Church on the B-Sides Vol. VII: The Envy of the Original, the Colonization of Language, and the War for the Sacred

When the Copy Replaces the Source and the Sacred Becomes a Hashtag

Every time I bring this up, not always, but often enough, it touches a nerve. Sometimes people don’t say anything. Sometimes they get loud. It’s not just white folks either. It’s everyone. I’ve said it in person here in Austin, I’ve said it online—Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook. The resistance is palpable. Because what I’m pointing to isn’t just appropriation. It’s not just spiritual bypass. It’s the ache at the center of the modern identity crisis. And nobody wants to admit it:

A lot of people want to be Native American.

Not because they are, but because they want to be original. They want to be aligned with something that feels pure, ancient, rooted. Something that predates colonization and industrialization and everything that feels hollow and plastic. I get it. Who wouldn’t want to belong to something that feels like it came from the beginning of time?

Who wouldn’t want to be part of the origin story?

But what nobody wants to say out loud is that this desire…especially when it comes from people who are not Indigenous to this land…is another form of colonization. It’s envy dressed up as reverence. And envy, when it doesn’t know its own name, always turns extractive.

And to make it worse, it’s often Mexicans, those of us who actually carry at least half of Indigenous blood right alongside the blood of the Conquistador— are made “the other” on the land that our ancestors belong to. While others come in with Etsy feathers and talk about their “1/8th Cherokee” great-grandmother, or light white sage like it’s a mood booster, or use DNA test results like spiritual credit scores.

What we’re dealing with isn’t just the theft of rituals or symbols. It’s the theft of memory. It’s the desire to replace what’s been lost with something that still has power—but isn’t yours to hold.

And the problem isn’t just spiritual—it’s linguistic. It’s cosmological.

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I want to talk about the word shaman for a minute, because it’s the perfect example of how language gets colonized first, before land or people ever do.

The word “shaman” comes from the Evenki language, a Tungusic dialect spoken by Indigenous people of Siberia. The original word is šamán, which referred to a person who entered ecstatic trance states to commune with spirits and heal the community. It was a specific role, within a specific cosmology, tied to the land and spiritual ecology of Siberian peoples.

But by the time the word made it into Western academic texts—thanks in large part to Mircea Eliade, who wrote Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy—it had been abstracted, globalized, and force-fit onto every Indigenous medicine person the Western gaze encountered.

“The shaman is a psychopomp, and in some cultures, he is also priest, mystic, and poet.”
— Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

Eliade, who also wrote The Sacred and the Profane, was influential in shaping how the West understood sacredness in the 20th century. He treated the “shaman” as a kind of universal archetype—a person who heals through ecstasy and symbolic death—but in doing so, he helped erase the cultural specificity of thousands of spiritual systems across Africa, the Americas, and Asia. It was a colonial move, dressed up in scholarship.

“The modern man has desacralized his world and assumed a profane existence, but the symbols, myths, and rituals remain embedded in his unconscious.”
— Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane

Because once you universalize a word, you can disconnect it from place. From language. From the rites that give it meaning. Once you do that, you can sell it. You can self-identify with it. You can build a brand around it. You can cosplay sacredness without ever submitting to it.

This is what I mean when I say that colonization begins with language. It starts when words are taken out of context and given new definitions by people who have no real relationship to the land, the spirits, or the cosmology those words came from. Once the word is disembodied, everything else is fair game.

“He who loses the words, loses the world.”
— African proverb

And then what happens? People start using that word—shaman—as if it means something universal, something archetypal, something that belongs to everyone. And now it’s in yoga bios and LinkedIn titles and Instagram handles. But what does it actually mean if you haven’t been initiated? And I don’t mean formal ceremony—I mean lived initiation. I mean rupture. Ego death. Illness. Grief. Ancestral visitation. The kind of initiation that costs you something.

“The gods have become diseases. Zeus no longer rules Olympus, but rather the solar plexus, and disorders the inner realm.”
— Carl Jung

Instead, people pick and choose. They take the bits that feel powerful and leave the ones that demand humility. And they call that “shamanism.” It’s not.

It’s a fucking costume.

This is the colonizer mind at work. The colonizer mind isn’t always white. It isn’t always male. But it’s always entitled. It’s the mind that believes everything is available for the taking. The mind that doesn’t know the difference between curiosity and consumption. The mind that replaces reverence with rebranding.

“To speak falsely is to betray the soul; for speech is the image of the soul.”
— Corpus Hermeticum

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I’ve seen people talk about being “multi-tribal” or “of mixed ancestry” like it’s a license to bypass. But if you’re not doing decolonization work—of your mind, your body, your theology—then what does that ancestry actually mean?

If you haven’t grieved the rupture or studied the root, then you’re just name-dropping ancestors you don’t actually know.

And I say this as someone with Mestiza blood.

I carry the colonized and the colonizer. I didn’t read that in a book. I live that tension every day. The violence that created my people is the same violence that wants to sell their medicine back to them with a markup. That tension—between worlds, between bloodlines—is not just political. It’s spiritual. And it’s fertile ground for a new consciousness, one that refuses to erase either side of the paradox.

“La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual cultural perspectives. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality.”
— Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

But to get there, we have to stop romanticizing indigeneity and start doing the hard work of remembering our own cosmologies.

Europeans have their own healers.

The Yoruba, the Akan, the Mende, the Igbo, the Bakongo—they all have names for their medicine people, their spiritual intermediaries, their diviners. So do the Norse. The Celts. The Slavs. The Germans. The problem is not that people don’t have lineages. The problem is they don’t want to do the work of returning to them.

They’d rather borrow someone else’s that looks more powerful, more trendy, more marketable.

And that’s what makes this moment so confusing for people. The sacred has been colonized both in form and in language. So the ones who carry the original bloodlines are sidelined, while the ones who carry the copied version get visibility, get credit, get platformed.

This is how neocolonialism works in the spiritual world.
This is how the copy gets more praise than the source.
This is how envy becomes empire, all over again.

“The absence of initiation is the presence of emptiness. The West is dying of spiritual anemia.”
— Malidoma Somé

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So no, I’m not impressed by your DNA test. I don’t care what your grandma said about her cheekbones. I want to know what cosmology you’ve inherited, what gods you’ve wrestled with, what language you’re trying to reclaim. I want to know what your ancestors called their healer, and whether you’ve earned the right to speak that name with your mouth full of grief and awe.

Because until you’ve done that, what you’re doing isn’t reclaiming.
It’s consuming.

And consumption, especially of the sacred, will never lead to belonging.
Only the surrender to humility and reverence will.

About the Author

Chriselda Pacheco is a chicana, political heretic and the founder of The Lilith Academy, a shadow work ecosystem for women, specializing in decolonization, Christian deconstruction, and the reclamation of feminine primordial power. A retired sex worker, independent journalist, writer, philosopher and politically homeless thinker, she examines the intersection of sex, power, myth, culture and politics with a razor-sharp wit. As a consecrated Neo-Luciferian Gnostic priestess (2014), she weaves esotericism, cultural critique, and unapologetic storytelling to expose the hidden machinery of empire and the collective shadows we refuse to face.

Find her courses, services and unfiltered takes at www.thelilithacademy.com.

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