![]() ![]() Mashed into jellies, cooked into porridge, or ground into flour. ![]() ![]() They ate mesquite pods and agave leaves, wild cherries and berries, and every bit of the cactus. But from European texts, oral traditions, and some surviving practices, we do know that Native Californians had incredibly varied diets based upon careful management of wild plants and game. ![]() Poachers are routinely found with hundreds of pounds of white sage during busts.Īccording to the late Tongva elder and cultural educator Barbara Drake, centuries of colonization have made it impossible to fully know how important white sage was in historical Native Californian foodways. “It hurts Native Californian people.” Weshoyot Alvitre, a Tongva artist, has argued that the destruction of white-sage lands amounts to cultural genocide. “We’re losing native plants and environments on high speed,” says Rose Ramirez, a Chumash- and Yaqui-descended basket weaver who works to raise awareness of white sage exploitation. And this loss has played out, in a turn of tragic irony, just as local Native groups have ramped up efforts, through cooking collectives and cultural education, to revitalize long-ravaged culinary traditions. Many Native Californians have already stopped taking white sage from traditional gathering sites in order to protect them. But Indigenous and conservationist groups alike believe this unchecked wave of mass commercial harvesting is rapidly driving it to the brink. Officially, white sage is not endangered, nor even threatened. Rangers at the protected North Etiwanda Preserve, 1,200 acres not far from Los Angeles, whose unique ecosystem is anchored around white sage, often bust people sneaking hundreds of pounds of uprooted shrubs out in sacks. In recent years, skyrocketing demand for white sage, fueled by new age beliefs about its powers as a cleansing and calming tool (that largely appropriate but misrepresent Indigenous traditions), has incited rampant over-exploitation. “It was completely destroyed.” Some of the elders present “sobbed their hearts out.” When they got to the sage grounds, they found that the people in the truck had “ripped it all up by the roots,” she recalls. But as they pulled up to the trailhead, they saw a huge truck, filled to mounding with white sage, driving away. A particularly pungent and potent species of sage, it has a unique flavor: intensely earthy, with a slight pepper and pine kick.Īs an herbalist, Cordero-Lamb had brought many youth groups to this site to teach them how to care for the land and harvest leaves, respectfully and sparingly. While it’s best known for its use in local Native spiritual and medicinal traditions, its leaves, seeds, and stalks have also been a cornerstone of regional cooking for centuries. But it only grows in the scrublands of Southern California and Northwestern Mexico. Unlike common sage-a short shrub usually found in stores and herb gardens, which grows all over the world-white sage can grow upwards of five feet, into dense thickets of long white-to-lavender-tinted green leaves. A few years ago, Julie Cordero-Lamb took a handful of kids from her tribe, the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation, to a remote spot in the hills between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles where their community has, for generations, gathered white sage. ![]()
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