c. 2007 Religion News Service

BRIDGETON, N.J. _ Frederick “Two Feathers” Owle is 38, but he can still remember taking part in his first Native American purification ritual 30 years ago on a Cherokee reservation in North Carolina.

The traditional ceremony, which offers prayers to the creator, uses steam trapped under a wood-framed hut called a “sweat lodge” to cleanse bodies and minds.

Owle’s most recent purification ritual, however, was at an unusual place: South Woods State Prison, where he is serving 15 years for committing a string of armed robberies in South Jersey.

A sweat lodge was built at the prison after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal law requiring state prisons to accommodate religious practices of inmates.

“It means a lot,” Owle said in a recent interview at South Woods. “Before this came, I would basically do it in my room by meditating. That’s all I could do.”

Urie Ridgeway, a member of the state Commission on American Indian Affairs who oversees the ceremony, said “it can have a tremendous impact on inmates.”

“They are in prison for a reason: they did something wrong, meaning their life wasn’t balanced,” said Ridgeway, who is part of the Nanticoke Lenni Lenape tribe. “It’s a chance for a lot of them to experience the creator and his power. They have to sacrifice themselves for something else, for their prayers, and they might not be used to doing that.”

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, the state also allowed East Jersey State Prison inmate Patrick Pantusco, a convicted murderer, to practice Wicca, a form of witchcraft.

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Stephen Latimer, the lawyer who represented Pantusco on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union, said he has not received any complaints from inmates about religious intolerance since the Supreme Court ruling.

“I would suspect that those issues are not going to be very prevalent unless some other nontraditional religion comes in,” said Latimer. “Prisons get very uptight when something they’re not used to surfaces.”

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The state Department of Corrections initially didn’t want to build a sweat lodge, fearing it would be a firetrap and allow inmates to have sex, share drugs, store weapons or assault fellow prisoners. That prompted a lawsuit by two convicted murderers, Jesus Sanabria and David Russo, who wanted one at the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton.

Corrections officials say their fears have not materialized because the Supreme Court also stressed inmate requests must be handled in a “balanced way, with particular sensitivity to security concerns.”

To address safety, the sweat lodge was built at South Woods instead of the maximum-security Trenton prison.

For the ceremony, inmates from other prisons are transported to South Woods, where access to the sweat lodge is limited. The ritual must be overseen by Ridgeway, whose family also built a sweat lodge at a federal prison at Fort Dix 14 years ago.

Officials denied the inmates’ request to wear colored headbands, instead of white ones, saying the use of colors could be construed as promoting gang activity.

“These are unusual requests that present to us difficult security concerns,” said the Rev. E. James DuBois, who manages prison chaplains. “We’ve tried to accommodate them with a compromise.”

At South Woods, inmates built the roughly 12-foot-wide domed frame of the sweat lodge by using twine and oak and sassafras saplings collected by Ridgeway near his home. They dug a shallow hole in the center of the floor and used the extra dirt to create an earthen altar near the entrance of the lodge.

The frame is usually bare, but during the ceremony, inmates drape it with blankets and spark a fire in a nearby pit to heat the rocks, which Native American participants in the ceremony refer to as “grandfathers” because they have experienced many things, Ridgeway said.

As the rocks heat up, inmates use bundles of burning cedar and sage to “smudge,” or cleanse, the area, Ridgeway said. They also fill pipes with a mixture of tobacco, cedar and herbs and say prayers to the creator.

During the ceremony, the inmates, dressed only in shorts, enter the lodge and sit in a circle as the “firekeeper” carries rocks from the fire and deposits them in the hole at the center of the lodge, Ridgeway said. An inmate then pours water over the rocks to create a stiflingly hot steam bath while the others say prayers and sing songs.

The inmates perform the ceremony four times, smoking the prayer pipe after the third session, Ridgeway said. Once the ritual is complete, the inmates leave the sweat lodge on all fours as a way to symbolize their rebirth.

Arnold Mason, a 36-year-old Mohawk serving up to eight years for a drug conviction, said he was transformed by the purification ritual. It was his first, even though he lived most of his life on a reservation in upstate New York and his family tries to follow traditional ways.

“When I went in there, it took me away from here,” Mason said. “You pray for you and your family. You take the good in and you take the bad out. I was really grateful that they let us do that. I think it will steer us in the right direction.”

(Rick Hepp writes for The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.)

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