The commercial white sage bundle sold as a smudge kit is a twentieth-century retail product, and its rise has a documented cost that the nations whose ceremonies it borrows from have stated publicly rather than left to outside inference. White sage, Salvia apiana, grows wild in a limited range in California and northern Mexico, and demand from the wellness market has driven overharvesting serious enough that some tribal and conservation groups have asked retailers and wildcrafters to stop selling it, since the plant is used ceremonially by the very communities whose supply is being depleted by commercial demand having nothing to do with those ceremonies.
The Muskogee Creek Nation, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and other nations and Indigenous organisations have issued public statements objecting specifically to the sale of bundled sage as a generic New Age product stripped of the protocols, the specific plants, the specific words and the specific people authorised to use them, that govern each nation's own purification rites, arguing that the practice being marketed is not any actual ceremony but a flattened composite that borrows only the outward gesture. This entry has accordingly described the commercial phenomenon and the objection to it rather than any procedure, in keeping with the position stated plainly by the nations concerned: what circulates as smudging in shops and wellness spaces is a separate, modern thing, and treating it as equivalent to, or as license to approximate, the closed ceremonies it borrows its name from is precisely what has been asked to stop.