Tessa Minthorn Woods is ready to start her own small business, but for the past few years, she’s had nowhere to put it on the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

Woods’ specialty is Indian tacos – Tex-Mex-style tacos that use fry bread as a base. She’s been a vendor at powwows and catered events in her home community on the reservation, but when she tried to turn her side hustle into a food truck, she had trouble finding a place that would allow it.

Now, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation are trying to respond. Nixyaawii Community Financial Services, a financial institution geared toward Indian Country, is building a food truck park where Woods plans to move as soon as it’s open.

It’s a part of a wider movement from the CTUIR government and affiliated organizations to build a more modern community on land that has belonged to the tribes for thousands of years. Doing so requires navigating cultural challenges and legal obstacles that off-reservation areas don’t often face.

“We couldn’t have designed a more hostile system for home ownership or small business ownership or even a certain level of freedom than a reservation,” said Dave Tovey, the executive director of Nixyaawii Community Financial Services.

A food cart future

In the 1980s, Tovey said the Umatilla Indian Reservation’s unemployment rate was north of 40%.

That began to change with the construction of the Wildhorse Casino and Resort in 1995. The growing revenue from Wildhorse would help the CTUIR reinvest in the reservation. Within the past 20 years, the tribes have built new facilities for their health clinic, high school and governance center.

The Nixyaawii Community Financial Services office overlooks Wildhorse, which is undergoing a major expansion as the tribes add a second hotel tower to its sprawling campus. For all the prosperity Wildhorse and other tribal enterprises bring, Tovey said, a lot of the money generated “leaks” off the reservation as tribal members have to seek goods and services elsewhere.

Jacob Wallis, Nixyaawii Community Financial Services’s business services manager, said the food truck idea started three years ago as the organization tried to figure out ways to support small businesses within the reservation.

“We don’t have a lot of infrastructure out here and it’s expensive to build,” he said. “So we’re like, ‘How do we kind of kill 30 birds with one stone?’”

Nixyaawii Community Financial Services initially planned a retail center for emerging businesses but pivoted after construction costs shot up following the COVID-19 pandemic, Wallis said.

Nixyaawii staff liked the idea of a food truck park because the stakes would be a little lower. Food trucks run on a lower overhead than a traditional brick-and-mortar restaurant and if the business doesn’t work out, owners could sell the truck to a different vendor.

After raising money from a number of public and private grants, Nixyaawii Community Financial Services is busy installing utility hookups, bathrooms and a covered dining area. The park will have room for six food trucks, Wallis said.

With its close proximity to the casino and Interstate 84, the food truck park is primed to get the attention of visitors. But, Wallis said, the hope is that the food trucks also will cater to a tribal customer base. As Nixyaawii Community Financial Services solicits food trucks, he said, staff are prioritizing applications from enrolled tribal members and their descendants.

“We’re really trying to capture what it means to be a community, and we think that all of those demographics meet that standard and that need,” he said. “We really want to make sure that they feel that we see them and that they do impact our community.”

Tribal members should become more interested in the park once they see it operating, Tovey said. It’s anticipated to launch a soft opening this fall with a grand opening next year.

“Our tribe generates plans upon plans upon plans,” Tovey said. “People are used to having a lot of plans, but when they can actually start seeing and touching things, it kind of changes the game.”

‘I still want to live here’

The tribal government’s plans extend far beyond food trucks. Building new homes to buy on the reservation - another area for expansion - can be even more difficult.

A lot of reservation land is held in a trust by the federal government, meaning it can’t be sold or given away by the tribes without federal consent. While it’s a key tool in the tribes retaining their land, Tovey said, policies around land transfers also led to an unintentional redlining effect. If a bank can’t use property as collateral in a loan, then it’s unlikely to issue mortgages on a reservation.

“We live in two worlds, where we have to live in the modern world, where things have value, things have possession and possession rights,” said JD Tovey, the executive director of the CTUIR and Dave Tovey’s son. “But culturally, we don’t hold those. That’s something we each have to kind of wrestle with individually.”

Before he was promoted to executive director last year, JD Tovey was the tribal government’s planning director. He said the tribes saw a real need for more housing. A 2017 housing study showed that 350 homes need to be built over the next 20 years, a big number for a confederation that has about 3,200 members.

The Nixyaawii Neighborhood was conceived as a 40-lot housing project meant to provide options for middle and higher-income tribal members, who often either have to move off-reservation or live in low-income tribal housing because it is one of the few options available to them. To work around the fact that neighborhood land couldn’t be sold, the tribes devised a program to lease land to prospective homeowners for 99 years.

JD Tovey said he had to overcome skepticism within his own tribe. Some members felt like the tribes should just give away land instead of leasing it. Others said residents would prefer larger acreages to a modern housing development.

“I remember people saying, ‘JD, we don’t need a metropolis,’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘40 houses a metropolis does not quite make.’”

CTUIR staff felt vindicated when nearly half of the lots sold on the first day they were available. Some residents have already moved into completed houses, while others, including JD Tovey, are waiting for their houses to be developed.

“We’ve now given tribal members the opportunity to say, ‘You know what, I want to become a homeowner, but I also want to move back and live on the reservation,’” said Pamela Ranslam, the homeownership services manager for Nixyaawii Community Financial Services. “I don’t have to buy a house off the reservation. I can now look into my own community.”

The tribes have more ambitious goals for the Nixyaawii Neighborhood. JD Tovey said he’d like to see some of the lots used for other purposes, like a post office, a laundromat or office space. He described a future where residents could live in the neighborhood, walk to work at the nearby clinic and then catch a ride on the CTUIR’s public transportation system.

Building homes to buy is far from unprecedented in Indigenous communities. Congress created the Hawaiian Home Lands program in 1920 and the agency continues to provide 99-year leases for Native Hawaiians looking to homestead. There are new homes to buy on the Navajo Nation in Arizona, although the homes are on “fee simple” land, meaning the land can be bought and sold.

But housing remains a significant hurdle on American Indian reservations across the country. A 2017 federal report showed that there was a need for 68,000 new or rehabilitated housing units in Indian Country.

The resilience of fry bread

Woods’ beaded Doritos earrings dangled from her ears as she gave a tour of her soon-to-be-operational food truck, Tessa’s Superb Tacos and Snack Shack.

Since acquiring her food truck, Woods has gotten a crash course in construction. She and her family renovated much of the truck themselves, investing thousands of dollars in the process.

But what’s remained steady throughout the process is her love of making fry bread. She noted that fry bread’s origins started in the 1800s when the U.S. government provided rations to the Navajo people as they were forced out of their land. She said the bread represented resilience as it spread to other Indigenous peoples throughout the country.

“A lot of families have their own passed down recipes,” she said. “People don’t even measure the ingredients. They just put it all together with the magic touch.”

While the new developments on the reservation may have been hotly debated, Woods said, she’s excited to see the tribes building out their local community. The food truck park will allow her to make a living from the food she loves.

“I love to cook. It’s my passion,” she said. “I love the community. I love to serve people and so I just can’t wait to be doing this.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/09/26/umatilla-tribes-navigate-modern-development-on-reservation-land/