I. The First Cut:

You’re not a Shaman. You can’t be.

This isn’t gatekeeping. This is soul-leading.

II. Words Matter 

1. “White" doesn’t mean every person of European descent. We don't all have the same story. I’m speaking to those whose ancestral threads were severed by empire and colonization, not because they were always oppressors, but because they too, were once colonized, Christianized, conquered and burned.

2. “Shaman” doesn’t have an equivalent in English. It’s not a title you snatch for yourself after a weekend retreat, even if you didn’t puke the plants right away. It’s a word that carries specific ancestral, cultural and spiritual responsibilities. 

Today, 'Shaman' has become a universal word, a sort of spiritual Iingua-franca of the modern age. The origin comes from the Tungusic “šamán” and speaks of a whole world - land, ancestors, spirits, stories - woven together through ritual, suffering, duty, love, and prayers.

Anthropologists (mostly white, middle class men) took it, stretched it all over the world and slapped it on every kind of healer, spirit-walker and ghost-talker and popped in into pop culture like a panacea for us all.

But words matter. 

They carry meaning. 

Our ancestors ride our breath in the sounds we speak.

Every Indigenous Peoples have their own names for their Spirited Ones:

• The Sami call us Noids - the listeners

• The Mongols have the Böö

• The Celts spoke of Seers and Druids

• Native Nations speak of Medicine People, Holy People, Ceremonial Leaders (none of which translate to “shaman”)

• The Maya remember the Ajq’ij, the day keepers, and the H-men, the healers who carry the Earth’s songs.

• Across Africas rich lineages, for example the Yoruba have their Babalawo, the Kongo speak of Nganga, and the Southern nations honor the Sangoma.
  

‘Shaman’ has become the word we use when speaking in English - the colonizers tongue -  because the English language has no other words left. English is now the language of the modern world, and it too, has lost its spiritual roots, and with it comes a great forgetting.

III. Why White People Want to Be Shamans

Here’s the tragedy we are not supposed to speak to:

White people had deep, sacred, nature-revering, earth-bound traditions too. We had witches, wise ones, dreamers, singers and listeners of stones, stars, and rivers.

Then came Empire. 

Then came the Burning Times. 

Then came the slow, soul-destroying machine of Christian conquest.

And with it, a rupture far deeper than ritual.

Not just ceremonies lost - but an entire cosmology collapsed.

Nature reduced to resource.

Spirit replaced by institutions.

The Sacred wild made to move indoors and made subservient to the state.

This wasn’t just theft - it was soul replacement.

Our wild ones were tortured, ridiculed, erased.

Our stories were silenced, renamed, forgotten.

A psychic amputation - not just of wisdoms, but of memory itself.

Native knowledge annihilated by the many-faced forces of empire.

The evildoers were different, the story the same: 

stolen lands, lineages erased, wise ones killed, wild ones tamed. 

No wonder we are starving of spiritual hunger.

Our ancestors pain screams in our blood and bones.

Their gods were stolen. Their spirits maimed.

Soul-food gone.

No wonder we see many desperate enough to eat from other’s plates.

But unacknowledged grief doesn’t justify theft.

IV. White-Washing What’s Left Is Not Right

Without memories, seekers grab what looks sacred, piecing together a patchwork of half-digested rites, putting on a show of superficial spirituality that looks cool, sounds right, but doesn’t feel whole.

Picking apart like it’s a fine art; taking feathers from Native ceremonies, stealing beats from African rhythms, and slapping on a Siberian word and mispronouncing it as ‘Shey-man’.

Putting on their traditional costumes like its cosplay. 

Claiming the medicine by imitation, not initiation.

We were taught that to devour is our only power.

Capitalism didn’t just commodify goods; it colonized how we relate:

To each other.

To nature.

To our place in the universe.

In a world where human beings are reduced to resources and stripped of our souls;

We have been made into monsters.

Predators of mass-consumption.

We come to take, not to receive.

Ignorant that there's a difference. 

Selfies in Ceremony.

Sovereign tools sold as souvenirs to tourists.

Too busy, too stressed, to be present with those who need us.

Our children left to learn on their own devices, 

Growing up emulating virtual strangers seen on screens

More familiar than their families’ faces.

Our Elders exiled into ‘care homes’

Their wisdoms made into memes used by self-promoting influencers.

True healing isn’t transactional. 

You can’t buy your way whole.

We have a lot of ground to cover. 

Everyone wants the power. 

Nobody wants the pain.

Chasing the glory to shine without first having been forged.

Your inner fire can only burn bright if you have walked through the flames. 

If you won’t carry the grief, you have no business taking the tools.

V. You Can’t Use the Medicine without Honoring the Wound

I don’t have a problem with the word ‘shaman’ being used. 

It is taking it without honoring the path that I find disrespectful. 

I understand your longing. I will not stand for your laziness.

Calling yourself a shaman isn’t automatically wrong. 

Doing it ‘lightly’ is. 

But here’s the deeper hurt:

Empire didn’t just steal your land.

It steals words, rewrites language.

Guts the good and sells it back.

Disfigured figurines.

All shine, no shadow. 

It is not all “love and light”, friends. 

You’ve been lied to. 

The New age agenda isn’t just naïve - its a strategic sedative.

A softly spoken-spell to reel you into sanitize your soul.

“Good vibes only” keeping you securely in your comfort zone.

Spiritual bypassing disguised as enlightenment.

Teaching you to ignore the darkness, and avoid ‘low vibration emotions’

To stay nice and calm and keep your mask on.

Chanting mantras you don’t understand,

Calling to Gods from other lands. 

That is not holy. Its hollow.

None of this is accidental.

It is Empire.

It is time we call out the oldest trick in their book:

Divide and conquer.

While we fight each other over who’s who,

Empire stays hidden - feeding on our fears of scarcity while they’re making billions.

We’re brainwashed into categories -

Proudly wearing labels like honorary titles that make us feel special and chosen,

Thinking they set us free -  but they keep us in line.

So we stay small, and separated from Spirit that unites us.

Forgetting the real enemy. 

It's not a flag or a skin color or party.

It is not something you can see with your two eyes.

You have to use your other senses.

It wants us angry - but not at it.

Distracted, disempowered and arguing among ourselves.

So it can keep controlling us from within the systems.

We become the proud guards of our own prisons. 

The shamanic path is carved through death, illness, loss, betrayal, exile. 

It demands you lay your life down, again and again, and surrender to spirit. 

That you show up - not for yourself, but for others. 

For the earth herself. 

It will cost you everything you thought you were - your illusions, your comfort, the simplicity and shallowness where you thought you belonged. 

VI. Stitching the Wound with Threads of Remembering

Some of us, the ones who dream true - we who see beyond the superficial, beyond they veils of Maya, into the unseen, the dreamlands, the spirit realms, still carry thin, stubborn threads of memory.

If your soul remembers, you have work to do. 

You have a duty. 

Service, not self-serving.

Not play-acting or self-declaring, but a long, slow, humbling walk on the road of reconnection. 

No one owns the sacred. 

It is our duty to defend it, because no one gets to steal it either.

VII. Final Cut: Mourning Your True Calling

Most white people will never be shamans.

Not because they are inherently bad, but because they were broken. 

Their roots were severed, and their memories burned at the stake.

And there are no shortcuts to regrow a soul.

Yet for the willing - 

those ready to roar the grief in their bones, 

to be humbled, 

to rebuild what cannot be bought,

ready to sacrifice the comforts of consumption culture,

there is a way to walk on.

Not one of stolen titles or store bought feathers, 

but of service, sacrifice and sacred standing.

So what can you do?

You can become something even more vital:

One who remembers.

One who reclaims your roots.

One who rebuilds what was nearly-lost.

Stop pretending.

Start grieving.

Start remembering.

Grief is not a weakness - it is initiation.

The sacrifice laid at the altar of reconnection.

We must be emptied of entitlement before we can hold real medicine.

Not to reclaim a title, 

but to repair a lineage,

To live in right relation.

Let your soul grow new roots from the dust of the dead.

This is the real way home, not through stolen words or appropriation, but through the fierce, tender art of living with an open, faithful, tender heart.

MAY THESE WORDS BE A BEACON.

MAY THEY FIND THE ONES THEY ARE MEANT FOR

AND LEAVE THE REST WITH PEACE.

MAY I REMAIN A CLEAR VESSEL AND HOLLOW BONE

IN SERVICE OF TRUTH, BEAUTY AND SPIRITS OF HOME.

Authors note:

Maya Tiegrah Giri is a Noid and story-teller of Swedish and Sámi blood, with roots to the first known shamans and wild songs carved into her bones.

Raised between realms, she walks the old ways in a modern world, bearing remembrance, resistance and reconnection as living medicine. 

A guardian and Spiritual Mentor, she serves sensitive souls with bold hearts ready to reclaim their powers and embody true spirituality in reality. 

Find her at: TigressMedicine.com