Excerpt from Sacred Instructions

Posted by North Atlantic Books – October 10, 2025

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Categories: Excerpt Indigenous Cultures & Anthropology New Release Spirituality & Religion

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Excerpt from Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change.

Ritual and Ceremony

Reclaiming our ceremonies and rituals is an important part of decolonizing our minds.

The disruption of ceremonial and ritual practices is another primary tool of oppression. Ritual has an impact on people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. A disruption in customary ritual can have wide-reaching impacts, changing social expectations and community behavior, and diminishing the sense of hope held by the people. In order to get an idea of how profound the impacts of ritual can be, think about the many rituals performed by athletes and sports fans. The belief that the disruption of one person’s ritual has the ability to impact the performance of the entire team is commonplace. Athletes that can’t find their lucky socks enter the sports arena with a sense of dread. The practice of ritual to these players is directly connected to their belief in their ability to succeed.

The same is true for people with solid daily rituals, such as waking at a certain hour and in a certain way, practicing meditation or yoga, showering, drinking their first cup of coffee, or other forms of morning routines. If their routine is disrupted, they feel that their whole day is off balance. Now, imagine deeper cultural rituals that are tied to the well-being of the community, or spiritual ceremonies that are designed for protection or healing, and you will begin to understand how destructive the interruption of ritual practice can be. Our connection to ritual frames the order in our lives. Disrupting that order creates feelings of uncertainty and instability.

Rituals provide certainty and comfort, and a sense of connection to something larger than one’s self. They are used to alleviate pain and facilitate healing. The rituals that we celebrate around death are a clear example. Death rituals provide structure and order during a time of immense grief. They provide us with a shared experience of expressing our emotions. And they help us face the reality of the death, and for many, confirm the promise of an afterlife.

The engagement in ritual provides individuals and the community with a sense of control over the conditions of their lives. When this process is disrupted, it furthers feelings of hopelessness and despair, and makes the loss of control feel more complete. This is why the colonizers purposely disrupted the ritual practices of those it sought to conquer. In the United States, this was done by outlawing Native ceremonies and languages. In 1884, Native American ceremonial practices were outlawed in this country. Native people were killed and imprisoned for practicing their rituals and ceremonies or speaking their languages. Native people who were taken into custody or placed in boarding schools were also forced to cut their hair. This is important because the hair is seen as a symbol of strength and an extension of spiritual wisdom for many tribal peoples. In fact, many tribes only cut their hair when a loved one has died. The cut hair is offered to the person that has died as both an expression of grief and an offering of strength. It is offered to help support their loved one’s journey to the other side. Forcing tribal people to cut their hair was a way to induce grief and to separate the people from a symbol of their strength. Face paint, ceremonial attire, social dances, and community feasts were also outlawed.

In 1890, more than three hundred men, women, and children from the Lakota Sioux tribe were massacred by U.S. military troops at Wounded Knee for engaging in the Ghost Dance ceremony. All of these attacks broke down morale, disrupted community connections, and sought to shatter the hearts of the people. The laws against Native American religious ceremonies and languages remained in place until 1978. Today, tribal beliefs and rituals may not be outlawed, but they are still largely trivialized, appropriated, and disrespected by the larger society. And, they are still met with violence, as was seen at Standing Rock, where peaceful, prayerful people were attacked with dogs, water cannons, tear gas, concussion grenades, and batons. The response that the police and military forces had to the prayerful water protectors is a reflection of colonization’s lasting impact on the minds of those in the larger society. Though the laws may change, the hearts and the minds of the people will remain poisoned until they wake up to the influence that this history has had on them.

Reclaiming our ceremonies and rituals is an important part of decolonizing our minds. To do so, we must take an honest inventory of the rituals that we perform, and search for the influence of the colonizer within them. Do our rituals contain hierarchies? Do they encourage the exertion of control over others? Reclaiming old rituals or creating new ones allows us to find balance within our communities and societies, and it allows us to realign our way of being with the values that we hold most dear.

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Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change

A “profound and inspiring” collection of ancient indigenous wisdom for “anyone wanting the healing of self, society, and of our shared planet” (Peter Levine, author of Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma).

Drawing from ancestral knowledge, as well as her experience as an attorney and activist, Sherri Mitchell addresses some of the most crucial issues of our day—including indigenous land rights, environmental justice, and our collective human survival. Sharing the gifts she has received from the elders of her tribe, the Penobscot Nation, she asks us to look deeply into the illusions we have labeled as truth and which separate us from our higher mind and from one another.

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