A Century in Which the Law Itself Banned the Office

For much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the ceremonies medicine people conduct were criminalised outright by United States federal policy: the Religious Crimes Code of 1883 empowered reservation agents to prohibit and punish traditional dances and ceremonies, and enforcement under this and related policies suppressed public ceremonial practice on many reservations for decades, driving much of it into concealment rather than ending it. Canada's Indian Act carried comparable prohibitions, including a ban on the potlatch and related ceremonies that remained in force into the twentieth century.

Legal protection came only much later and remains incomplete. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 was the first explicit federal statement that Native peoples in the United States have a right to practice their traditional religions, and subsequent litigation has tested how far that right extends against competing claims, including cases over access to sacred sites on federal land and over the use of otherwise controlled substances such as peyote in ceremony, an exemption now recognised in United States federal law for members of the Native American Church. The medicine person, and the community that recognises and depends on that person, practises today under legal protections that are recent, were won rather than given, and continue to be actively defined and defended in court.