By Kelly Ettenborough
Staff writerStripped to their shorts, the young warriors emerge, skin glistening with sweat, steam rushing off their bodies, problems disappearing into the night air chill.
Cocooned inside the sweat lodge, they had forgotten the concertina wire around the perimeter, the stolen cars and drive-by shootings, their incarceration at Adobe Mountain Juvenile Institution in Phoenix.
As the teenage boys pray, talk and listen together inside the lodge they built themselves, they are becoming a family, and, for some, they are discovering spirituality and a heritage they never knew.
"I feel the heat and the power and all the stuff the Creator gives me. It's my belief from a long time ago. I started going away from it. I have to come back to who I am instead of acting like someone else," said Harley, 17, who is Pima and lived on the Gila River Reservation before his sentence for stealing a car.
The boys built the sweat lodge' s skeleton of 13 poles near the chapel in September. Once a month, about 20 Native American boys build the fire, heat the stones and wrap the poles in blankets and tarps. Steve Bison and other Native American volunteers teach the boys the old ways and lead most of the sweat lodges and weekly circle talks.
However, for the most recent sweat, on Dec. 23, the boys elected leaders from among themselves. In the late afternoon, when the fire was hot and the sweat lodge prepared, the teenagers gathered in a circle and Bison told them that they were the age of warriors, then explained what that meant. A warrior protects his fimily and his nation. He is true in spirit.
After blessings were said, the boys, who left most of their clothes and towels hanging on pine trees in the sparse yard, entered the small sweat lodge.
Twenty fit inside. There's always room, said Bear Paw, who works with a similar program for incarcerated Native American juveniles in Texas and helped Bison recently.
"The grandfathers make miracles," said Paw, 59, a school carpenter, artist and Chiricahua Apache who lives in El Paso. "I think this is beautiful because they are beginning to learn about respect."
The heavy coverings muffle the voices, except for the occasional yell and loud chant. The stones, so hot they pulsate orange, are brought out of the fire to the sweat lodge's pit.
"(Inside) I feel safe, comfortable, no worries that everything is going to be all right," said Stephen, 15, of Phoenix. "I believe in it. For a long time, I went around with no religion, no spiritual hope. This brings back things I never had."
Stephen, who is Apache, HoChunk-formerly known as Winnebago-and Hispanic, has 10 months left in an 18-month sentence for a drive-by shooting.
Inside the lodge, the boys, who typically shun touch, sit shoulder to shoulder, and some put arms around each other. Prayers are said and souls are bared.
"It's a place where these young men can say things they can't say on the outside without embarrassment," Bison said. "They can talk about fear. They can talk about anxieties. They can talk about anger. . . . In the very first lodge, I heard every single one of these boys pray for their mothers. That was real special. I heard one boy come out and say, 'I wish I had a father.' And I was able to inform him in the way that I was taught there are no Indian orphans. You belong to a clan. You belong to a tribe."
Entering the lodge is like returning to the womb, Bison said.
"You see those stones glowing in that pit, and you're looking at the earth as it was when it was first created. When you put the water on the stones and the steam rises, you're looking at the primordial stew from the very beginning of time. That gives you the opportunity to go back and make your life new, when you look at these things and you experience these things and you feel these things."
These boys, who want a fresh start when they leave Adobe, need that experience, he said. He teaches them respect and honor-but gives them no excuses.
"These boys need hope. There's a lot of good kids out here who have done a lot of stupid things," Bison said. "When we fail to honor and respect our Earth and we fail to honor and respect our women, we fail to honor and respect ourselves, and that's how we end up here."
The detention center is mandated by a federal consent decree to offer religious access, and through about 85 volunteers called the Heart Team religious life at the institution nearly reflects the community. About 300 boys are incarcerated at Adobe Mountain. Without volunteers, though, the program would be impossible, said the chaplain, the Rev. Keith Arnold, and it's often easier to find Catholic priests and evangelical preachers to lead services.
"It's been several years at Adobe since we've had a sweat lodge, and it's been many, many years since we've had one at Catalina in Tucson," said Arnold, a chaplain for 16 years to youths in detention. "We need to get our hearts set on helping these kids find out who they really are. I don't believe it's hocus-pocus. I believe there's power in that."
At least nine tribes are represented in the sweat lodge at Adobe. Bison, 46, is Cherokee, Choctaw, German and English, and lives on the Gila River Reservation. He is the president of Tempe-based Ani-Ko-S-Du, a Nonprofit networking group for Native Americans. Enrique, 17, knows only that his great- grandfather was half-Indian.
He first came to the sweat lodges and circle talks to learn something different, something that maybe would help. Now he believes, he said.
"It just raises me up more. It makes me feel better about everything, like being in here, about being alive, thanking God for everything that he's done. It's hard to explain," said the Phoenix youth, who stole a car.
The experiences have not turned them into model teenagers-but they're making a difference. Terry Green, a corrections officer, said the boys look forward to the circle talks and, in particular, the sweats. He has observed a positive effect.
"They talk about it all week," Green said. "Mealtime is really important to these guys, but they were ready to fast for this."
Dallas DeLowe, the former chief judge of the Gila River Indian Community, said spiritual teaching is beneficial for incarcerated youths but maybe more so for Native American youths who have lost touch with their culture.
"It's good that they do that, to make the effort to teach these kids," DeLowe said.
From The Arizona Republic (1/18/1997)