Sweat lodge ceremony

In October 2009 the self-help author James Arthur Ray ran a five-day event near Sedona, Arizona, called Spiritual Warrior, at a price of roughly nine thousand dollars a place. The closing exercise was held in a covered structure built by Ray's staff, into which more than fifty participants were put for a session lasting about two hours in rounds, following several days that had included fasting and a period alone in the desert.

Kirby Brown, 38, and James Shore, 40, died that day. Liz Neuman, 49, died after more than a week in a coma. Eighteen other people were taken to hospital. Testimony at trial described participants vomiting, losing consciousness and being dragged out while the session continued, and described Ray discouraging people from leaving.

He was acquitted of manslaughter and convicted in June 2011 on three counts of negligent homicide. He was sentenced to two years on each count, to be served concurrently, and was released after twenty months.

The reason to record this in an encyclopedia entry is not the crime. It is what the event was not. Nothing about it resembled the ceremony whose name it borrowed. The traditions that hold the inipi and its relatives put the entire weight of the thing on the qualification of the person leading it, on protocols governing the door and anyone who needs to go out, on the preparation of the fire and the stones, and on a relationship between leader and participants that is not a commercial one. Ray had none of that and was not claiming to. He had bought a shape.

Native commentators said so at the time, and several noted a second thing: that much of the coverage treated the deaths as an indictment of sweat lodges rather than of a man selling a ceremony that had never been given to him. Both errors are available and they point in opposite directions. A ceremony conducted by the people who hold it is not what killed anyone in Arizona, and the fact that a ceremony can be imitated badly is not an argument for publishing it so that imitators can do it properly.

Sources State of Arizona v. James Arthur Ray (Yavapai County Superior Court)Yavapai County Superior Court (Judge Warren R. Darrow presiding) with Hand et al. v. Ray et al. (United States District Court, District of Arizona)United States District Court, District of Arizona (Prescott Division), Arvol Looking Horse: Public Statement on the Sedona Sweat Lodge DeathsArvol Looking Horse, 19th Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe Bundle

What actually governs a sweat lodge ceremony among the nations that hold it is a body of protocol that has almost nothing to do with the amount of heat involved, which is exactly what the imitations that have caused documented deaths get wrong. Among the Lakota, the inipi is conducted by a leader trained over years, often in an apprenticeship lasting a decade or more, who is responsible for the fire, the number and heating of the stones, the pacing of the rounds, the words spoken, and critically, an unbroken rule that anyone in the lodge may ask for the door to be opened and leave at any point without shame or refusal, a safety valve built into the ceremony's own structure rather than an accommodation added afterward.

Distinct nations, Dine, Anishinaabe, Cree, Blackfoot among others, maintain their own versions with their own leadership requirements, their own songs and their own understanding of what the ceremony does, and Indigenous commentators have specifically objected to treating these as one interchangeable practice, since that flattening is part of what makes an unqualified imitation dangerous: a leader who has not learned the actual protocol from an actual tradition does not know what makes the ceremony safe, only what it looks like from outside. That distinction is not abstract. Fatal incidents run by people without standing to lead the ceremony have occurred in commercial retreat settings, and Native leaders and organisations have been explicit in response that these events were not sweat lodge ceremonies conducted wrongly but an appropriation of the form entirely detached from the tradition and the training that make it what it is.