During Native American Heritage Month in November, the Las Vegas Indian Center celebrated its semicentennial anniversary with food, vendors, dance and gratitude.
As smells of fry bread and ceremonial smoke wafted around the building off Rancho and Bonanza, Rulon Pete, the center’s executive director, addressed attendees and vendors at the November 19 anniversary celebration.
“It’s always been something for me, to want to be able to bring in a good staff, but also to bring back the community to our center. … I’m thankful for it. It’s all of you here that keep us going,” Pete said.
Pete took over as executive director of the center in 2018 after serving as an employment coordinator for 11 years. He says that prior to him assuming the position, the community didn’t necessarily feel welcomed or involved in the center. In contrast, he says, he and his staff have taken a more service-oriented approach.
“We just decided to approach it differently … just reaching out and to the whole Indigenous community, being able to welcome them in and … get their ideas,” Pete tells the Weekly.
The Las Vegas Indian Center opened in 1972 as part of a federal program to help Natives who were moving into the city, Pete says. Today, it’s no longer run by the government and operates as a nonprofit providing assistance with employment, internet connection, affordable housing, voter registration and other services.
Members of the Las Vegas Paiute Tribal Council at a NuWu Cannabis Marketplace groundbreaking event in February 2022
“We have Natives and non-Natives [here],” Pete says. “We just want to be able to make others feel comfortable and welcome while they’re here.”
During the 20th century, many Native Americans moved to urban centers, away from ancestral lands that had been taken and reassigned to federal reservations in the previous century. Today, nearly 30,000 American Indians and Alaska Natives live in Southern Nevada, according to the 2021 U.S. Census.
The Las Vegas Paiute Tribe—comprising Southern Paiutes who originally inhabited the Las Vegas Valley’s namesake “meadows”—has jurisdiction over the 10-acre Las Vegas Paiute Colony Downtown and the 4,000-acre Snow Mountain Reservation to the northeast. The tribe, which has 53 enrolled members, runs a successful smoke shop, the Las Vegas Paiute Golf Resort and NuWu Cannabis Marketplace.
Newly elected tribal chairwoman Deryn Pete
(Rulon Pete’s cousin) helped in the earliest stages of NuWu’s Downtown and North dispensary locations. Now with six years of tribal council experience under her belt, she says she looks forward to seeing the tribe’s popular and profitable cannabis ventures continue to grow during her two-year term.
“In 2017, we opened the new marketplace, and I was hired on as a budtender. And then just worked my way up the ladder,” Deryn Pete recalls, adding that she left a lead role at NuWu’s North location in 2020 when she was elected the tribe’s vice chairwoman.
Developments are already underway. An expansion that broke ground in February will offer two stories of more retail and consumption lounge space at the Downtown dispensary. “We’re going to try to utilize the Fremont view,” Deryn Pete says.
She adds that she looks forward to working more with local and state governments to “acquire new land” for the Snow Mountain Reservation—a goal toward which the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe has been working with the City of Las Vegas and Clark County in recent years.
At 29 years old, Deryn Pete is among the youngest ever to chair the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe’s government. She says she looks forward to bringing fresh energy and engagement to the community.
The tribe’s annual powwow in May remains one way “for non-Natives to get a sense of the culture,” she says. “I think it’s really important that people get to know Natives who were born here, lived here and created families here, and the history that we have.”
She says she would like to see additional outreach, such as partnering with educators for presentations on tribal culture and history, and with local sports teams who want to bring land acknowledgment to their fields and arenas.
At Las Vegas Indian Center’s anniversary celebration, artist and local craftsmaker Sol Martinez gave a land acknowledgment, meant to contextualize the historic and ongoing impacts of colonialism, which has threatened Natives’ way of life since European settlers made first contact.
Craftsmaker AJ Mills at Las Vegas Indian Center
“We are situated on the traditional homelands of the Nuwuvi Southern Paiute people. We offer gratitude for the land itself and for those who have stewarded it for generations and for the opportunity to learn, work and be in community with this land,” Martinez said, before performing a jingle dance.
For Natives in Southern Nevada, there’s more than one way to reclaim land, celebrate their resilient culture and connect with community.
AJ Mills, a vendor at Las Vegas Indian Center’s November 19 event, uses naturally sourced materials to create jewelry and other crafts. The practice aligns with the values of sustainability his Indigenous heritage taught him, he says.
Another organization represented at the anniversary event, the Solidarity Fridge, founded a community pantry in East Las Vegas in 2021. The Indigenous-led group has also established free small libraries in its neighborhoods, where it distributes self-published zines about Native foods and recipes.
Planting seeds for the future, both the Solidarity Fridge and Las Vegas Indian Center launched community gardens in 2022.
“With the pandemic, a lot of Indigenous people were having difficulties with food. … We decided to start something that’s going to help them with not only the food side of it but also the sacred side of it,” Rulon Pete says, adding that sage and other sacred herbs can be cultivated there for traditional medicinal use. During the pandemic, the center also offered drive-through food assistance to clients on an appointment basis.
“What I decided to do is to bring in the younger generation, and to get more ideas—ideas I’ve never really thought about … I’m old-school, and there’s things that I was just used to, but I [said], there’s got to be more to it, than this,” he says, referencing the center’s lack of engagement prior to his takeover as executive director. “Without your community, you really don’t have anything.”
The center will host its annual holiday market at CSN North Las Vegas Campus on December 10.
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