Apache Sunrise Ceremony

The Sunrise Ceremony, na'ii'ees, is the puberty ceremonial of the Western Apache, held for a girl after her first menstruation to mark her passage into womanhood under the sponsorship of the community and of White Painted Woman, the culture heroine and holy figure at the centre of Apache tradition, whom the girl is understood to embody for the ceremony's duration. It is a closed ceremony belonging to a living Apache religious tradition, led by the girl's godmother and by a medicine person versed in the songs and the extensive knowledge the rite requires, and its specific ritual content, songs and procedures are not published here or generalised for outside audiences, in keeping with Western Apache communities' own stated wish that the ceremony's substance remain theirs to teach and theirs to hold.

What can be said from the outside, drawn from published ethnography written with community cooperation, is the ceremony's shape and significance rather than its performance: it runs across several demanding days, involves the whole extended community in sponsorship and support, and is remembered by Apache people as one of the central surviving expressions of a religious and cultural identity that endured a long and documented history of forced removal, boarding schools and suppression of Indigenous religious practice in the United States.

The continuance of the Sunrise Ceremony is a matter of United States public law as well as of religious transmission, and that record, unlike the ceremony itself, is documented outside Apache communities. In 1883 the Department of the Interior issued rules for the Courts of Indian Offenses which made a punishable offence of a range of dances, feasts and ceremonial practices. Those courts operated across the reservation system for half a century. The rules placed Native ceremonial life outside the law during the same decades in which Apache children were being removed to boarding schools. Ceremonies continued where communities could sustain them, in reduced or private form.

The administrative prohibition ended in 1934, when the Commissioner of Indian Affairs circulated an instruction that no interference with Indian religious life or ceremonial expression would be tolerated. That was a reversal of policy rather than a grant of right, and statutory protection was a further four decades away. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 was the first federal statute to state a policy of protecting the free exercise of traditional Native religions, naming access to sites, the use of sacred objects and the freedom to worship through ceremonial rites.

The ceremony is held today on the Apache reservations, chiefly among the White Mountain, San Carlos and Mescalero communities, and it is spoken of there as something recovered rather than merely retained. It is costly for the sponsoring family, which feeds and houses a large gathering across several days. Attendance, photography and description are governed by the family and the medicine person, not by any general permission, which is the reason an account written from outside stops where this one does.

Sources Documents of United States Indian PolicyFrancis Paul Prucha (ed.) with American Indian Religious Freedom Act, Pub. L. 95-341, 92 Stat. 469United States Congress