There are 7 sacred rites of the Lakota. The inipi (Lakota word) sweat lodge (in English) ceremony is one of the most sacred. I’m attaching a diagram of how the lodge is constructed. In normal times, the lodges are rebuilt in May or June in the prisons. It takes about 35 river willows to build one lodge. The willows need to be about 12 ft. tall and be very straight. They are called river willows because they grow along rivers or ponds. Since we have 3 lodges (one for each of our 3 prisons in Sioux Falls), it can take at least half a day to cut the willows. The first problem is in finding some to cut and getting permission from the property owner. Sometimes a tribe will allow us to cut some on their land, the City of Sioux Falls has allowed us to cut some, and the Burlington Northern Railroad has allowed us to cut some along their tracks. Private land owners have also given us permission. If you drive in the country in early spring before the trees have leafed out, you can spot the river willows because the leaf buds are red.

We try to get 6-8 people to help. One person cuts, 3 or 4 people drag them to the truck, and the remaining people get them trimmed. (I’m a dragger and trimmer.) Usually we have at least 3 non-inmates helping and try to get 3 or 4 inmates from the trusty unit to help. Including the driving time to get to the willow site, it takes 4-6 hours to cut and load the willows. We have to make arrangements with the prison in advance on when the willows can be brought in. On the Hill, they have to be dragged in through a double gate to the inside of the prison yard. I usually drag in the 35 willows and try to get passing officers to help me. Willows can only be brought in when there are no inmates in the yard since the gates need to be opened, one at a time. The lodge is fairly close to the gates. Usually we leave the willows on the lawn outside the prison in the afternoon and drag them in about 6:30 or 7 in the morning on the Hill. At Jameson, we leave them outside the prison in a grassy area and a prison employee uses a Bobcat to take them in. For the trusty unit, we can usually get permission to drive near their lodge area to unload them.

All the men want to be part of building a new lodge, but the list needs to be limited to 8 or so. They don’t all agree on how it should be constructed. A post hole auger is used to dig holes for the willows. The holes need to be at about a 45 degree angle since the tops of the willows need to be bent (without breaking them) to be tied to another willow on the other side of the circle. If the holes aren’t slanted, the willows will pop out of them. For the men, the day the new lodge is built is like Christmas, the 4th of July, and Thanksgiving rolled into one. Of the men selected to build it, there need to be some experienced men who get along with each other well enough to work together and one or two who are learners. I am usually in the yard with them during the construction process since I am responsible for the post hole auger and the larger scissors they use to cut cloth or string to tie the lodge together.

You can’t go to a lumberyard and get willows to build a lodge. Our lodges are larger than the ones used on the reservations since we have so many men who want to take part in the inipi ceremonies. We limit the number of men at a ceremony to 30 for safety reasons so we need to have 3 inipi ceremonies a week on the Hill, 2 at Jameson and 1 at the trustee unit to accommodate everyone so they attend once a week.

The point of my long essay on building sweat lodges is that it takes one heck of a lot of work for outsiders (not inmates) to get the materials needed! I’ve been part of the outsider work crew for most of 20 years.

One year I was returning 4 inmates back to the trusty unit and drove past a school. There was a loud voice from the back seat saying I was in a forbidden zone. One of the inmates started talking to his ankle saying we were just driving past a school. I didn’t know I had a sex offender in the back seat wearing an ankle monitor! After that I made sure I didn’t drive past schools when transporting inmates.

Mary Montoya