. Seeds are traditions and culture. What we’re really saying is that we’re investing in our youth. This is us putting our best foot forward, all of the strength of our energy forward to try and create this space that they can call home. It allows and lends itself for them to hang on to who they are.”
