Next time you smell the scent of burning sage, think about who’s burning it and where they got it from.
Tightly-wound bundles of the dried plant have become an innocuous sight in smoke shops and at booths lining the Venice Beach boardwalk.
But consumerism has never been what the Native American tradition of burning sage is about.
“We sage to […] clean up the energy around us and to help us have good thoughts, and the smoke carries all of that impurity up to the Creator,” Kimberly Morales Johnson of the Gabrieleno/Tongva tribe said.
This plant has been used for spiritual cleansing by Native American tribes in what is now known as California for generations. But its recent popularity in American capitalist culture is devastating the species.
“White sage is a California plant that the Southern California tribes use as part of cleansing rituals and is a very integral part of the culture. And because of that—that history and that identity the plant has—it’s been taken by the larger culture in general, the larger mass media, and you can buy it at places like Whole Foods and stuff like that,” Jason Steinhauser, a horticulture student at Long Beach City College, said.
Cultural appropriation and commodification
The recent interest in white sage divorces the use of the plant from its origins, as do the many depictions of burning white sage that appear in popular culture.
“We’ve noticed within the past three to five years that, you know, it’s everywhere. It’s in movies, it’s in ‘Grace and Frankie.’ It’s on Instagram. There was a girl who was roller skating down the beach waving a white sage smudge stick up in the air,” Kimberly said.
Native American people who harvest the plant traditionally develop a close relationship with it, showing it care, gratitude and a deep respect.
“It’s beyond my comprehension how somebody could just take this plant that we’ve revered for so many centuries as sacred to, you know, a movie scene,” Kimberly said.
On the Morales Johnsons’ Instagram page @protectwhitesage, they shared a gif from the Netflix series “Dead to Me” in which a white actress is seen dramatically waving a sage smudge stick around a room after killing someone in a hit-and-run.
“And kind of done in a very sarcastic way like ‘Oh this is gonna clean me of anything wrong.’ So it’s cultural appropriation, but it’s also desecration to our culture,” Kimberly said. “It’s sad. It’s like another way of waiving discrimination or like a racist event in our faces—’Ha, look what I’ve got,’—you know what I mean? It’s tough. It’s really tough to see what has become of it.”
Ecological damage of poaching white sage
Kimberly remembers gathering wild sage with her father in the 1980s and 1990s.
“We would sing songs to the plant, and we’d always have an offering to the plant,” Kimberly said. “It’s a reciprocal relationship so the plant was given a drink of water, thanked.”
But that’s not how bundles of sage found in stores and online are gathered.
Oftentimes those looking to sell sage harvest it illegally from federally-protected areas, cutting off large parts of the plant without regard for its health.
“These wildcrafters will go into the wilderness areas and just hack it down,” Steinhauser said.
Just chopping off parts of a white sage plant can kill the whole bush. Its leaves must be taken sparingly, and only at the right time of year.
“We never gathered too much from one plant. We never gather when a plant is blooming. There’s a lot of rules to how we gather to keep the plants sustainable, and it’s done in a very respectful way,” Kimberly said.
Kimberly and her daughter Samantha Morales Johnson started an Instagram page to educate the public on the cultural appropriation and over-harvesting inherent in the wide-scale use of white sage.
“In my viewpoint as a Native person, white sage should never be sold,” Kimberly said.
Kimberly and Samantha have a relationship with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife authorities at Etiwanda Nature Preserve, where white sage is constantly poached.
Once the authorities confiscate white sage from those who illegally cut it, they give it to Kimberly and Samantha.
“They contact us because we’re the local tribe, and they know that we’ll distribute it in a good way to our relatives to be used in the way that it’s supposed to be used,” Kimberly said.
Kimberly and Samantha remind the public that if white sage is sold or advertised as “wild gathered” that means it has been poached.
In one incident in May, Fish and Wildlife authorities confiscated three large duffel bags completely filled with illegally cut white sage. The bags weighed over 100 pounds each.
Kimberly and Samantha were crushed when authorities handed over the confiscated white sage to them.
The fact that this many plants had been damaged for money was bad enough, said Kimberly. But the white sage within the duffel bags had been kept tightly packed together until it grew mold and began to smell.
The mother-daughter duo had to sort through the hundreds of pounds of white sage to save as much of it from rot as possible.
“The next day, I remember I called an elder from another tribe and I said, ‘I feel like I was at a six-hour funeral last night.’ We had to try to save as much of this white sage as we could before it started to ferment and smell and go bad. And we cried, my daughter and I, we cried because it was so sad what happened to this plant,” Kimberly said.
Black market industry
According to Kimberly, white sage can sell for $30 a pound in Los Angeles on the black market. The person who stuffed the duffel bags had poached over $9,000 worth of white sage.
When Fish and Wildlife authorities gave them the duffel bags, they told them that only two weeks prior they had confiscated another 500 pounds of the poached plant.
In August of 2020, Fish and Wildlife at Etiwanda confiscated 1,500 pounds of white sage, according to Kimberly.
The confiscated sage was eventually distributed to Native American students at the Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, who practiced wrapping it into bundles.
“The next day, I remember I called an elder from another tribe and I said, ‘I feel like I was at a six hour funeral last night.’ We had to try to save as much of this white sage as we could, before it started to ferment and smell and go bad. And we cried, my daughter and I, we cried because it was so sad what happened to this plant.”
—Kimberly Morales Johnson of the Gabrieleno/Tongva tribe
Besides the ecological harm and cultural appropriation of harvesting wild white sage, Kimberly and Samantha also warn people that poachers don’t care if the sage plants they sell have mold growing on them.
“If you are burning something that’s dried up, moldy, you’re most likely inhaling something that is not good for you,” Kimberly said.
Grow it yourself
Kimberly and Steinhauser believe that if someone wishes to use white sage, they should develop a personal relationship with a white sage plant that grows on their own property.
“In my perfect world, everybody who wanted it would have a white sage plant growing that they could gather from, that they could develop a relationship with, and not have to buy it from anyone,” Kimberly said.
Steinhauser sells potted white sage plants that people can bring home and care for. He can be contacted through his Instagram page, @heyitsjaystein.
“In my viewpoint, it’s Grandmother White Sage, and so I treat it like an ancestor. So we care for plants, we tend to plants. The white sage that I have growing in my yard is held in a very high regard because this is a grandmother,” Kimberly said. “This is the descendant of a plant that has seen my ancestors for years and years.”
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