Mystery Science Theater 3000, the TV show with movie-riffing puppets from the early 1990s, whose theme song began this way, became an important part of my life in 1992. I was an inmate at Washington Corrections Center in Shelton, Washington, and discovered the show while flipping through the channels on the tiny TV in my cell.

I was doing 22 months on forgery and drug possession charges and, as an Alaska Native member of the Tlingit tribe, I had joined the prison’s Native American spirituality circle. We called ourselves the Tribal Sons and met twice a week to drum and sing. Once a month, we went out to the sweat lodge on the prison property and held an Inipi purification ceremony.

I knew almost nothing about my Tlingit heritage and culture, but the brothers in the Tribal Sons didn’t mind. I was Native. That was enough. They would teach me their traditions until someday when I could learn the traditions of my own tribe.

The ceremonies and traditions we practiced were mainly from the Plains tribes, the Lakota, Ojibwe, and others. The most powerful of these traditions was the Inipi ceremony, commonly called the sweat lodge.

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