The Deer Tribe Is A Cult
Chapter 61 of Neophyte: My Life In A Sex Cult
This is a chapter within my memoir, Neophyte, about my time in a harmful cult called the Deer Tribe Metis Medicine Society. It is not meant to be read as a stand-alone post. To view all book chapters, click here.
The Deer Tribe is a dangerous cult. While they present themselves as a spiritual community offering healing and empowerment, their practices are rooted in manipulation, control, and cultural appropriation. Like many cults, they offer moments of genuine connection and personal insight — but these are strategically used to gain trust and draw people deeper into a harmful system. Readers are encouraged to read the entire book before forming opinions about the Deer Tribe.
Chapter 61
The Deer Tribe is a cult.
I didn’t know what to do with this realization. It was earth-shattering. When I left the Path eight months earlier, it had been because of Necea and my shame, but I still believed in everything the Deer Tribe had taught me. Now, I faced the hard truth that some—maybe most, or even all—of what I had learned over the past decade had been manipulated or completely fabricated. My heart was breaking all over again.
I spent a lot of time in a daze, foggy-minded and exhausted. Sometimes, the memories were so overwhelming that all I could do was lie on the couch for hours as they played on repeat in my mind. The only real comfort came from talking with June and Naomi. In the days and weeks that followed, we talked almost daily, piecing together how the Deer Tribe had warped our minds and influenced every part of our lives, big and small.
For a while, fear kept me from fully opening up to Matthew, a painful realization that only deepened my heartache. Why was I afraid to talk to my husband? Quodoushka hadn’t helped us, I thought bitterly. It hadn’t strengthened our bond or healed my sexual trauma. Instead, Quodoushka, along with the entire Deer Tribe dynamic, had profoundly damaged our relationship. With growing horror, I began to recognize all the ways the Deer Tribe had undermined our marriage. Decisions that should have been ours alone were continually influenced by Silver, Necea, or whichever Deer Tribe teacher was acting as our “mentor” at the time.
The most tragic of these decisions was the abortion of our unborn child several years earlier. Silver and Mukee Okan had advised us that having a baby would stall our spiritual growth. They assured us that a ceremony could be performed to allow the soul of our child to return to us at a later time. Necea had designed the ceremony. With deep sadness and guilt, I realized that I had sacrificed our child for a lie. The grief over this loss would haunt me for years.
To move forward and heal, I knew Matthew and I needed to be on the same page. I slowly began to open up, sharing what I was discovering. To my relief, he listened with an open mind and even agreed with me about the sinister and unethical actions of the Deer Tribe leadership. These were people he had once admired and respected. While I had formally ended my apprenticeship, he ghosted his apprentice guide. And while I was falling apart emotionally, he carried on, getting up every day and going to work to provide for us.
But there were moments when I had doubts. Was the Deer Tribe really a cult? I had been a willing, consensual participant. Nobody had physically forced me to do anything. I hadn’t been “brainwashed” to believe…had I?
In my search for answers, I dove deeply into cult research. I read books, listened to podcasts, and watched documentaries. The more I learned, the more I realized that the Deer Tribe checked every box for mind control: sleep deprivation, fasting, peak experiences, personal confessions, behavior control, information control, and emotional control. The list went on and on.
The Deer Tribe’s Covert Indoctrination Tactics
Reading Steven Hassan’s Combatting Cult Mind Control was eye-opening. I learned that most cults do not use physical abuse, torture, or overt control. Instead, they rely on “hypnotic processes” and “group dynamics,” such as group singing, meditation, breathing exercises, and dancing. These activities are extremely effective at lowering inhibitions. They shut down the analytical mind and put people in an open, receptive state. Once this state is achieved, the cult leader or teacher can easily implant whatever information or belief systems they choose with minimal resistance from the victim.
These indoctrination processes are carried out by people the victim considers friends, peers, and trusted authority figures. In other words, the cult recruit’s guard is down. They willingly comply with the indoctrination tactics, sincerely believing they are making free choices. They adopt the cult’s beliefs, language, practices, and mannerisms, believing them to be worthwhile and positive. They don’t realize they are being groomed into a new personality. They don’t realize they are undergoing a subtle, drawn-out indoctrination process.
This happened inside Quodoushka. The teachings were always delivered after prolonged dancing or other intense forms of catharsis. During my neophyte training, Walter LeVay, a hypnotist, openly admitted that he intentionally used hypnotic language patterns to reach participants’ subconscious minds. “We need to present information in a way that they will accept, not reject,” he explained to me on one occasion. I never questioned this; in fact, I thought it was brilliant. I believed, because I was constantly told, that the Quodoushka teachings were epic, healing, and destined to change the world. It never once occurred to me that what we were doing was highly unethical. Even worse, the participants were never informed they were being hypnotized. With sadness, I realized that we had stripped them of what should be a basic human right: the freedom to choose their beliefs without undue influence.
My heart felt heavy with guilt. I was a victim, true, but then I became complicit when I used these same processes on others. I didn’t know what else to do except continue reaching out to everyone I could think of, warning them about the nefarious nature of Quodoushka, and apologize for recruiting them.
Information Control
Information control was another way the Deer Tribe captured victims. Steven Hassan explained that information control includes withholding information, distorting facts, and outright lying. With information control, there is no full disclosure, no informed consent. Again, Quodoushka was a perfect example. I had never seen a Q instructor fully disclose the sexually explicit nature of these workshops when recruiting participants. Instead, they relied on loaded language, like “breathing exercises,” “healing exercises,” “dancing,” and “yoga.” Indeed, I was outright lied to by Mukee, who told me there were no sexual exercises inside a Q1.
The Q3 workshop I attended culminated in full sexual intercourse without any privacy. Participants were placed together in one room while the panel of teachers watched. Participants had not been informed about this ceremony during enrollment. At least I wasn’t, and many others I spoke with told me they also didn’t know this bizarre, public sex orgy would be happening. While I suppose anyone could have theoretically opted out, the peer pressure and momentum of Quodoushka workshops have a way of sweeping everything along.
Group Will Over Individual Will
And therein, I realized, was the problem. The will of the group always superseded an individual’s will. Of course, the Deer Tribe never presented it that way. They were very clever at disguising these sinister practices behind talk of “individuality,” “freedom,” and “autonomy.” We were told their practices, methods, and teachings were healing us, strengthening our inner voice, increasing our energy, boosting our confidence, and expanding our personal power. In reality, the opposite was happening. We were being trained to ignore our instincts, submit to authority, and model the leadership. It was a highly sophisticated form of doublespeak.
I recalled my first Quodoushka workshop. It was the neophytes and instructors who first appeared naked, setting the standard for us to follow. The instructors would often show up nude without warning, grinding their near-naked bodies against participants during the dancing portions. In any other setting, such as between a therapist and client or a professor and student, behavior like this would be a glaring red flag and grounds for termination. Perhaps even a lawsuit. But at Quodoushka, the instructors blatantly ignore and capitalize on the power imbalance.
There was never open freedom to change partners for freedancers, nor were there teachings on consent or safety. Participants weren’t told how to say no or what recourse they had if they felt unsafe. The atmosphere created a sense that everyone is doing it, so I should too, or else risk feeling like I’m a prude, something is wrong with me, or I’m being resistant.
No Full Disclosure (And Therefore, No Informed Consent)
One day, I opened my email to find a message from Sarah Stephens, a woman I knew vaguely from SunDance. She was in her early seventies and had been on the Path for nearly 40 years.
“Hi, I’ve been quietly watching your Facebook posts,” she wrote. “I admire your strength! I am also leaving the Path for my own reasons. Incest is tough. I experienced it from my uncle as a child. I was never keen on attending the Qs. I only did it because it was required to get into the upper gateways. I didn’t know this when I started on the Path, and in hindsight, I wish I had been informed about this requirement because I might have rethought my decision to apprentice at all. There were some fun times, but it was a big investment.”
It was difficult to gauge Sarah’s feelings since we were communicating through text alone. But I wondered if she grasped the seriousness of what she had just revealed. Apprentices are not told they will someday have to attend a Q3 and Q4 to continue their gateway work. It’s a classic cult tactic: gradually revealing requirements only after someone is already deeply invested, making it harder for them to leave.
Dangerous Practices
Quodoushka wasn’t the only problem, I realized with growing horror. While a lot of the Deer Tribe’s ceremonies were probably innocent and benign, many were dangerous. Some were specifically designed to break people. The Walk Talk ceremony I participated in during Red Lodge Year 3 stood out as one of them.
There were only three of us in Year 3, Olivia, Rick, and I, so third and fourth gateway apprentices from the community were invited to join in. They formed a large circle as Olivia, Rick, and I each took a turn sitting in the middle. Prior to the ceremony, we had to submit an extremely personal questionnaire, where we described every trauma, sexual hang-up, fetish, block, wound, darkest mistake, and deepest personality flaw. While we sat in the middle of the circle (completely naked, by the way), the dance chief reflected all of this personal information back to us. Then, two community members, called the “Walk Talkers,” took us by the arms and dragged us around the circle, whispering insults in our ears while the circle members loudly discussed everything they had just heard about us. It was profoundly weird, disorienting, and uncomfortable.
I had recently completed my healing ceremony and felt untouchable, probably because I had just undergone something similar. But Olivia, my beautiful, honest, caring friend from Denton, whom I had known and loved for years, was completely shattered. I watched her face throughout the ceremony and could see that she was being obliterated. She was never the same after that. She became obedient and submissive to her apprentice guide and pipe teacher. She lost her ability to formulate her own opinions. “I can’t know how I feel about that until I talk to Catrina,” she had told me more than once, most recently a few weeks ago when I reached out to her in exasperation about the Deer Tribe’s actions.
Reindoctrination Sessions
What happened to Oliva was not empowerment or healing. That is an example of toxic codependency. But the Deer Tribe feeds off of this. After all, if people truly healed, they wouldn’t need to pay for more ceremonies and workshops.
“People are tragically made to feel much more broken or wounded than they truly are,” Naomi said in one of our conversations. “They are kept in a disempowered state, always needing the next ceremony, the next teaching, the next experience.”
That described me perfectly. For years, I had been miserable while telling myself I was miraculously lucky to have discovered the Deer Tribe. I became addicted to the ceremonies, always counting the days until the next sweat lodge, workshop, or SunDance. I needed my ceremonial “fix” just to function as an adult. I longed for ceremony and had even killed my precious baby growing in my womb, because that would have been a barrier to my “spiritual growth.” But always, once the medicine wore off, I was right back where I started: miserable and hating my normal life.
And why was I so desperate to be in ceremony all the time? Honestly, they weren’t that enjoyable. SunDance was grueling and hot, and fasting made me ill. Gateway ceremonies also required us to fast, and I usually spent the 24 or 48 hours battling nausea and migraines. The teaching portions of Quodoushka were abstract and boring. I recalled numerous times my mind had drifted while Necea rambled on (boredom, I learned, was another way to lower critical defenses in an individual and implant new beliefs). But despite their challenges, each of these ceremonies included peak experiences that provided me with a giant shot of euphoria. They sucked me in and kept me coming back.
Steven Hassan described these types of experiences as “reindoctrination sessions,” a key to keeping a cult victim entangled for years. Cults don’t want their members going too long without one of these sessions, so they place tremendous pressure on them to stay active. When we do, we are seen as a good girl or boy. When we don’t, we are criticized and belittled.
Behavior Modification
Behavioral modification was another method used to keep us under the Deer Tribe’s influence. We were given new names (our “medicine” names) to trigger our cult personality. We learned the Deer Tribe’s language, called “Deer Speak,” and new definitions for common words. Bad emotions, for example, were reframed as “Blocks to Maturity,” and we were encouraged to overcome them. If we didn’t, we were belittled or accused of being in “pity” or “personality and events,” which was the Deer Tribe’s way of convincing us that we were being overdramatic, resistant to growth, or caught up in things that didn’t matter.
Slowly, the Deer Tribe consumed nearly every moment of my life as I adopted all their daily, spiritual, “orende-boosting” practices. These practices, I learned, were thought-stopping techniques, designed to keep me loyal to the cult. Anytime I had doubts or questioned my purpose, I would “clear” it through chanting, a warrior technique, a pipe ceremony, or a mantra. The key was to keep us so busy and consumed, so invested in the Deer Tribe’s activities, that we never had the time or energy to stop and contemplate what it was costing us.
I became so busy with their workshops, ceremonies, and personal practices that I had little time for friends outside the Deer Tribe. I didn’t have hobbies, I didn’t take vacations, and I didn’t try new things. Matthew and I never even had a honeymoon.
Over time, I began to see the world differently, finding significant meaning in the mundane. Numbers, animals, heck, even cloud shades could all be interpreted as a “medicine sign” that would shape my decisions!
My conversations with Deer Tribe members were much different from my conversations with work colleagues or non-Deer Tribe friends, and sometimes they took a disturbing turn. The Deer Tribe had an elitist mentality. Though it was rarely outright said, those not on the Path were seen as “lower-vibrational” beings. Some teachers even referred to outsiders as “muggles.”
Of course, I never once suspected that I was being indoctrinated. I believed I was part of a special group, one that would change the world. But now that I was out and learning about cults, I realized that everything about the Deer Tribe was deeply dysfunctional.
The Hierarchy
The power imbalance was undeniable. Leaders were always deemed more “evolved” because of their higher status in the Deer Tribe. When a leader gave a “reflection,” it was always framed as essential for our “spiritual growth,” but now I saw it for what it truly was: a prolonged and intricate grooming process.
I remembered something Silver often told us: “Everything works if you do.” That phrase had kept me chasing practices, even when they weren’t working, even when they were harming me. It was never the ceremony, never the teacher, never the teaching.
The problem, I was made to believe, was always me.
Go to Chapter 62.
,