An inherited practice
The ceremonial use of plants and other sacred medicines is old, varied, and specific. Different communities across the Americas, Africa, and Asia developed distinct practices, embedded in distinct cosmologies, with rules about who could hold them, when, and for what.
What circulates internationally today is usually a compression of that. A practice separated from its language, its calendar, its community obligations, and the long apprenticeship that used to precede holding it. Sometimes that compression is done carefully and in relationship with the originating community. Frequently it is not.
The first honest step is to know which of those your own practice is, and to be able to say so out loud.
What it cost the people who carried it
Many of these traditions survived deliberate suppression. Practitioners were criminalised, converted, or killed, and the practices continued quietly at real personal risk. They exist now because specific people protected them.
Those communities are frequently not the ones benefiting from the current expansion. In several places the raw materials are being extracted at scale from the regions that hold the tradition, the training and the retreats are sold elsewhere, and the money stays where it was collected.
That is worth saying plainly to students, without turning it into a performance of guilt, and without treating acknowledgement as though it were a payment.
What appropriation looks like in practice
The word gets used loosely. Concretely, the recurring patterns are:
- Claiming a lineage, an initiation, or a title that was not actually conferred.
- Using the aesthetics of a tradition, its songs, dress, and language, without its obligations.
- Implying the endorsement of a community that has not endorsed anything.
- Blending several traditions into a single evening and calling the result ancestral.
- Charging premium prices on the authority of a culture that receives none of it.
The test is not whether anyone from that culture is in the room. It is whether the relationship would survive being described accurately to them.
Being honest about what you hold
There is an honourable position available to anyone in this field, and it is simply accuracy. You can say: I learned this from these specific people, over this long, in this setting. I hold no formal lineage. What I offer is my own practice, informed by traditions I did not grow up in, and I am telling you that so you can judge it accordingly.
That statement is more credible than a claimed lineage, harder to dispute, and it leaves the participant able to make an informed decision. It also removes the incentive to keep inflating the story, which is how most people in this field end up stuck.
Reciprocity that is not decorative
Acknowledgement is not reciprocity. Reciprocity is material, ongoing, and specific.
What it can look like: a fixed percentage of revenue going to organisations chosen by the communities themselves rather than by you. Paying teachers from those communities at professional rates, including their travel and their time. Supporting habitat and land protection where the materials are sourced. Sourcing in ways that do not deplete. Being publicly accountable for the amounts.
What it does not look like: a paragraph on a website, a photograph, or a one-off donation mentioned frequently.
Teaching this without flattening it
For anyone teaching or writing in this field, a few habits help. Name your sources specifically. Distinguish what you were taught from what you invented. Do not present a contested history as settled, particularly where archaeological or historical claims are thin. Where a community has asked outsiders not to use something, say so and follow it.
And leave room for students to conclude that the honest thing for them is not to offer this work at all. That conclusion should be an available outcome of a training, not a failure of one.