Vision Quest

"Vision quest" is an anthropological and ethnographic term, not a phrase originating from a single Indigenous nation. Scholars have used it to describe rites, documented among a number of North American Indigenous peoples, in which an individual — often at a life transition — undertakes isolation, fasting, and prayer in a natural setting in search of guidance or a vision. Specific forms, purposes, and terminology vary substantially by nation and are not interchangeable.

Where these practices exist, their specific protocols, songs, and meanings are held and transmitted within particular communities, often under the guidance of an elder or spiritual leader, and are frequently not intended for outside publication. This page deliberately does not reproduce ceremonial specifics for that reason: a general reference note is not the same thing as a source with standing to describe a living, community-held practice.

From the 1970s onward, non-Indigenous wilderness-therapy programs and New Age retreats adopted the phrase "vision quest" for secular solo-in-nature experiences unconnected to any specific nation's practice or permission. Indigenous scholars and anthropologists have criticized this borrowing as decontextualized appropriation of a term whose original referents are specific, plural, and community-governed.