When culture, ancestry and nature refuse to stay inside the boxes we created for them
At some point, burning white sage became an act that apparently requires permission.
Use it to clear your home and sooner or later someone may tell you that you are participating in cultural appropriation. White sage is sacred to certain Native American peoples, the argument goes, and therefore anyone outside those cultures should leave it alone. Sometimes the conversation goes even further: the burning of sage itself is treated as though it belongs to one people, one tradition and one history.
Every time I encounter this argument, I come back to the same question.
Who owns a plant?
Not a ceremony. Not an initiation. Not a tribal identity or religious office. Those are different conversations. You cannot watch someone else's sacred ceremony, imitate it, give yourself their title and suddenly possess their lineage.
I mean the actual plant growing from the earth.
Who gets to encounter something in nature, develop a relationship with it and then declare that relationship so exclusive that generations of other human beings require cultural permission to develop one of their own?
Because the deeper you travel into human history, the harder it becomes to maintain the fantasy that cultures—and especially cultures in the Americas—developed inside separate, untouched boxes.
They didn't.
Neither did we.
Before White Sage Became an Argument
Humans have been working with plants for longer than anyone has been keeping records of why we did it. We learned what fed us, what poisoned us, what healed wounds, what changed consciousness and what happened when certain leaves, woods and resins met fire. Eventually those discoveries became medicine, food, ceremony, prayer, folklore and spiritual technology.
Sage itself makes an interesting example because California white sage, Salvia apiana, is only one member of a much larger botanical family. Indigenous peoples of Southern California have documented relationships with white sage for medicinal, nutritional and ceremonial purposes. But they were hardly the only human beings developing relationships with plants called sage. Ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman sources record the medicinal use of Salvia, and Roman writers including Pliny, Dioscorides and Galen discussed it centuries ago. Those Old World sages were not California white sage; the distinction matters botanically. What matters historically is that different peoples were encountering members of the same broad botanical family and learning from them independently.
The same pattern appears everywhere we look. Africans developed vast bodies of botanical and spiritual knowledge. Europeans developed herbal and folk traditions. Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas developed sophisticated relationships with the plants around them. Across the Mediterranean, Middle East and Asia, people burned botanical materials in religious and domestic life.
Different plants. Different cosmologies. Different ceremonies.
The recurring behavior is human.
We encounter nature, discover something about it and incorporate what we learn into our understanding of the world.
That becomes particularly important when the conversation reaches African Americans, because the idea that we should simply “stay within our own culture” raises an immediate problem:
Which culture would that be?
African Americans are not simply Africans who happen to have been born in America. We are a people created in the Americas through one of the most violent and complicated periods of human migration, colonization and cultural collision in history. Our ancestors arrived from different African peoples carrying different languages, cosmologies, medicines and spiritual knowledge. They encountered Europeans, Indigenous peoples, Caribbean peoples, Latin American populations and one another. Some relationships were chosen. Others were produced through enslavement, coercion and rape.
That history remains visible in our DNA. Large genetic studies of African Americans show substantial variation in European ancestry alongside African ancestry, as well as Native American ancestry in portions of the population. They also reveal a pronounced imbalance between European male and African female ancestral contributions, a genetic pattern inseparable from the history of slavery and racial oppression. The same research demonstrates extensive African, European and Indigenous mixture throughout populations of the Americas rather than the clean racial categories we later learned to imagine.
Our cultures carry the evidence too.
Conjure did not arrive in America finished.
Hoodoo was not unloaded from a ship in a box labeled African Spirituality: Do Not Modify.
It developed here.
The Smithsonian's collection describes historian Yvonne Chireau's scholarship on conjure as an African American tradition that evolved from African, European and American elements. Katrina Hazzard-Donald's work similarly traces Hoodoo from African traditions into the particular circumstances of African American life in the Americas.
That does not dilute the African foundation of these traditions. It tells us something far more interesting about what our ancestors did with that foundation.
They adapted.
They learned a new land. They encountered unfamiliar plants. They retained knowledge where they could, transformed it where circumstances demanded and incorporated new materials into systems whose deeper spiritual logic had crossed an ocean with them. Christianity entered the tradition. Biblical material entered it. American plants entered it. European influences appeared. Regional practices developed.
Then travel farther south and the neat little cultural boxes fall apart even faster.
Louisiana's history includes Native American, African, French, Spanish, Caribbean and Latin American populations living within the same region. The Library of Congress describes Creole culture as emerging from mixed French, African American and Native American heritage and documents communities formed through layers of French and Spanish colonial rule, African enslavement, free people of color, Caribbean migration and cultural exchange.
Cajun and Creole are not synonyms. Hoodoo and conjure are not interchangeable with every African-derived religion. Indigenous traditions are not one enormous religion called “Native American spirituality.” Mexican identity contains its own complicated Indigenous, European and African histories.
But that complexity is precisely the point.
America mixed people. And people mixed culture.
Sometimes beautifully.
Sometimes violently.
Often both.
The History Written on Paper Isn't Always the History Inside the Family
I understand this personally because I come from Delaware.
There are Black families where I come from who can pull out old photographs and point to grandfathers and great-grandfathers remembered as Native people. To someone accustomed to America's modern racial boxes, those family histories can sound contradictory.
Then you look at Delaware's actual records.
They aren't contradictory at all.
The Nanticoke people of Delaware spent generations fighting to retain an identity that the surrounding society repeatedly tried to classify differently. Delaware Public Archives records that Nanticoke families were classified by the dominant culture as “colored” or “mulatto.” Delaware eventually enacted legislation specifically recognizing descendants of the Nanticoke Indians.
Delaware becomes even more fascinating when you encounter another historical designation: Moors.
The state's own law records that the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware was formerly known as “the Moors,” and that for decades state documents could designate members' race with an “M.” Delaware schools once included separate schools for children officially described as “people called Moors.”
Think about what that means before assuming an old census category tells us everything about someone's ancestry.
The government could call people Indian, Moor, colored, mulatto, Negro or something else depending upon the place, period, law and person doing the recording. Descendants could eventually be understood socially as Black while carrying family histories that told a more complicated story.
And the complexity doesn't stop there.
There have long been arguments that African contact with the Americas predates Columbus, including theories involving African voyages and transatlantic contact. Those claims remain contested; scholars have argued both for reconsidering possibilities of pre-Columbian ocean contact and forcefully against Afrocentric claims of established African influence on pre-Columbian American civilizations.
I am interested in that argument precisely because I am no longer willing to confuse “this is the history we were taught”with “therefore every other historical possibility has been settled forever.”
History is not simply what happened.
History is also what survived. What was written down. Who was permitted to write. Whose oral histories were considered evidence. Which records governments created. Which identities officials assigned to people. Which artifacts survived. Which scholars were taken seriously. Which theories institutions funded. Which stories schools eventually placed inside textbooks.
We should be able to distinguish evidence from theory without surrendering our right to question the people and institutions that historically decided what counted as evidence in the first place.
And when records from places like Delaware show us that authorities could not even consistently describe the people standing directly in front of them, I think a little intellectual humility about the completeness of the historical record is warranted.
So We Come Back to the Plant
White sage did not create this argument.
We did.
The plant existed before the racial terminology, before the internet debates and before anyone currently alive arrived to claim authority over it. Human communities encountered it and developed relationships with it. Those relationships deserve to be studied. They deserve acknowledgment. If a ceremony belongs to a particular tradition, I have no need to pretend that ceremony belongs to me.
But the plant and the ceremony are not the same thing.
That distinction changes everything.
If I light a candle while praying, I have not become Catholic.
If I burn frankincense, I have not claimed the religious identity of every ancient people who burned frankincense before me.
If I take an herbal spiritual bath, the presence of plants and water cannot tell you whether I am practicing Hoodoo, an African traditional religion, a Caribbean tradition, a folk practice, something taught within my family or something entirely personal.
The material alone does not establish the tradition.
So why would the presence of white sage automatically mean that someone is performing a Native American ceremony?
If I imitate a specific Indigenous ceremony and falsely present it as my own lineage, criticize that.
If I claim an initiation I never received, challenge me.
If I pretend to speak for a people I do not belong to, question me.
But if I work with a plant because I have studied it, developed my own relationship with it and incorporated it into my own spiritual practice, we are discussing something fundamentally different.
And I reject the idea that acknowledging somebody else's historical relationship with nature requires surrendering my own.
That becomes especially untenable for people descended from populations that have been mixing culturally and ancestrally in the Americas for centuries. At what percentage of ancestry does permission suddenly activate? Which ancestor counts? Which government classification are we supposed to trust? Which century establishes ownership? Which cultural exchange was legitimate, and which one must descendants now reverse?
Our ancestors did not live according to those rules.
They couldn't have.
They lived beside one another. They traded. They fought. They enslaved and were enslaved. They escaped. They sheltered one another. They married. They raped. They loved. They had children. They exchanged food, language, medicine, music and spiritual knowledge. They encountered new landscapes and learned how to survive within them.
Modern America inherited the result and then tried to draw clean racial lines through it.
Nature never agreed to those lines.
Neither did history.
As for Me
I am a conjurer.
That means my relationship with the natural world is not decorative. Roots, herbs, waters, minerals, oils and other botanical materials are part of how I understand and practice spiritual work. I want to know what something is, what it does, who has worked with it, how they worked with it and what happens when I develop a relationship with it myself.
I also come from Delaware, where the history around me taught me something long before I had sophisticated language for it: what America calls your race and who your family knows itself to be are not always the same thing.
I have seen Black families with Native ancestry preserved in photographs and family memory. Now, as an adult, I can look at the historical record and see some of the machinery that helped create that contradiction on paper. People themselves were mixed, while institutions kept trying to decide which single category they belonged in.
So I am deeply uninterested in rebuilding those same walls inside my spirituality.
I don't need to become Native American to work with white sage.
I don't need to become Celtic to study how European peoples worked with sage.
I don't cease being a conjurer because a plant I encounter originated somewhere other than West Africa.
Conjure itself teaches me better than that. It exists because Black people in America carried knowledge forward while responding to the world they actually inhabited.
That is inheritance.
That is adaptation.
That is survival.
And that is culture.
Haus Of Alchemy exists, in part, because I am tired of being handed somebody else's boundaries and being told they are sacred simply because they have been repeated long enough.
I will study history. I will acknowledge traditions. I will distinguish another person's ceremony from my own practice. I will ask where my materials came from, what they have meant to different people and what they mean when they enter my hands.
But I will also question.
I will investigate.
And I reserve the right to decide what belongs inside my own spiritual practice.
So when someone asks me whether burning white sage is cultural appropriation, my answer begins somewhere entirely different.
Tell me what you are actually doing.
Are you pretending to belong to another people?
Are you reproducing their ceremony and calling it yours?
Or are you a human being standing in the same natural world our ancestors have inhabited for thousands of years, learning a plant and deciding what relationship you will have with it?
Those are not the same thing.
And perhaps the reason the white sage argument never seems to end is that we keep pretending they are.
— Ameynra J. Alquemi
Founder, Haus Of Alchemy
Manifest your vision.
