Early one morning in November 2009, Lance Morris waited at the Rainbow Bridge. The Assiniboine tribal member, who was married to a Yavapai-Apache woman and lived on the reservation nearby, had some papers to deliver to the owners of Angel Valley in Sedona.

 

Angel Valley owners Michael and Amayra Hamilton had closed the retreat center and locked the entrance gate at the bridge in an attempt to keep out the peering eyes of the media. They had also filed for bankruptcy as they waited for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office to complete its investigation. The Hamiltons were cooperating with police and were told by investigators that they were not a target of the homicide case. But the widely publicized deaths that happened on their property were not good for business, nor was the media coverage questioning the retreat center’s New Age focus on angels, channeling spirits, and appropriation of Indigenous ceremonies.

 

As a longtime AIM member, Lance was well versed in covert tactics to get into places that were trying to keep him out. He pulled over to the side of the road near the gate and waited patiently. Eventually a delivery truck arrived. The gate opened and Lance slipped in behind the large vehicle.

 

Lance drove across the bridge and past large circular stone labyrinths that were used for walking meditations and communicating with mystical entities. He skirted around the patch of barren red dirt next to the creek where the sweat lodge had stood a month earlier. After investigators had extracted everything they needed from the site for toxicology testing, the Hamiltons dismantled the lodge to get rid of the dark energy inside.

 

Parking in front of a building marked “office,” Lance gathered his papers and walked inside to find a large sun-filled room with white carpet, white furniture, and a full-size harp in the corner.

Amayra Hamilton was sitting at her desk near the door sipping coffee. She had short white hair and was dressed in white.

 

Amayra was visibly taken aback by Lance’s surprise visit. Lance wore a traditional black skull cap on his head and had a large, imposing presence. He introduced himself and set the papers on her desk, waiting for her to review the first page.

 

The documents stated that Angel Valley, along with James Arthur Ray and the United States government, were defendants in a suit brought by a group of Native Americans for violation of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. The plaintiffs also accused Angel Valley and Ray of violating the 1990 Indian Arts and Crafts Act with their imitation sweat lodge ceremony.

 

“She nearly spit out her coffee when she read the papers,” Lance later recalled. “She wasn’t expecting a real Indian to suddenly show up in her office.”

 

The legal action was orchestrated by Oglala Lakota spiritual leader Floyd Looks for Buffalo Hand, great-great grandson of Chief Red Cloud. Like his famous ancestor, Hand believed in using an enemy’s own weapons against them. In this case, it was American law and the US Constitution.

 

The complaint filed in the US District Court of Arizona by Floyd and his adopted grandson, Ivan Lewis, a member of the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, alleged that the defendants had violated Article I of the Fort Laramie treaty, which was known as the “bad men” clause.

 

The clause states: “If bad men among the whites, or among other people subject to the authority of the United States, shall commit any wrong upon the person or property of the Indians, the United States will, upon proof made to the agent, and forwarded to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs at Washington city, proceed at once to cause the offender to be arrested and punished according to the laws of the United States, and also reimburse the injured person for the loss sustained.”

 

The petition by Floyd and Ivan argued that Ray’s so-called sweat lodge ceremony harmed the Lakota people by desecrating the Inikaga ritual, “one of the seven sacred rites brought to the Lakota by the White Buffalo Calf Woman.” The lawsuit also alleged that Ray and Angel Valley committed fraud by “impersonating Native Americans.” The plaintiffs did not seek financial reparations but requested that the Treaty of Fort Laramie be followed. This meant Ray and the owners of Angel Valley had to be “held accountable and prosecuted by the laws of the United States of America so that the Lakota Nation may live in peace.”

 

The Fort Laramie Treaty was signed in 1868 shortly after the Lakota people won a major victory against the United States in what was called Red Cloud’s War. Negotiating from a position of strength, Plains tribes insisted that they retain a large swath of their homeland as well as receive guarantees from the United States for reservation-based schools, health- care, housing, and food annuities. The fact that the treaty started with the “bad men” clause reflected the extent to which the Lakota leaders and the rest of the Sioux nation did not trust European settlers.

 

America’s first inhabitants generally lived according to communal values and respect for the earth, so what they witnessed with the white man’s greed—poisoning streams as they prospected for gold and killing bison for their hides while leaving the carcass to rot—seemed outrageous. The Lakota came up with a special slur for these invaders: “wasi’chu,” fat taker.

 

As far as Floyd was concerned, not much had changed about Euro- pean settlers over the past 141 years since the treaty was signed. “Ray is a spiritual vampire who will use whatever means necessary to turn a profit,” Hand said in a November 25, 2009, Rapid City Journal story about the lawsuit. “We maintain our cultural identity today and people like Ray are trying to mock it as a means to acquire material possessions.”

 

The complaint emphasized Article VI of the US Constitution, which states that all treaties made by the United States are binding and the “supreme law of the land.” It also noted a federal precedent set earlier that year in April 2009 that upheld the Fort Laramie Treaty as well as the “bad men” clause. A young Lakota woman named Lavetta Elk was sexually assaulted on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation by a white US Army recruiter. Elk sued the United States under the “bad men” clause, and the federal government paid her $590,000 in monetary relief for the treaty violation.

 

However, unlike the late nineteenth century when the Fort Laramie Treaty was signed, Native American sovereignty issues were not on the radar of the average citizen in the United States in 2009. More than 80 percent of Americans lived in urban areas where Native reservations were tiny or non-existent. And while plenty of Native Americans also lived in these urban areas, they were a small percentage of the total population and did not fit the teepee-dwelling stereotypes that many non-Natives still associated with the country’s first inhabitants.

 

According to the 2010 census, there were 2.9 million people in the United States who identified as American Indian or Alaska native. This was up from the low point of less than 238,000 people a century earlier after decades of disease brought by colonizers along with government-sanctioned genocidal campaigns and land theft. Native people managed to increase populations and preserve their cultures during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries despite continued assimilation policies, most notably boarding schools. Meanwhile, even in the early 2000s, the only contact the average urban-dwelling white American had with Indigenous culture was through contrived Hollywood stereotypes, such as the Disney blockbuster Pocahontas or Dances with Wolves. Now, television news was awash in stories about a Native American sweat lodge.

 

The tragedy in Sedona thrust the Lakota fight for sovereignty back into the headlines in a way that had not happened since the Wounded Knee standoff in 1973. Most tribal government leaders stayed quiet but AIM members—some of whom had been at Wounded Knee—were eager to speak up. They wanted to express their sadness over the deaths of Kirby, James, and Liz but also teach the public about the danger of plastic shamans and demand that all Americans respect Indigenous spiritual practices.

 

“These New Agers have been selling our Native ceremonies for years here on our homeland,” Ivan told an Arizona journalist when asked about the lawsuit. “The non-Natives are taking everything from us. Ray and the Angel Valley folks are a dime a dozen in Yavapai territory. My hope is that this lawsuit will put light on our treaties with the US and will show the people of Arizona that we have sovereign rights.”

 

News of Floyd and Ivan’s lawsuit quickly traveled across Native reservations via Facebook. Just three years after it became available to the public, the social media platform counted one hundred million users worldwide in 2009 and was embraced as an essential means of communication among Native Americans living in remote places. It also linked tribal members residing in cities with their relatives on the reservation. Native Americans created private Facebook groups, including one for Arizona’s AIM chapter, where they discussed what the next steps should be in protesting Ray and other plastic shamans.

 

One thing all of Indian Country agreed on was that non-Natives needed to stop calling the atrocity at Angel Valley a sweat lodge. Floyd’s attorney on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation sent the Yavapai County Sheriff a letter that amounted to a cease-and-desist request regarding the use of “sweat lodge” in relation to the investigation.

 

The sheriff’s office was happy to comply but what should they call it instead, the detectives wondered. After a brief discussion they came up with a more precise description: a heat endurance event.