The new age industry has perfected a form of value extraction that would make colonial administrators proud. It takes sacred practices from indigenous cultures, strips them of their cultural context, repackages them for wealthy Western consumers, and profits handsomely while the original communities remain marginalized.
This is not cultural exchange. This is spiritual strip mining.
The Extraction Process
The mechanics are straightforward. A sacred indigenous practice—sage burning, ayahuasca ceremonies, sweat lodges, chakra systems—gets discovered by Western practitioners. The practice is then decontextualized from its original cultural, historical, and community frameworks.
What emerges is a commodified product that retains the exotic appeal of “ancient wisdom” while removing any uncomfortable reminders of how that wisdom became available for extraction.
The original communities are effectively erased from the narrative. Their ongoing struggles, their resistance to colonialism, their current poverty—none of this appears in the sanitized spiritual product being sold.
The Value Inversion
The most perverse aspect of this system is how it inverts value relationships. The communities that created and maintained these practices for millennia receive nothing. Meanwhile, the extractors—typically white, middle-class entrepreneurs—build lucrative businesses around their “discoveries.”
A Lakota sweat lodge ceremony becomes a $200 “detox experience” in a suburban wellness center. Traditional plant medicines become $5000 retreat packages in Costa Rica. Ancient meditation techniques become subscription-based apps with venture capital backing.
The value flows exclusively upward to those who already possess economic and social capital.
Historical Amnesia as Business Model
The new age industry requires historical amnesia to function. Acknowledging the reality of colonialism would undermine the entire business model.
If practitioners had to confront the fact that indigenous communities were systematically destroyed to make their spiritual shopping possible, the experience would lose its therapeutic appeal. The “ancient wisdom” narrative works precisely because it skips over the centuries of violence that interrupted the transmission of that wisdom.
This amnesia is not accidental. It is structurally necessary for the commodification process to work.
The Authenticity Paradox
New age practitioners often speak of seeking “authentic” spiritual experiences. But authenticity requires context, community, and continuity—precisely what the extraction process destroys.
A sage ceremony performed by someone who learned it from a YouTube video is not authentic in any meaningful sense. It is a simulation of authenticity, stripped of the cultural knowledge, community relationships, and historical understanding that gave the original practice its meaning.
The pursuit of authenticity through appropriation becomes fundamentally self-defeating.
Colonialism Never Ended
The new age industry demonstrates that colonialism did not end with political independence. It simply evolved more sophisticated extraction mechanisms.
Instead of taking land and resources through military force, modern colonialism takes cultural knowledge through market mechanisms. The result is the same: value flows from marginalized communities to dominant ones.
The indigenous communities that created these practices remain impoverished while their spiritual traditions generate wealth for others. This is not historical coincidence. This is ongoing structural violence.
The Guru Complex
Many new age leaders position themselves as spiritual authorities despite having no legitimate connection to the traditions they teach. They claim special access to ancient wisdom while demonstrating profound ignorance of the cultures from which they extract.
This guru complex serves a crucial function in the appropriation process. It provides a white intermediary who can make indigenous practices palatable to white consumers. The guru becomes the translator who removes any challenging political content from the spiritual product.
Resistance as Inconvenience
When indigenous communities object to the appropriation of their practices, they are typically dismissed as overly sensitive or trapped in outdated thinking. Their resistance is reframed as an obstacle to universal spiritual progress.
This dismissal reveals the true power dynamics at work. The same communities whose wisdom is valuable enough to commercialize are somehow not qualified to determine how their own traditions should be used.
The Wellness-Industrial Complex
The new age appropriation of indigenous practices must be understood within the broader context of the wellness industry—now worth over $1.5 trillion globally.
This industry has successfully commodified human suffering and spiritual seeking. It promises that any problem can be solved through the right combination of extracted practices, packaged experiences, and purchased wisdom.
Indigenous traditions become raw materials in this industrial process, valuable only insofar as they can be processed into marketable products.
Beyond Individual Responsibility
While individual new age practitioners bear some responsibility for their choices, focusing on individual behavior misses the systemic nature of the problem.
The appropriation of indigenous practices is not an unfortunate side effect of spiritual seeking. It is a predictable outcome of a system that treats all cultural knowledge as potential intellectual property.
Until we address the structural inequalities that make appropriation profitable, individual consciousness-raising will remain inadequate.
The Real Cost
The true cost of new age appropriation extends far beyond offense or disrespect. It perpetuates the marginalization of indigenous communities by extracting their cultural wealth while leaving their material poverty intact.
It also corrupts the practices themselves. Spiritual traditions that were designed to serve community healing become tools for individual self-optimization. Sacred ceremonies become consumer experiences. Ancient wisdom becomes lifestyle content.
Alternative Values
Genuine respect for indigenous traditions would require completely different value systems. It would mean:
- Recognizing indigenous communities as the rightful stewards of their own practices
- Supporting indigenous-led initiatives rather than extractive businesses
- Acknowledging the historical violence that made appropriation possible
- Accepting that some knowledge is not meant for universal consumption
- Understanding that authentic spirituality cannot be purchased
These alternatives threaten the entire business model of the new age industry. Which explains why they are so rarely considered.
The new age movement’s relationship with indigenous practices reveals the sophisticated mechanisms through which colonial value extraction continues in the 21st century. It demonstrates how even the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment can become a form of exploitation when it operates within fundamentally exploitative systems.
The industry’s success depends on maintaining the illusion that these practices exist in a timeless, cultureless void—available for anyone to claim without consequence. This illusion serves the economic interests of extractors while perpetuating the marginalization of the communities from which they extract.
Real transformation would require abandoning the entire framework of spiritual consumption and developing relationships of genuine reciprocity with indigenous communities. But that would threaten the profitable fiction that enlightenment can be purchased at market rates.