Two contestant food booths repeated their first place wins in the 2016 National Indian Taco Championship held Oct. 1 in downtown Pawhuska.
Ramona Horsechief (Pawnee/ Cherokee) took first place with a $1,500 prize for the fifth time and food booth Osage Sisters (Dana Daylight, Jacque Jones and family) took the $1,000 People’s Choice Award for the fourth consecutive year.
Runners-up were Francis Soxie who took second place ($1,000) and third place went to Foxtown Roland Noear ($500). Horsechief previously won first place four times with the most recent wins in 2014 and 2013 consecutively.
“Amazing!” Daylight said of her reaction after the results were announced. Daylight, Jones and their family members worked one out of 20 food booths setup at the competition. The booths wound around the Triangle Building where they made Indian tacos and Indian dogs for the hundreds who attended the event. Daylight pointed at the growing line after she and Jones accepted their prize check: people were lining up to buy the winning booth’s Indian taco plate.
Jones later expressed gratitude on Facebook: “Thank you to all who voted us People’s Choice at the National Indian Taco Championship today! We appreciate all the patrons who came and waited in line for some of our food. Man, I am super humbled right now. It took a whole team of sisters to win this title for the fourth year in a row!”
The contestants’ dishes faced two rounds of voting by judges who registered and paid a fee to sample the unmarked Indian taco dishes in a secluded empty business building. Those judges then wrote on scorecards to rate each Indian taco and those scores were tabulated. Ten finalists were selected for the final judging round, which included area celebrities and politicians, which included prior years participant Paula Mashunkashey, State Rep. Sean Roberts, State Rep. Steve Vaughn and Tulsa TV News on 6 Host Craig Day.
The People’s Choice Award is determined by attendees who pay and sign up to be judges and those judges (with issued badges) are eligible to buy discounted samples of the Indian Taco plates and afterward the judges are given five tickets that are used to insert into the booth contestants’ containers of their choice, according to the contest rules. The booth contestant who receives the most tickets is the winner.
Now in its 12th year, the Pawhuska Chamber of Commerce hosted the NITC on Kihekah Avenue where 40 vendor booths were also set up and powwow dancing was held for entertainment throughout the day before the winners were announced. This year’s event sponsors included the Osage Casino, Grand Lake Casino, Osage Nation, Quapaw Tribe, Enbridge and TribalTV.
By
Benny Polacca
Original Publish Date: 2016-10-03 00:00:00
