You're looking at a stick of white sage
considered sacred to the Indigenous peoples
of Southern California.
Burning sage has become
a trend on social media.
Is that my aerobics hoop?
It’s a saging hoop now!
So what happens to a marginalized culture
when its rituals go viral?
Wow. [laughs]
"I hope I got this sage thing right.
They say today is 420."
Well, that's really sad.
- The story of white sage goes beyond the smoke.
It's about colonialism and genocide in the past,
and a problem with poaching in the present.
The wellness craze, fueled by influencers and celebrities,
has sparked a black market for white sage.
And to the Native community, it's come at a high cost.
[Sighs]
It's become a joke.
That's the hardest one for me.
And that's the hardest part, because it's something
that is a sacred part of a culture that has been almost completely erased.
- We're in Los Angeles, California, to speak with Native activists
about the fight to preserve white sage.
- We’re with Heidi Lucero,
a member of the Acjachemen and Mutsun Ohlone tribes in her front yard.
She's making an offering of tobacco before harvesting some leaves
from her white sage plant.
For the Acjachemen and many Indigenous people,
making an offering before taking from a sacred plant
is an essential part of the process.
I can remember being probably
about 4 or 5 and being at ceremony out in our traditional tribal territory
in Orange County and smelling the sage burning at our gathering.
I don't know what I would do without it.
- White sage is a shrub in the mint family
that is endemic to Southern California and the Baja Peninsula,
meaning it only grows naturally in the wild in those areas.
White Sage has also been a sacred plant to the Native people
of Southern California and Mexico for centuries.
- It's a relative.
My grandmother had just passed away
literally like a week before my house closed escrow.
I was gifted two white sage plants,
and so I planted those in honor of my grandmother at my house.
Those plants are actually in the walkway when you come up to my house.
And every day when I leave my house, it kind of touches me as I go out.
And so I always have a piece of my grandmother with me,
and that fragrance of white sage is usually on my clothes when I go places.
It just has this incredible smell.
- That smell is what has made this plant so popular worldwide.
Although Native people have used white sage medicinally
and as a source of food, it is most commonly used for smudging,
a process of burning a bundle of dried plant material
and using the aromatic smoke to cleanse people, objects and places.
For Heidi, non-Native people
using white sage wasn't a problem until about 10 years ago.
- I remember for the first time seeing it was walking the boardwalk
in Venice Beach and seeing it being sold
alongside all kinds of like crystals.
I don't think I even thought twice about it then.
Not until you start seeing it all over
social media and start
seeing it on all these online stores
that it all of a sudden was a problem.
There is a whole list of protocols
that we have when we gather things like white sage,
and that is part of the medicine that's involved.
Those are the things that I question, “Were those things being done?”
- Over here, guys. This is a perfect example.
Look at the cuts.
- It's 6 a.m.
and we're at the North Etiwanda Preserve,
home to one of the largest populations of white sage
left in Southern California.
Ron Goodman is a ranger for the preserve and he's an expert
at spotting the signs of white sage poaching,
an ongoing problem at the preserve,
where it is illegal to disturb any plant or animal life.
This is a classic case of poaching.
You can see where this has been cut.
Social media and the wellness craze.
That's it.
You have celebrities that have lent themselves to promoting this.
And there's a mad rush for people
to get this because they think
it's a great thing to do.
- White sage is a hearty plant that grows quickly
in the right conditions but is rarely grown commercially.
There's varying theories to why there aren't many white sage farms,
including that it was not considered a profitable crop
until the recent explosion in popularity.
Reports say the rise in demand for white sage
has birthed a black market
fueled by a network
of wholesalers and middlemen
who regularly rely on migrant workers
to do the actual poaching.
These workers are often undocumented
and paid only a few dollars per pound.
All of this means
most of the sage bundles
you see in stores
labeled as “wild gathered”
are likely poached from places such as the North Etiwanda Preserve.
The poaching has put extra pressure on the white sage populations,
which were already in decline because of drought, wildfires and development.
- We know that it happens on a daily basis.
The biggest difficulty is trying to catch them.
They are so sophisticated now with their poaching.
It's my belief that about 90% of the individuals poaching
get away with it without ever being caught.
- Ron's belief might be right.
While location scouting,
our film crew saw a woman
walking out of the preserve
with a bundle of white sage.
The underground nature of the market makes it impossible
to estimate the annual revenue
raked in from poaching white sage.
But Ron has an educated guess.
- There's been days when we've gone up there and we've confiscated
300, 400 pounds in one bust.
And that's a significant amount of sage
because the wholesale on it is about $30 a pound.
So if you just took 300 pounds...
a week
times 52 weeks, you can do the math
and it adds up very quickly.
- Ron says there's actually been one benefit
to the increase in the sophistication of the poachers:
a way to prevent the poached white sage from going to waste.
- Initially, when we started making these busts
and they were using the trashcans
rather than the duffel sacks,
we would make them dump it out.
But now we are able to carry it out
and then we're able to get it to folks
in the Indigenous tribes
to where they can utilize it
for their ceremonial functions.
- Look how big it is!
It's like as big as my hair. [laughs]
You won't find leaves like this in a poached sage smudge stick
because everything is so, is so neglected.
Samantha Morales-Johnson is a member
of the Gabrielino-Tongva Band of Mission Indians
and one of the recipients of poached sage
from the North Etiwanda Preserve.
She says that her community has received more than 1,000 pounds,
about 450 kilos, of poached sage in the past two years.
But the first time was the most memorable.
We knew we were going to be receiving about 300 pounds,
and I was so excited because I was like, “Wow!
That's a lifetime worth of white sage.
We can give this to everyone and we wouldn't need it for years.”
And when we received it, it was kind of like expecting
to adopt a foster dog,
and then having like the most,
like sick, sad,
beaten-up looking dog
like, just dropped on your doorstep.
And so to see that abuse
was really difficult
and my heart really hurt for it.
- Samantha runs a social media account
called “Protect White Sage,”
which features her work as a science illustrator.
It is a counterpoint to many of the posts
and memes she sees across social media.
I’ve seen a lot of memes.
I've seen someone
like, put their legs up
and smudge in between their legs.
It's become a joke.
That's the hardest one for me
and that's the hardest part
is when it's become a joke.
Because it's something
that is a sacred part of a culture
that has been almost completely erased.
Small pieces of LA's Indigenous past can still be found in the city,
including the remains of a sacred village
that are now part of the Cal State Long Beach campus.
- This village is called Puvu, or Puvungna, which is the gathering place.
This is the place where our creation story occurred.
This is the last 23 acres of a much larger village.
To be able to come to this land and actually to have
a space to have prayer, to have ceremony,
we don't have that any other place but here.
So the reason that
Native people here in Southern California are rare
is because we went through several waves of genocide.
First was the mission system that came in here with the Spanish.
- The mission system refers to a series of Catholic outposts
established throughout California and operated from 1769 until the 1830s.
They were funded by the Spanish government
for the purpose of converting the Indigenous people of the region
to Catholicism and expanding Spanish colonial territory.
During this period, more than 150,000 Indigenous people died
and were subjected to physical abuse, forced labor and disease.
Practice of any Indigenous culture or ceremony,
such as smudging white sage, was forbidden.
We had to hide our identity.
They were actively hunting Native people.
And so many Native people, they would claim another identity, such as Mexican.
- Hiding also meant foregoing ceremonies and rituals
essential to Indigenous life and culture.
Native people didn't gain the full legal right
to practice their Indigenous religions and rituals until 1978,
when then-President Jimmy Carter signed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.
So now, we're in another wave of genocide, but this is a cultural genocide.
Heidi's tribe, the Acjachemen, and most of the tribes
in the Los Angeles area, are not federally recognized,
which means they are not entitled to self-government or rights,
such as claiming ancestor remains
or protecting sacred land, such as Puvungna.
For Heidi, lack of federal recognition
makes the lack of awareness around cultural appropriation even harder.
- For years,
you know, we weren't allowed to practice our ceremonies and our traditions
and by somebody else trying to appropriate that, they don't understand.
It's really hurtful that they don't understand.
They don't take the opportunity to understand.
Black sage there, maybe one right here and one in front of the window?
Sure. OK.
- We're with Samantha
at a one-acre piece of property north of downtown LA
that was recently gifted to the Tongva people as communal land.
Samantha is the Land Return Coordinator for the tribe.
She is working to re-landscape the property
with plants native to Southern California.
Today, she is reintroducing
a few native plants to the property
including two white sage plants.
- This is the first time that we've owned
land as a community in 200 years.
We're going to have a direct connection
with our plants growing and living with us,
instead of just seeing them at some place
where we're not permitted to truly interact with them
the way that we've done so for hundreds of years.
Whew. Work out.
And so now what's beautiful about this place
is that we can grow our plants and we can tell our youth,
“These are our plants. This is how we take care of them.
This is how they take care of us.”
Mwah!
Welcome home, buddy.
Welcome home.
- So is it too late to save white sage?
Samantha doesn't think so.
- There are always alternatives for white sage.
There are alternative smudge sticks.
There are alternative candles. There's alternative incense.
And so because there's so many options to alternatives,
I think that we can win this because it doesn't have to stay on the market.
You can have a thousand other smudge sticks
that are made of lavender, pine, rosemary,
so many other beautiful smelling plants that are sustainably grown already.
It's not just a part of our heritage,
it is a part of our ancestry and our family.
We think of white sage as our grandmother, as our relative.
What would you do to protect a relative?
You would do as much as you can.
And so that's what we're willing to do.
We're willing to protect our grandmother, white sage.