The Sage That Comes From Trees:

What Every Smudge Bundle Wants You to Know

A stolen plant, a sacred trust, the Tree of Life in each of us — and the healing that was never in the bundle.

by Bunny Sings Wolf   | IndigenousHealing.io

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I want to tell you about a small bag of sage and a dream song that led me here with this in hand and heart.

Now that kind of small bag of sage that was recieved in a huge box of loose sage?  Not the kind you pick up at a crystal shop, or order from a wellness boutique, or find bundled and tagged at a farmer's market.

This sage has a different history. It was torn from the California hillsides by poachers. It was seized. And then, in an act of extraordinary respect and trust, it magically made its way to me — a Lakota Ambassador nine miles from Mato Tipila in Hulett, Wyoming — with a specific instruction:

Tell the truth about it.

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White sage — Salvia apiana — is not a generic spiritual herb. It is a specific plant, a shrub native only to a narrow coastal and inland region stretching from San Luis Obispo County in California down through Baja California, Mexico. For the Cahuilla, the Tongva, the Chumash, and other California tribal nations, this plant is not a product. It is a relative.

In the Cahuilla language, there is no word for 'nature' — because the Cahuilla people know naturally that they are nature. The concept of a separate world that humans observe from outside doesn't exist. Plants are the first people. White sage is family.

When Indigenous elders gather sage, they go to stands their grandparents visited. They sing. They pray. They take only what is needed and give thanks for what remains. The relationship is reciprocal, ancient, and alive.

Or it was — until the market decided white sage was worth money.

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Because white sage grows slowly. It does not bounce back from being cut to the ground. A stand of sage that has grown for generations can be gone in one night. And it will not return in your lifetime.

The California Native Plant Society has been documenting this. Rangers have been stationed. Arrests have been made. And still it continues — because the market for 'smudge bundles' has outpaced the ecology that could ever sustainably supply it.

A quantity of white sage confiscated from illegal poachers was eventually forwarded to me — Bunny Sings Wolf, Ambassador for the Lakota Dakota Nakota Nation — by those connected with its prosecution, who wanted it honored rather than discarded.

Here is what matters: our Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota elders do not use California White Sage in our ceremonies. We have our own medicines — sacred plants native to our Black Hills homeland, gathered in proper relationship since time immemorial. This sage does not belong to our tradition. But it came to us with a story that needed carrying forward.

So I accepted it. And now I am carrying that story to you.

The wellness world has created enormous demand for California White Sage without creating corresponding understanding of what it is, who tends it, or what its commercial harvest is doing to the landscapes and peoples it belongs to.

This is not about blame. Most people who burn a smudge bundle are doing so with a good heart. They want to clear the energy in their home. They want to feel something sacred. They want to connect with something older and wiser than the noise of modern life.

Those are honest longings. And they deserve an honest answer.

The answer has never been in the sage. The answer has always been inside you.

The ancient wisdom I carry — Nature's 4 Steps of Healing: Balance, Harmony, Abundance, Peace — does not point you toward any plant, substance, crystal, or tool as the source of your healing. 

These are doorways. They can open something. But the healing itself?

It is in you. It always was.

This is what our California relations have been trying to protect — not just a plant, but a living understanding of relationship. When a medicine is torn from its place and sold as a product, it is not just the plant that suffers. The understanding suffers. The relationship suffers. And the people who needed the real teaching suffer, because they received a bundle instead of a truth.

I am distributing the confiscated sage — in small, beautiful bags — as an educational gift with donations to the Circle the Walk of Peace Path, our 2028 gathering at Mato Tipila.

Each bag comes with the story you are reading now. The purpose is not to promote the use of white sage. The purpose is to make this the last bag you ever buy — and the first step toward understanding why healing was never IN the bundle.

If you have one of these bags, I ask you: before you burn it, watch the video above. Visit cnps.org/conservation/white-sage. Let the sage teach you what it came here to teach 

— not through burning, but through knowing, and honoring the sacredness of relationship with all things that we each hold in our hands and hearts.

You are not wrong to want something sacred. You are not wrong to reach for a ritual, a ceremony, a plant, a stone. The reaching is the beginning of the journey.

But the journey leads inside.

I would be honored to walk with you there. IndigenousHealing.io is a free global healing community where Indigenous wisdom meets the science of our times through Nature's 4 Steps of Healing. We can now join this circle from our hands and hearts, in a global community right here, connected energetically from our stone-powered devices 24/7 from where we LIVE!

Come in. The circle is always open.

And if you feel called to travel the long distance, do the additional research, dive deeply into your own healing heart to hone the inner resonance skills to stand at Mato Tipila on Summer Solstice, June 20, 2028 — as one of 1,400 Life-honoring Resonance Walkers circling the Sacred Heart of Turtle Island in a live-streamed gathering for global peace — come find your place in the circle now.

The walk has already begun. 🌿

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📹  Watch: Saging the World — https://youtu.be/_V7NoB1UPU8

🌿  Learn more: California Native Plant Society — cnps.org/conservation/white-sage

🌐  Join free: IndigenousHealing.io

🤍  Support: Circle the Walk of Peace Path 2028 — givesendgo.com/indigenoushealing

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Since trees and shrubs are woody perennials with so very much in common, and since the sage that was stolen and brought to my table is itself a woody shrub — a tree relative — I want to honor this moment with my 5 year old's received and saved dream song - simply called 'Song to Trees.'

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If you have ever been a tree hugger as a child — if you ever pressed your face into bark and felt something listening — this is the science that confirms what you always sensed.

Trees and shrubs share a living kinship. California White Sage itself is a woody shrub — structurally, ecologically, and spiritually kin to the trees whose stories echo in every tradition on Earth. Here is a little of what they share:

1.  Woody stems, built to last.

Both trees and shrubs have woody stems that are hard and enduring — unlike soft-stemmed plants that live one season and are gone. This woody tissue is structural memory: the plant's record of every year it has survived.

2.  Perennial — returning, year after year.

They are perennial plants — meaning they live for more than two years, establishing deep root systems and adapting to seasonal changes with a patience that teaches us everything about resilience.

3.  Multiple stems rising from one root.

Shrubs send up multiple stems from a single base — while trees rise on one great trunk. Different expressions of the same deep will: to reach upward, to grow, to give.

4.  Branches that shelter, leaves that breathe.

Both produce leaves and flowers. Both provide shade, habitat, and food for creatures who could not survive without them. Both contribute to the oxygen in every breath you are breathing right now.

5.  Roots dug deep — the foundation that holds.

Within the trunk, life surges up. The deeper the roots, the taller the reach. This is not just botany. This is the pattern of healing — the deeper the inner work, the higher the life you grow.

6.  Guardians of the ecosystem.

Trees and shrubs prevent soil erosion, regulate water cycles, cool the air, shelter the small and the vulnerable. They give without ceasing. Our Lakota teachers have always said: the trees were here before us, and will be here after us. They are our elders.

The tree of life grows within each of us — in our roots, our trunk, our branches reaching toward the sky. That is the walk. That is the healing.

Mato Tipila — what many call Devils Tower — rises from the earth nine miles from my home here in Hulett, Wyoming. Many tribal stories from surrounding nations speak of it not as stone, but as the ancient remains of an enormous tree — perhaps the Tree of Life itself. That story deserves its own post, its own ceremony of telling. But I plant the seed here: the walk we are gathering to take in 2028 circles what may be the oldest tree ancestor on this continent.

The walk has already begun. 🌿

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Mitakuye Oyasin — All My Relations 🌿

Bunny Sings Wolf Engberg

Indigenous Wisdom Keeper  · Dream Song Carrier  ·  Ambassador, Lakota Dakota Nakota Nation