
Strategies for:
- Advancing Stronger Protection
- Assuring Access for Indigenous Spiritual Practitioners
- Reducing the Risks of Cultural Appropriation of Sacred and Ceremonial Plants
Introduction
To date, there is no integrated, overarching set of policy guidelines, special plant status designations, or acts of Congress that tangibly protect sacred and ceremonial plants required for the spiritual practices of Native American communities.
The best we have is the statement of National Park Service (NPS) Director Charles F. Sams III, in Guidance for Implementing 36 CFR 2.6— Plant Gathering by Federally Recognized Tribes for Traditional Purposes. This nine-page memo provides context for the more general NPS plant gathering regulation 36-CFR 2.6. That regulation
established a management framework that provides for designated members of federally recognized Tribes to gather plants or plant parts for traditional purposes from park lands under an agreement and permit. The regulation went into effect on August 11, 2016, but does not specifically refer to issues regarding sacred and ceremonial plants as opposed to those used for food, fiber, medicine or crafts.
Like all U.S. citizens, members of the Indigenous or Native Nations, the Native Hawaiian communities, and Indigenous Alaskans should enjoy the right to maintain their traditional religious expressions that are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Their access to plants used in their spiritual expressions should be regarded as part of their rights to practice their religious traditions. While Mexico has given a special status designation to certain sacred plants used by its Indigenous peoples under its legal framework for protecting threatened and endangered plants, the U.S. has not yet done so.
That is ironic, for over the last two decades, Indigenous nations and federal land management agencies have made enormous and laudable strides in identifying and protecting vulnerable sacred sites of land and water. They have collectively devised innovative means of safeguarding them for use in ceremonies and seasonal rituals, sacred pilgrimages and cultural renewals. However, sacred, ceremonial and sacramental plants throughout the U.S.—some of them integral to Indigenous peoples’ creation and origin narratives—remain much more vulnerable for several reasons.
Between the catastrophic effects of climate change, land and water development, and overharvesting by non-Indigenous users who are accidentally or intentionally cultural appropriating these plants, many species of trees, herbs, vines, cacti, succulents and grasses of spiritual significance may be more in peril than ever before.
According to a United Nations Environment Program (2019) report, one-third of all animal and plant species on the planet could face extinction by 2070 due to climate change interacting with other stressors, if Paris Accord recommendations for reducing greenhouse gas emissions are not heeded. Based on data analysis from the University of Arizona, 28% of all plant species are predicted to be lost from their natural habitats by 2070, with an increasingly higher percentage occurring in arid subtropical and tropical climes than the global average (Román-Palacios and Wiens 2020).
Of the species potentially being lost, plants of utmost importance to the well-being of humankind will continue to be locally extirpated or globally extinguished. These include plants used as foods, drinks and medicines for our physical and nutritional health; those providing ecosystem services for our environmental health; and those sacred and ceremonial plants essential to the spiritual health and constitutionally guaranteed religious expression of the world’s diverse cultures and faiths. These losses are tragic for us all, but especially so for the Indigenous people who have had direct contact and high regard for these plants.
In addition to suffering from the impacts of climate change as all other species on earth are, many plants important to Indigenous place-based spiritual traditions have become inaccessible to traditional foragers because their time-tried sources have been depleted through unethical cultural appropriation.
The Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund (2024) has recently summarized threats to these sacred, ceremonial and medicinal plants. These include:
- loss of habitat due to agricultural, mining and energy production;
- overharvest, improper harvest, poaching and black market trade;
- dramatic increases in global demand;
- disconnection from biocultural knowledge and traditional caretakers;
- lack of Indigenous access to land where the plants grow;
- pressure on Indigenous sovereignty from those interested in psychotropic and medicinal plants.
Defining Sacred versus Ceremonial Plants: Continuum or Distinct Categories?
In Native American Ethnobotany Daniel Moerman (1998), wisely distinguished three different categories of plants of concern to us here:
- Sacred items: plants or plant parts dedicated or set apart for the service or worship of deity; Ceremonial items: Any item made from plant parts used for ceremonial purposes; and
- Hallucinogens [a subset of drugs or medicines]: Substance that induces hallucinations.
Although Moerman concedes that these categories may be “fuzzy sets,” with a few species overlaping into two or all three of the categories, he tallied 21 genera or “kinds” of sacred plants such as tobacco, elderberry, ironwood, maize and spruce; 173 kinds of ceremonial plants, including agaves cottonwood, firs, sage, saguaro cacti, wild sunflowers, and tobacco; and just 11 kinds of hallucinogens, including black drink or yaupon; Colorado four o’clock, datura or jimsonweed, and peyote.
In preliminary surveys from all ethnographic records of North America’s Indigenous or “First” Nations, perhaps only 5 to 6 % of the plant genera historically described as sacred or ceremonial are hallucinogens, and even a smaller percentage of native wild species on public lands induce hallucinations.
Other categories are plants used as talismans and offerings to ward off evil; plants used in ceremonies or rituals to mark rites of passage or seasonal events; plants used as “magic” to assure good hunting; plants fermented into alcoholic or emetic drinks used to “bring rains,” prophesize good harvests, or purge toxins or curses; and plants used to mark sites of spiritual power and primordial cultural significance.
If any one of us searched the internet for definitions and lists of sacred plants, what we might find today is far different than what we would have encountered two to three decades ago when Moerman did his study. Where older definitions might emphasize plants that are held in high regard because of their significance in a culture or faith’s origin, creation, identity formation and migration narratives, today, many websites and books tend to use the term “sacred plants” synonymously with hallucinogenic,” “psychedelic” “entheogenic,” or “psychotropic” plants that might trigger an altered state of consciousness that may lead toward enlightenment, ecstasy, or psychic transformation.
While it is that clear peyote, tobacco and sacred datura found in North American landscapes have been used ceremonially for spiritual awakening or metanoia, it is unfortunate that many people now assume that the term “sacred plants” refers only to such mind-altering plants used in ecstatic ceremonies. In many cases, there is a continuum of uses and values that reflects the diversity of cultural contexts in which plants are given special significance in a culture’s oral histories and rituals.