--- slug: cultural-appropriation type: risk subsection: cultural-harm created: 2026-06-01 updated: 2026-06-02 summary: "The harm that follows when living traditions' practices, plants, and symbols are extracted from source communities, sold by outsiders, and stripped of the relationships that make them accountable." related: spiritual-marketplace: relation: related note: "The marketplace is the engine that turns a source community's ceremonial materials into commodity products with the context stripped out." wellness-culture: relation: related note: "Wellness culture is where Hindu and Buddhist practices most often arrive rebranded as self-optimization, severed from the traditions that carry them." chakras: relation: related note: "The chakra system is among the most thoroughly decontextualized imports: a Tantric map of subtle anatomy turned into a wellness graphic." spiritual-bypassing: relation: related note: "Treating another culture's depth as instantly available, no lineage required, is the bypass move applied to a whole tradition." --- # Cultural Appropriation in Spiritual Practice > **Risk** > > How a belief or practice can mislead, harm, exploit, or detach people from reality. > "The smoke of white sage is not a product. It is a relative." > — paraphrasing a refrain common among California Native culture-bearers *The harm that follows when living traditions' practices, plants, and symbols are extracted from source communities and sold by outsiders with no accountable tie to them, depleting communities while hollowing practices out.* This is one of the live controversies a practitioner meets the moment they walk into a crystal shop or open an app. A bundle of white sage sits by the register. A palo santo stick comes free with a yoga-mat order. A "shamanic journey" is offered as a weekend workshop, no relationship to any shamanic lineage required. None of it announces a problem, and most of the people buying mean only respect. The harm is real anyway. Naming it carefully matters more than the field's usual two settings of guilty silence and angry callout. The word that does the work here is *extraction*. Cultural appropriation in this sense is not the simple fact of an outsider practicing something. It is taking a practice, plant, or symbol out of the community that holds it, without permission, payment, relationship, or understanding, and converting it into something to sell. The community loses access, income, or control. The practice loses the context that gave it meaning. Both can happen at once. ## How it presents It rarely looks like theft. It looks like a product. - **White sage and smudging.** Many Native North American traditions use smoke from particular plants in ceremony. In the wellness marketplace, that family of practices is flattened into "smudging" and sold as bundled white sage. White sage (*Salvia apiana*) grows wild in a narrow band of Southern California; commercial demand has driven illegal over-harvesting on public and tribal land, making the ceremonial plant harder for Native communities to find. - **Palo santo.** The "holy wood" of South American traditions is sold by the bundle in wellness shops. *Bursera graveolens* is not currently listed as endangered, but the boom has raised real concern about unsustainable cutting and mislabeling, and the ceremonial relationship the wood carries among Andean and Amazonian peoples does not travel with the stick. - **Chakras and yoga, decontextualized.** A map of subtle anatomy from Tantric and Hatha yoga becomes a seven-color graphic for "balancing your energy." A devotional discipline with centuries of philosophy behind it becomes a fitness class set to a playlist. The form survives; the tradition is filed off. - **Plastic shamanism.** A term coined by Native activists for non-Native people who sell "shamanic" ceremonies, sweat lodges, or vision quests while claiming a Native authority they do not hold. The 1993 *Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality* named this directly. The consequences can be lethal: in 2009, three people died in a sweat-lodge ceremony run by self-help entrepreneur James Arthur Ray, who had no standing in any Native tradition and was later convicted of negligent homicide. ## Why people fall into it Almost no one sets out to harm a culture. The pulls are ordinary. - **The marketplace makes it frictionless.** The [spiritual marketplace](spiritual-marketplace.md) sells the sage bundle and the palo santo stick with the context already stripped; the buyer never sees the community, only the shelf. - **The practice genuinely works for them.** Burning sage does shift a room's feel; the breath and posture of yoga do settle the nervous system. When something helps, "where did this come from and at what cost" is an easy question to skip. - **No gatekeeper is present.** Unlike a closed initiatory lineage, an herb bundle or a downloadable meditation has no one at the door to say who may enter and on what terms. - **The line is genuinely blurry.** Cultures have always borrowed from each other, and most spiritual traditions are themselves syntheses. That truth gets stretched into a blanket permission slip. ## Warning signs The reliable tells are about *relationship, consent, and money*, not about who a person was born as. A practice has likely crossed from honoring into helping-yourself when these tells appear: - The source community is absent from the transaction entirely. - A teacher claims an authority ("trained by a Lakota medicine man," "carrying a 5,000-year-old lineage") that cannot be checked and that the named community disowns. - Ceremonial materials are sold at scale with no benefit flowing back. - The practice is stripped of the obligations that came with it and kept only for the parts that feel good. - People from the source culture who object are dismissed as gatekeepers or as too sensitive. ## Common rationalizations The defenses recur almost word for word, and each contains a half-truth worth separating from the cover it provides. - "Culture is meant to be shared." Sharing is mutual and consented; extraction is one-directional and unasked. The communities raising the alarm are not refusing to share; they are objecting to being taken from. - "I'm honoring it, not mocking it." Sincerity is real and does not settle the question. Over-harvested sage is just as gone whether the buyer was reverent or careless. - "Everything is appropriated from something." True, and not a permission slip. The morally relevant facts are power and harm: borrowing from a dominant, well-resourced tradition is not the same act as extracting from a colonized, still-living, often-impoverished one. - "Spirituality is universal, so no one owns it." The universal layer may be real, but the specific forms, plants, names, and ceremonies are held by specific peoples, and treating that as ownerless is precisely the move under dispute. ## Likely harms The harms are concrete, not symbolic. - **Material depletion.** Over-harvesting puts a ceremonial plant out of reach of the people who depend on it, while a sustainability and labor crisis builds behind the wellness boom. - **Economic displacement.** Outsiders capture the income from a tradition while its originators see little, a pattern Cultural Survival has described as another form of extractivism. - **Loss of meaning and misinformation.** A practice severed from its framework gets taught wrong, so the decontextualized version crowds out the real one and the public "learns" a hollow copy. - **Direct physical harm.** Plastic-shamanism ceremonies run by people without training or standing have injured and killed participants, the Ray sweat-lodge deaths being the starkest case. - **Compounded disrespect.** For communities whose religions were criminalized within living memory, watching outsiders sell those same practices lands as one more theft on top of the original ones. Native American ceremonial practice was not federally protected in the United States until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. ## Safer alternatives The repair is not to retreat into paralysis, and it is not for outsiders to police who is "allowed" what. It is to move the relationship from extraction toward appreciation. > **💡 Appreciation over extraction** > > Before adopting a practice from a living tradition, ask three questions: *Where did this come from, and what did it mean there? Is the source community consenting, and does anyone there benefit? Am I keeping the obligations, or only the parts that feel good?* If you can't answer the first, you're not ready for the practice. If the answer to the second is no, you're extracting. If you are keeping only the parts that feel good, you're decorating. In practice that means learning a practice's origin before adopting it. Buy ceremonial materials, when at all, from the source community directly, with sustainable harvesting documented. Substitute freely where you can: garden sage, rosemary, cedar, or your own tradition's herbs can clear a room without touching a ceremonial plant under pressure. If you smoke-cleanse outside a Native lineage, call it smoke cleansing rather than smudging. Support and credit living practitioners and teachers from the culture rather than the white-label reseller, and treat the objections of culture-bearers as information about harm, not as an attack to be argued down. The aim is not a smaller spiritual life. It is one whose debts are acknowledged and, where possible, paid. ## Related articles The commercial machine that strips context from ceremonial materials is the [spiritual marketplace](spiritual-marketplace.md), operating most visibly inside [wellness culture](wellness-culture.md), where Hindu and Buddhist practice most often arrives rebranded. The [chakra system](chakras.md) is a clear case of a tradition's depth flattened into a wellness graphic. The assumption that another culture's hard-won depth is instantly available with no lineage or obligation is [spiritual bypassing](spiritual-bypassing.md) applied to a whole people. ## Sources - Cultural Survival, ["Cultural Appropriation: Another Form of Extractivism"](https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/cultural-appropriation-another-form-extractivism) (2020). Frames appropriation through extraction and the over-harvesting of white sage. - Lisa Aldred, ["Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances: New Age Commercialization of Native American Spirituality"](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1185908) (*American Indian Quarterly*, 2000). The standard scholarly treatment of New Age commercialization of Native practice. - ["Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality"](https://aim-west.org/declaration-of-war/) (Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Nations, 1993). The foundational Native statement naming plastic shamanism as exploitation. - American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, [Pub. L. 95-341](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-92/pdf/STATUTE-92-Pg469.pdf). The law that first protected Native ceremonial practice in the United States, marking how recently it was criminalized. --- - [Previous: Social & Cultural Harm](cultural-harm.md)