Indian Inmates Turn to Sweat Lodges to Find Faith, Way to Go Straight : Cultures: Federal prisons have allowed the ancient ceremony for 13 years. For some prisoners, penitentiaries offered their first encounter with the rite.

In the heat of the Arizona desert, a slow-speaking man with broken teeth and sharp eyes is rebuilding the ruins of a sacred lodge left by his Navajo grandfather. Arley Woodty has returned, to his culture, to his people.

The road that took Woodty back began in the frozen mud of a Michigan prison yard last winter. It was in the federal lockup under the eyes and guns of white guards that Woodty, the 31-year-old grandson of a medicine man, rekindled his native faiths. He did it inside a prison sweat lodge.

“It’s given me some kind of foundation,” Woodty says. “It’s holding me straight.”

There are sweat lodges at every federal prison with a significant Indian population, says Charles Riggs, head of chaplain services for the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington.

“We have them where any group has requested for the opportunity to sweat, except in places like high-rises, like New York or Los Angeles,” he says. “We’ve tried very arduously to provide staff with understanding about headbands or eagle feathers or pouches.”

At the Milan Federal Correctional Institute in southern Michigan last January, Woodty helped inmates build a fire so intense it melted the winter clay. The mud steamed. The men threw on more wood.

They waited for hours in the bitter cold, wearing shabby coats and colorful blankets, waiting for the fire to heat a pile of stones stacked at its center. Then they moved the stones to a small domed hut. They stripped off their clothes and crawled beneath the poles and tarps labeled “Property of the U. S.”

As the heated rocks brought the lodge to a stifling temperature, the men sang in Sioux and Navajo. They listened for spirits. They made offerings. They prayed.

When it was done, they crawled out of the lodge, blinking in the light, and stepped past a buffalo skull guarding the door.

“This thing here, this is nothing to play with,” said one Sioux, with a bright red bandanna circling his long, black hair. He crouched at the narrow opening to the lodge, the fire crackling at his back.

“This isn’t like an exhibit or anything like that. It is very sacred for us and the people that come here. Even the white people.”

This ancient ceremony of heat--called the sweat lodge and native in some form to many of the North American tribes--entered the federal penitentiary system 13 years ago under the Indian Religious Freedoms Act.

For some of these Indians, prison offered their first encounter with the sweat lodge. For others, it was where they began to take it seriously.

The latter was so for Woodty, a living example of religious contradiction. On the reservation Woodty learned the symbolisms of his culture--that coyotes are harbingers of the dead and ill events, that peyote-induced visions and painted images in the sand are doorways into the spirit world.

While his own people sought out his grandfather for religious healing, boarding school nuns taught Woodty that such heathen practices were punished by hell. He became a Mormon. He tried spiritual hallucinogens. Now he sweats.

“Wakan Tanka, un-shi-ma-la-yo . . . wa-ni-wa-chin-ya,” he sings in Navajo. It means Great Spirit, show me thy mercy . . . . I want to live.

“Some of my own people call it sorcery, witchcraft. They say leave it alone, go to church,” Woodty says. “I think they decided not that it was wrong, but they could find themselves better off in society now than they could by sticking to the old ways.”

Woodty knows that many white people think Indian ceremonies convey a belief in magic and the supernatural. Some of it is foolery, he says. What is important is what the mind believes.

“It’s how you look at it, how you take it,” he says.

A true sweat exposes a man’s soul, he says. In Woodty’s case that means dealing with a sexual assault case that got him a 5-year sentence.

“What’s rough is you look at the truth, but the truth hurts,” Woodty says.

Since the 1978 Indian Religious Freedoms Act, there is no fuss when the Milan Indians gather every Thursday and build their fire.

This particular day, a Sioux named Carlin Jewett, serving 18 years for forcing a woman to perform oral sex at knifepoint, will pray for the health of a woman who is sick. For this, 24 large stones gather heat in the heart of the bonfire.

In the pit of the lodge, the stones release such intense heat that participants describe it in words of pain. Jewett speaks of the “flesh offering.” He plucks away an imaginary piece of his arm each time he uses the phrase.

A tall Seneca explains. “You suffer for the people,” says Franklin Holmes, 34, with the drawl of West Virginia coal towns and mountain hollows. He is serving 84 months for racketeering.

The Senecas have been absorbed into Appalachia, breeding white people, as Holmes puts it, since 1640. There was little Indian culture to find at home in Cambells Creek. Here in a Michigan sweat lodge packed with Sioux from out West, Holmes is thinking of things smaller than cultural genocide.

“I feel this is a chance I have to renew myself, away from the alcohol and away from drugs,” Holmes says. “I know in my heart, I’m settled in my heart, that my wife is protected. That things are going to fit into place for her and for my children and even for my mother and my grandmother and all.

“I have to give thanks for the Great Spirit.”

He is sincere about the power of the lodge. “A lot of the guys may joke around and kid around and act one way, but when they get into the sweat, their heart is sincere and their belief is strong.”

Carlin Jewett, 31, is one such convert.

Four years ago on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, an intoxicated Jewett sexually attacked a relative of his, threatened her at knifepoint in front of his family. Jewett pleaded guilty to involuntary sodomy. AssistanS. Atty. Michael Hanson digs out the case notes. “The person I’m reading about here was about as nasty a camper as we come by here,” Hanson says.

This day, Jewett’s dark eyes are calm and focused as he explains the patterns of the ritual: how to burn sage, cedar, tobacco; the meaning of the cloth strips tied to sticks around the buffalo skull. He speaks of the ancestral spirits who enter the lodge.

Woodty now is free. He has returned to Arizona, to his grandfather’s place near Winslow. The old medicine man has been dead since 1970 but his sweat lodge, built in the desert way of cedar and dirt, still stands and Woodty started repairing it.

Then he moved on to Tuba City, deeper into Navajo country, where he works at the U. S. Job Service office.

“I’m all right,” Woodty said recently. “I’m still straight.”