Natives Speak Out Against Cultural Appropriation in ‘Haunted Mansion’

Disney’s Haunted Mansion, the live-action movie adaptation of the Disneyland ride, is coming out on July 28, and a new poster highlights the characters who will be taking on the mansion’s many ghosts. However, there’s one detail on the poster that never should have been included—and it plays into a long history of the appropriation of Native traditions.

In the lower right hand corner of the poster, you can see a bundle of burning leaves, presumably white sage, in an abalone shell. White sage is a medicinal herb native to the U.S. and Mexico, and Native people have long partnered with the plant in medicine and ritual. Tongva comic book artist and illustrator Weshoyot Alvitre spotted the detail on the poster, and called it out as the latest example of the appropriation of Native spirituality for profit.

The poster features the white sage bundle, known as a smudge stick, in a collection of occult paraphernalia including a crystal ball, bell, candle, and grimoire. Indeed, white sage has exploded in popularity among New Age and occult practitioners in recent years, with numerous stores from Whole Foods to Sephora selling smudge sticks.

However, white sage’s popularity as a trendy incense has divorced the herb from its Native traditions and protocols—and led to a dramatic rise in overharvesting and poaching. In a recent Atlas Obscura interview, Chumash herbalist Julie Cordero-Lamb recounts an incident in which she brought students to visit a white sage patch, only to find that it had been destroyed by poachers:

As an herbalist, Cordero-Lamb had brought many youth groups to this site to teach them how to care for the land and harvest [white sage] leaves, respectfully and sparingly. Usually, they were alone in the hills. But as they pulled up to the trailhead, they saw a huge truck, filled to mounding with white sage, driving away. 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. “It was completely destroyed.” Some of the elders present “sobbed their hearts out.”

Last year, filmmakers Rose Ramirez and Deborah Small, along with the California Native Plant Society, released a documentary called Saging the World, which delves into the exploitation of white sage. In the documentary, Native practitioners explain the harm caused by the appropriation of their ceremonies, while park rangers reveal that poachers smuggle tens of thousands of pounds of white sage from protected lands and into stores like Walmart, Amazon, and Etsy.

Along with numerous Natives’ calls to stop buying white sage, the Indigenous arts and culture group Meztli Projects has published guidelines on how to protect the plant and hold retailers accountable.

Western occult traditions contain plenty of spooky fodder for films like Haunted Mansion, so there’s no reason to take from Native traditions as well. Here’s hoping Disney rights this wrong before Haunted Mansion‘s release.

(featured image: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)