The code was revised in 1892 and the prohibitions were sharpened rather than softened, with graduated penalties running to thirty days' imprisonment for a first offence. It was enforced with varying energy across agencies for half a century, and its practical effect was to make open ceremony a matter of an agent's tolerance.
The nations did not comply and did not simply defy. Ceremonies moved. Some were held in remote places or at times when the agency was not watching. Some were relabelled as Fourth of July celebrations, which the agents encouraged, so that a permitted patriotic gathering carried a prohibited ceremony inside it. Some elements were separated out and continued alone. Where a ceremony required a specific season, a specific site or a specific number of participants, the interruption did real damage, and several were reconstructed later from the memory of people who had seen them as children.
The change came from inside the same department. John Collier became Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1933 and issued Circular 2970 in January 1934, on Indian religious freedom and Indian culture, directing that no interference with Indian religious life or ceremonial expression would thereafter be tolerated and that the cultural liberty of Indians was in all respects to be considered equal to that of any other population. The Indian Reorganization Act followed in June.
The Courts of Indian Offenses still exist under federal regulation. What was removed was the list of ceremonies.