It is dark and hot. The silence is broken by the crackling of cedar against fired stones. Water is poured over the stones, and steam seeps out inside the sweat lodge.
A drum beat slowly builds, accompanied by the staccato rhythm of a Lakota spiritual as the Native American purification ritual begins."When we are here, we are relations, we are one family, we leave everything else outside," said Robert Dorin, a Lakota who leads weekly sweat lodge ceremonies at St. Mary's rehabilitation center, a halfway house for drug addicts and alcoholics.
The religious ceremony dates back centuries, but now it has a bureaucratic seal of approval from the Veterans Administration, which has agreed to provide it as a treatment for Native American veterans.
Dorin will conduct sweats for the Salt Lake City Veterans Affairs Medical Center's patients. The sweat lodge is a wood- framed dome covered with heavy blankets. Heated rocks placed in a pit in the middle of the floor provide the heat.
About one year after the Utah Intertribal Veterans Association made the request, the center has agreed to consider the sweat lodge ritual and other traditional native treatments for its patients, said Nancy Imhoff-Smith, spokeswoman for the medical center.
"We believe that a person's spirituality is a large part of their ability to achieve good health," Imhoff-Smith said. "This is an area we had not branched into."
Utah is following the lead of veterans hospitals in South Dakota and Minnesota that have been offering sweat lodges and other traditional practices for years, said Paul Sherbo, a spokesman for the Veterans Administration in the Rocky Mountain and Midwestern states.
"One of the reasons it's important for us to do this is that there are a lot of Native Americans veterans," Sherbo said. Native Americans are three times more likely to have served in the military than the general population, he said.
Dorin is not charging for the ritual, so the only cost to the veterans hospital will be driving patients across the city to St. Mary's.
Utah is home to at least 45 different Indian tribes, each with slightly different traditions. But the sweat lodge is common to all of them.
Getting the VA's approval for sweat lodges is a victory for the intertribal association because it brings official recognition to native religions, said Clifton Oppenhein, commander of the Utah Intertribal Veterans Association.
"The VA hospitals have long since had chaplains and people from various religions who go and meet with patients, yet it's been difficult to establish that a Native American healer represents a religion," Oppenhein said.
The VA is recognizing sweat lodges but is careful about the term "healers."
"I don't profess to be a healer or to have any special powers," said Dorin. "There's no magic, but a lot of people do seem to feel different when they come out of a sweat."
Utah Sen. Pete Suazo, D-Salt Lake City, is part Native American. He was among a group of six who attended a sweat lodge with Dorin in early November.
"The sweat lodge ceremony is as much about physical healing as it is emotional," said Dorin. "In our culture, you can't separate one from the other."
The sweat lodge tradition is generations away from modern medical practices. It is said to be one of seven sacred ceremonies Plains Indians believe was passed down to them by a spiritual messenger sent to help the Lakotas during a famine, according to Forrest Cuch, director of the Utah Division of Indian Affairs. Cuch, who also runs a sweat lodge, said it is not known where the tradition began but that it spread through out the High Plains into Utah, Colorado, Montana, the Dakotas and Canada.
"Providing the sweat lodge is an excellent gesture, and it represents an extremely high level of cultural awareness on the part of the veterans hospital administration," Cuch said. "And for us, it's a form of mental, spiritual and emotional healing."