In double news this week from News from Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, we previously shared with you our special upcoming event, the reopening of Dorothy Ramon Learning Center’s Gathering Hall on May 2, 2022, and a Dragonfly Lecture on the Treaty of Temecula. MORE INFO HERE.
White sage (Pat Murkland Photo)
Today, we share the exciting news of a film premiere at the Warner Grande Theatre in San Pedro on Earth Day, Friday, April 22, 2022: “Saging the World,” a documentary by Rose Ramirez (a Dorothy Ramon Learning Center Dragonfly Award honoree), Deborah Small, and the California Native Plant Society.
Ticket and more info HERE.
Trailer shared by the California Native Plant Society:
Saging the World
Everyone, it seems, is lighting a match to bundled white sage these days for varied “purifying” processes. People also are consuming popular sage products such as soaps and skin moisturizers. When we can buy a “smudge kit” on Amazon for $20.99, complete with a culturally appropriated abalone shell, or when we see large quantities of bundled and dried white sage for sale online through one of the world’s largest retail chains, we wonder why no one asks: Where are all the sage plantations?
Because qas'ily (Cahuilla), qáṣil (Luiseño), khapshīkh (Chumash dialects), qaarqc (Serrano),1 is a native plant that grows wild. White sage (Salvia apiana) and its sage relatives serve as the backbone for Southern California Native American homelands.
White sage grows in an Inland Southern California canyon (Pat Murkland Photo).
These Native American homelands are being systematically plundered of white sage — metric tons of plants. While we see lavender farms or other large plantings of plants being sold commercially, most of the white sage we’re seeing for sale everywhere has been ripped and stolen from both public and private lands, according to research by Rose Ramirez and Deborah Small. The plant populations are being decimated.
Broken and Depleted Relationships
Further, the late Tongva Elder Barbara Drake, another Dorothy Ramon Learning Center Dragonfly Award winner — “Saging the World” is dedicated to her memory — taught us not to look on plants as a mere source of materials or food. Instead, she said, they are the source of a powerful and respectful relationship.
Anthropologist Lowell Bean, who also has received the Dragonfly Award, explained in a 2011 Dragonfly Lecture at Dorothy Ramon Learning Center: “Philosophically, everything in the Cahuilla-Serrano-Luiseño environments were living things. They were like people,” he said. They were the Cahuilla Creator Mukat’s gifts to the world.
“When Mukat and Temawayat created the world, they created beings. So if you’re out, for example, picking for a basket, you’re not picking [a plant]. You’re picking up a being. Something that is alive and has a personality, and you treat it as such. It has rights. You talk to it.
“If you’re going to hunt a deer, or a major game animal like a mountain sheep, prior to the hunt, you would communicate with that animal and ask its permission for you to use it. And the deer, as the song indicates, knew you were going to do that. And this was his place on Earth. Just as the acorn has its own place on the Earth. And the chia seed has its own place on Earth. You treat it with respect for it.
“It just isn’t a religious matter that you treat it respectfully. It’s because it’s also a spiritual being.
“But, what’s the point? Some old Indian fellows many years ago got together and they figured out there is a thing called an ecological ethic. You have this ecology and all these things in this world that can support mankind. And if you don’t take care of it, you’re going to lose it. If you take care of it well, you’re going to live better than if you don’t take care of it well.
“So there were rules and regulations about how we treated the animal world and the plant world. We treated it with respect.
“What does that mean? That means you don’t overuse it.”2
White sage (Pat Murkland Photo)
Traditional Uses
Wild tobacco, not sage, traditionally was used for blowing smoke in ceremonies.
White sage wasn’t just burned up; it serves as a purifier, food, and medicine plant. Seeds were ground into food and also used as eye cleansers. Leaves were used for food seasonings and for hair shampoo and dye, according to Katherine Saubel and Lowell Bean in Temalpakh.
Plant notes provided to Dorothy Ramon Learning Center by Barbara Drake say: “Sage tea helps relieve congestion and stuffiness due to a cold. You can use the tea [to] … gargle and to soothe sore gums,” she wrote.3 She noted it also is burned in bundles as a prayer plant. And she discussed how sage leaves make a good insect repellant.
The late Elder Martha Chacon of San Manuel Reservation told anthropologist Michael Lerch that white sage is a medicine plant, and, “If you have a cold you pick out the fresh stems, they’re long, tall, real fresh. Peel it, you eat it. It’s good for your throat.” 4 White sage leaves, sometimes with non-native eucalyptus leaves, were also used in sweathouse settings to treat nasal congestion and sinus problems, she said.
This spring’s white sage gets ready to flower (Pat Murkland Photo).
“Fernando Librado said that a hunter placed the leaves of white sage in his mouth so that the deer would not detect his presence. … Maria Solares recommended placing the fresh, strong-scented leaves of white sage on one’s head as an effective treatment for headache,” Jan Timbrook writes in Chumash Ethnobotany: Plant Knowledge Among the Chumash People of Southern California.5
What to do? For starters, grow your own white sage, Rose Ramirez and Deborah Small say. Protect plants; don’t steal them. And don’t support those who profit from stolen sage, they say. "Yes, we want people to plant it if they want to use it and not to imitate Native ceremony,” Rose Ramirez says. “The cultural appropriation is why we are in such trouble. People are not stealing it to use as a tea, they are stealing it to imitate Native ceremony. Development and climate change are taking its toll, too. We also encourage if one must buy, then they have to make sure that it is coming from a farm-grown source."
Thank you
Thank you to Rose Ramirez, Deborah Small, and California Native Plant Society for working to protect white sage. Dorothy Ramon Learning Center is grateful to Barbara Drake for teaching us the wonder of relationships with native plants. The Center, led by Elder Ernest Siva (Cahuilla-Serrano), saves and shares Southern California Native American cultures, languages, history, and traditional arts.
We welcome all donations. (MORE INFO.) We welcome your EMAIL. Thank you from Editor Pat Murkland, April 20, 2022.
Sources for Indigenous plant names: Cahuilla, Lowell John Bean and Katherine Siva Saubel, Temalpakh: Cahuilla Indian knowledge and usage of plants, 1972, Malki-Ballena Press, pp. 136-138; Luiseño and Serrano, Kenneth C. Hill, Serrano Dictionary, University of Arizona, 1989 version; Chumash dialects, Jan Timbrook, Chumash Ethnobotany: Plant Knowledge Among the Chumash People of Southern California, © 2007 Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and Heyday Books, pp. 184-186, and Serrano, Ernest Siva (personal communication).
Recorded with Lowell Bean’s permission, 2011.
Barbara Drake wrote plant uses on index cards and used these cards in her displays at events. These notes are from those index cards.
Michael K. Lerch, “Serrano Uses of Plants in Joshua Tree National Park,” 1997, Dorothy Ramon Learning Center library archives.
p. 186.