Sweat lodges are salient features of a remarkable number of native traditions across North America from the Great Lakes to the Southwest. From Minnesota’s Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe1“Breaking the Cycle,” Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, July 29, 2019, https://millelacsband.com/news/breaking-the-cycle. to Plains peoples like the Lakota2“Inipi (The Rite of Purification),” Lakota Rites, accessed July 28, 2020, http://www.elexion.com/lakota/rites/inipi2.html. to southwestern peoples like the Navajo3Ronald Holt, “Traditional Navajo Sweat Lodge,” Quantum Navigation, updated 2018, http://www.quantumnavigation.net/traditional-navajo-sweat-lodge.html. may use and understand the sweat lodge in different ways, but all claim the importance of preserving the integrity of the ceremony as elemental in evolving cultural traditions.
Thousands of Native people incarcerated in Federal and State prisons have expressed interest in using sweat lodges not only to maintain their personal ‘religious’ faith but as a way to combat the hostile, sometimes dehumanizing experience of prison and begin their own reformative processes. Efforts have been met with prejudice and ignorance, calling sweat lodge ceremonies primitive and invalid practices of invalid religions.4Frank Hopper, “The Tribal Sons: Spiritual Resistance in the Belly of the Beast,” Indian Country Today online, September 2, 2017, https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/the-tribal-sons-spiritual-resistance-in-the-belly-of-the-beast-CKkCm1t5w0up4TqgA-rfaQ. Multiple cases regarding the use of sweat lodges in prisons have gone to court, like Rich v. Woodford (2000), Trapp v. DuBois (2003), and Yellowbear v. Lampert (2014).
