SECTION: NATIONAL; Pg. A12
LENGTH: 1385 words
HEADLINE: PAIR OFFERING INDIAN RITES -- FOR A PRICE;
TRIBES RESENT 'EXPLOITATION'
BYLINE: By KAREN LINCOLN MICHEL Dallas Morning News
DATELINE: February 2, 1994, TIOGA, TEXAS
Each Saturday, Darrel Hallbick asks the Stone People to release ancient American Indian teachings through steam rising from heated rocks splashed with water.
Perspiration drips from his body as mist from the holy water and heated rocks turns the ceremonial lodge of willow and tarpaulin into a sauna for spiritual cleansing. Sitting in total darkness with his followers, the 45-year-old white man tries to summon spirits through American Indian song and prayer.
The former United Methodist minister and psychotherapist said he can't put a price on the spiritual healing he shares through his rendition of a sweat lodge ceremony, an American Indian purification rite.
But he and his partner, Jenny Kays, advertise a $20 admission fee for those who come to Healing Springs Ranch in northeast Denton County to experience the ceremony.
Non-Indians using American Indian culture for profit have become a national trend in recent years. Everything from medicine pouches to sacred rituals are sold, some advertised in the back pages of New Age magazines, newsletters and directories.
It's a trend that many American Indians consider sacrilegious.
Members of many tribes believe that age-old ceremonies are not to be tampered with or taken lightly. If abused, many American Indians believe, the Creator will find a way to punish the abuser.
"Quite truthfully, I struggle because I'm not Native American," Hallbick said, adding that his respect for American Indian culture is honorable.
"I understand there's a lot of anger out there about white people leading ceremonies," he said. "But all I can worry about is our own intent."
Clyde Bellecourt, co-founder of the American Indian Movement and director of the Peacemakers Center in Minneapolis, said "hundreds of thousands" of non-Indians across the United States exploit native culture by selling what they know about traditional beliefs and ceremonies.
He calls them "shake-'n'-bake medicine people." In just a few easy steps, he said, something ordinary becomes something new.
"I don't care if he was charging 5 cents a person. He's still exploiting Indians, and he's wrong," Bellecourt said.
He said true medicine people accept only tobacco and food as payment. Tobacco is used as part of the prayer offering. The food is prepared for a meal that follows the sweat ceremony.
"Once you charge people, you lose your power," Bellecourt said.
Hallbick said the $20 charge is for the counseling he gives people who come to the ceremony. And because he has given up his psychotherapy practice, the sweat lodge is his only source of income.
"It takes a lot to keep up these grounds," he said, referring to the piece of land that the owners of Healing Springs Ranch have let him use free of charge.
Hallbick said he has grown used to criticism and threats since he started teaching others about American Indian ceremonies.
He said it has become routine to play back his telephone answering machine and hear an anonymous death threat.
"I've been given about as much as you can take, short of a bullet," he said.
But he continues with his weekly ceremonies, he said, "because I was taught to share."
What he shares, he said, is a chance for others to purify their souls in an early-afternoon-to-dusk ceremony.
Participants wear light clothing, such as T-shirts and shorts, or a swimsuit. Requests to leave the lodge and return are honored if a person becomes too hot. Drinking water is allowed in the lodge.
Hallbick said the ceremony consists of four rounds of singing and prayer. During the first round, he calls to American Indian spirits.
In the second round, he prays to let go of fear and other anxieties. In the third, participants are asked to pray for themselves and others. The fourth round is designated for prayers of gratitude.
Everywhere, there are symbols in the colors, the directional poles outside the lodge, the instruments used in the ceremony.
"The lodge is the womb of Grandmother Earth," Hallbick said. "You enter, you die, and you emerge reborn."
Growing up in western Kansas, Hallbick knew little about Indian culture. His family farmed near Indian burial mounds, and occasionally he'd come across such relics as arrowheads and hide scrapers.
He said he didn't know it back then, but Indian spirits were watching over him. He believes they eventually led him to the belief he calls "the braided way," a compilation of sweat lodge ceremonies he has experienced among various tribes, including the Lakota, Apache and Seneca.
Two decades would pass between his days as a farmhand and his first encounter with Indian spirituality. During those years, he earned three college degrees and became a United Methodist minister in the 1970s, in charge of his own church for three years in Meriden, Kan.
It wasn't until he moved to Texas eight years ago that Hallbick re-examined his beliefs. A therapist friend, Ross Banister, who is also white, introduced him to the sweat lodge at a ceremony in Oklahoma.
"I felt a real connection with spirit," Hallbick said. "What I knew of spirituality before, it was all just head stuff. Nothing experienced."
In a way, Hallbick said, he never really knew himself until he worshiped the Creator as American Indians have done for countless generations through the sweat lodge.
"People are so different when they come out of the sweat lodge. No matter who you are, whether you have a successful career or you're just an ordinary person, what we're really after is who we are," he said. "Where do we come from and why are we here."
Since his first ceremony, Hallbick has learned about the sweat lodge and pipe traditions from teachers around the country, and said he has gone twice on a vision quest - generally a four-day ceremony in which participants fast for spiritual guidance. Attempts to find his teachers were unsuccessful.
Bellecourt said that in his Ojibwa culture, only people of a certain clan can become medicine people.
"I can study all I want, and I could never become a medicine man or healer," he said.
"Now with this whole New Age movement, white people come to our ceremonies, they blink their eyes and they had a vision. The next thing you know, they're leading a sweat lodge," he said.
The late morning sun touched the center of the sky one recent day as Hallbick and Kays blessed themselves with smoke gently lifting from burning sage. They called it "smudging," a form of spiritual purification.
The couple sat in front of a lodge Hallbick built in August on the grounds of Healing Springs Ranch, about 25 miles northeast of Denton, Texas. Long ago, he said, the area's mineral springs were a gathering place for American Indians.
Hallbick said it is an ideal spot to practice the braided way ceremony. He said he uses the simplest, yet most powerful, parts of the ceremonies to help others heal themselves spiritually.
"There really are no pure traditions any more, anyway," he said.
His practice is troubling to Greg Gomez, a Mescalero Apache from suburban Mesquite, Texas, whose people believe in the sweat lodge.
Gomez, who practices the sun dance and sweat lodge traditions, said American Indians in the Dallas-Fort Worth area are angry that Hallbick has not only taken something that is sacred to them, but changed it to suit his needs.
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I don't think it's right for any individual to set themselves up as having the right to conduct ceremonies that the Creator has given to only a chosen few medicine people, healers, interpreters or spiritual leaders," Gomez said.
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"The feeling in the Indian community is that if he continues to do that, he may cause damage to himself, physically and spiritually," he said.
"I don't want to condemn or throw rocks," Gomez said. "But I think we should hold him accountable to our sacred traditions."
Kays disagrees. She said the couple is earnest about practicing Indian tradition.
"We do not devalue the ceremony at all," she said. "I see more Native Americans devaluing it."
Hallbick met Kays during his second vision quest four years ago near Ruidoso, N.M. It was her first ceremony.
"After my first time, I said, 'This is it,' " Kays said. "It's like I had been on a journey my whole life, and I finally found what I was looking for."
Copyright 1994 The Times-Picayune Publishing Co.
Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA)
January 30, 1994 Sunday, FIRST
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