Wilderness Quest & Vision Quest

Ceremonial rites of passage, with their challenges of solitude, fasting, and exposure to nature, help us to face our fears, affirm our inner strengths and capacities, and listen to our own souls. For over 45 years, Rites of Passage has provided these programs to bring people into a deep encounter with the natural world, to awaken, heal, and transform lives. The rite of passage begins with hearing the call to quest, an impulse as ancient as humanity: the path of the hero’s journey. This work speaks to anyone entering a life transition or change or wanting to deepen a spiritual path.

Rites of Passage was the first non-indigenous organization to offer vision quests to the general public, beginning in the 1970’s. Our guiding principle was to offer a pan-cultural ceremony that met a need for powerful and meaningful rites of passage for people in our contemporary world. We found that the vision quest helped people facing life crises or transitions, including career change, marriage, adulthood, death of a loved one, affirmation of gay or lesbian identity, elderhood, recovery from addiction, recovery from trauma, and more. It was also a kind of sacred adventure, allowing for self-discovery and renewal of what had become stale. Our clients, coming from diverse backgrounds, represented a spectrum of professions, ethnicity, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, and life experience. We were aided in this work by generous Native American teachers, who shared some important principles and teachings with us. The vision quest we offered, however, was not affiliated with or derived from any Native American ceremony.

European anthropologists used the term vision quest to describe certain ceremonies of indigenous communities of North and South America. These ceremonies, which served for thousands of years to mark significant changes in both individual and community life, were important in the social health of these communities. While each indigenous tribe would have its own unique ceremony, naming them all vision quests suggests certain common elements: solitude, time spent alone in nature, fasting, and seeking understanding or purpose through connection with both the visible and invisible worlds.

Over time, vision quest came to refer more generally to this kind of ceremony, found in some form on every continent.

Over the years, we continued to have contact with indigenous teachers. We were able, in the 1980’s, to deepen our understanding by attending the lodge of a Paiute elder. Then for fifteen years, beginning in the 1990’s, we had a friendship with Corbin Harney, the spiritual elder of the Western Shoshone nation. He would invite us to participate in his traditional sunrise ceremony with our groups, always welcoming and warm, especially with young people. In the 2000’s, a Mohawk Bear Clan Mother invited us to visit the her people in New York state. While there, we got to witness and support three young Mohawk men undertaking a vision quest. We were deeply touched by the way the whole community showed up to celebrate these young people when they returned, an experience that impacted our view of the importance of community in the practice of rites of passage.  None of these Native American allies expressed any problem with our calling our program a vision quest, even when asked directly.

Rites of Passage stopped using the term vision quest to describe our programs in February, 2019. We did this because over the past few years the term “vision quest” came to be associated more exclusively with Native American ceremonies. Continuing to use it would imply that we were in fact practicing a native tribal ceremony, and as such would inevitably result in cultural mis-appropriation, giving offense to those whose cultures are at risk, trivializing their struggles to maintain their traditions, and disregarding their own cultural understanding of the term. For these reasons, we decided to rename our core program from Vision Quest to Wilderness Quest. It’s still the same powerful program and still calls to people from diverse backgrounds, professions, locations, and ages. As the Wilderness Quest, it continues to change lives.