Smudging and ritual cleansing

What it is

Two things that share a mechanism and should not share a name.

Ritual fumigation — burning aromatic plant material to purify a place, an object or a person — appears almost everywhere. Frankincense and myrrh in the ancient Near East and in Catholic and Orthodox liturgy; dhoop in Hindu worship; incense in Buddhist and Shinto practice; kōdō, the Japanese way of incense; juniper, mugwort and rosemary smoke in European folk practice; copal in Mesoamerica.

Smudging is a specific set of ceremonial practices belonging to particular Native North American nations, using plants including white sage, sweetgrass, cedar and tobacco, with protocols about who conducts it, when, with what words, and for what purpose. The English word comes from that context.

The generic practice is common property. The specific one is not, and the popular use of "smudging" for lighting a sage bundle bought in a shop collapses the two.

Where it came from

Fumigation is old enough to be effectively undatable — resin residues appear in archaeological contexts across the ancient world, and the practices are independently attested on every inhabited continent.

The specific North American ceremonies belong to living traditions with their own histories, which this page does not detail, because that material belongs to the nations that hold it.

One piece of history is necessary, though, because it explains why this is contested rather than merely impolite. Native American ceremonial practice was actively suppressed in the United States for decades — the Bureau of Indian Affairs pursued policies against traditional religious practice from the 1880s, and it was not until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 that free exercise was explicitly protected. Comparable suppression occurred in Canada and Australia. Practitioners alive today can remember when ceremony was punished.

The asymmetry, then, is not abstract. Practices criminalised within living memory are now sold as wellness products by people who face no risk in using them, while the communities they were taken from often struggle for access to the plants.

How it is done

In the generic form: dried plant material is lit, the flame extinguished, and the smoke directed around a space or person, often with a feather or the hand, sometimes with a shell to catch ash. Windows are opened to let what has been cleared leave.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the impulse is universal and the general practice is not anyone's exclusive property. Burning rosemary in your own kitchen because your grandmother did is not appropriation of anything.

We can say the specific objection is well documented and comes from the source communities rather than from commentators. The 1993 Lakota declaration named the commercial sale of ceremonial practice explicitly.

We can say the plant supply raises real problems. White sage (Salvia apiana) grows in a limited range in southern California and northern Baja, and commercial demand has driven substantial wild harvesting, including documented poaching from public land and from private and tribal property. The species is not globally endangered, and it is important not to overstate that. What is well attested is localised over-harvesting and reduced access for the communities for whom the plant is ceremonially necessary. Cultivated sources exist, and buying from them is a straightforward improvement that costs nothing.

We can say the smoke is smoke. Burning plant material produces particulates and carbon monoxide like any combustion, and enclosed unventilated use is not good for anyone's lungs, particularly asthmatic ones. There is a small body of research on the antimicrobial properties of medicinal smoke — a 2007 study by Nautiyal and colleagues found substantial reductions in airborne bacterial counts in a closed room — but a measurable effect on bacteria is not evidence for the energetic claim, and the same study says nothing about whether it helps anyone.

We cannot say whether smoke moves anything unseen. What can be said is that a person who wants this practice has options that avoid the whole difficulty: use a plant from their own tradition or their own garden, buy cultivated rather than wild-harvested, and reserve the word "smudging" for the ceremony it names.

Further reading

• The Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality (1993).
• Reporting on white sage harvesting pressure in southern California, including from the United Plant Savers and from California news outlets covering poaching prosecutions.