Sweet Grass

Sweetgrass (Hierochloe odorata, also called Anthoxanthum nitens) is a fragrant perennial grass native to northern North America and parts of Eurasia, recognized by the warm, vanilla-like scent of its dried blades that comes from the naturally occurring compound coumarin. It grows in moist meadows and along stream edges and has been harvested, braided, and burned ceremonially by Indigenous peoples across the northern plains, Great Lakes region, and subarctic for as long as these nations have existed as communities.

Its English name, sweetgrass, translates the Anishinaabe name wiingaashk and other Indigenous names that similarly describe the plant’s scent. In Lakota it is called wachanga. These names carry the plant’s identity and its purpose within the communities that gave them.

History and origins

The ceremonial use of sweetgrass among many Indigenous peoples of North America is ancient and deeply embedded in spiritual practice. In Anishinaabe tradition, sweetgrass is one of the four sacred medicines alongside tobacco, cedar, and sage, each with specific teachings and protocols governing their use. Braiding sweetgrass into three-strand braids is itself a ritual act, and the braid carries specific meaning related to body, mind, and spirit.

The wider world became aware of sweetgrass primarily through the publication of ethnobotanical and spiritual memoirs from Indigenous authors in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, notably Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), which brought the plant and its significance to an enormous general audience. This increased awareness has also prompted important conversations about the ethics of non-Indigenous people adopting its ceremonial use.

Spiritual significance

Within the Indigenous traditions where sweetgrass is sacred, its burning is understood to be pleasing to benevolent spirits and to call them into a space. Where sage or cedar might be burned to clear or purify by pushing out what is unwanted, sweetgrass is typically burned after this clearing to invite what is good, functioning as a kind of spiritual welcome. The sweet scent is understood as a gift to the spirits, a way of honoring their presence and asking for their help.

The braid form is itself meaningful: the three strands represent different aspects of a whole, and the act of braiding is a form of prayer or meditation in many communities. Sweetgrass braids are kept in homes as a source of blessing and protection and are offered at ceremonies, funerals, and other significant moments.

For the non-Indigenous practitioner

Practitioners outside the Indigenous communities where sweetgrass is sacred can engage respectfully with the plant through education and acknowledgment rather than adoption of specific ceremonies. Learning from Indigenous authors and teachers, understanding the plant’s significance within its original context, and supporting Indigenous-owned businesses that cultivate and braid sweetgrass responsibly are all meaningful acts.

The scent of sweetgrass, the act of holding a braid and noticing its fragrance, can itself be a moment of mindful encounter with a remarkable plant and with the living traditions it represents. This kind of respectful, informed appreciation honors the plant and its communities without appropriating what belongs to them.

If you are drawn to working with plants for spiritual purification and calling in good energies, many traditions offer their own plants for this purpose: lavender, rosemary, pine, and frankincense all serve similar functions in European and Mediterranean folk practice and are appropriate choices for practitioners from those backgrounds.

In myth and popular culture

Sweetgrass holds a place in the ceremonial and narrative traditions of numerous Indigenous peoples, and some of these traditions have been shared with wider audiences through literature and ethnobotany. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2013 book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants brought the plant to an enormous non-Indigenous readership, weaving together Potawatomi botanical tradition with Western scientific ecology. The book’s wide reception generated significant conversation about the ethics of non-Indigenous engagement with Indigenous plant traditions, and Kimmerer has spoken directly about what respectful appreciation entails.

In Anishinaabe oral tradition, sweetgrass is sometimes described as the hair of Mother Earth, a teaching that locates the plant within a broader relational worldview in which the natural world is understood as a community of persons, not a collection of resources. This teaching has been shared by Anishinaabe and other Algonquian elders in public contexts, including educational and environmental organizations.

Sweetgrass braids appear in museum collections across North America, often collected without context in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during periods when Indigenous ceremonial practice was actively suppressed by law. The repatriation of ceremonial objects, including braids with specific provenance, has become part of a broader movement to restore what was taken. This history is part of the living context of sweetgrass as a spiritual plant, and engagement with it without awareness of this history is incomplete.

Myths and facts

Several misconceptions persist around sweetgrass and its spiritual significance.

• Sweetgrass is not interchangeable with white sage in practice or in tradition. White sage is primarily a smoke-purification and clearing plant in California Indigenous traditions; sweetgrass is understood to invite benevolent spiritual presences after a space has been cleared. The two plants serve different functions and come from different traditions, and treating them as equivalent erases those distinctions.
• The term “smudging” is specific to certain Indigenous practices and is not a neutral word for burning any herb for spiritual purposes. Using it outside its original cultural context is considered by many Indigenous educators to be inappropriate. Practitioners from non-Indigenous backgrounds are often asked to use terms like “smoke cleansing” for their own herbal burning practices.
• Sweetgrass does not need to be burned to release its scent. Rubbing the dried braid between the palms releases coumarin, the compound responsible for the plant’s distinctive vanilla-and-hay fragrance. The braid itself, without any burning, is used as a fragrant talisman in many contexts.
• Purchasing commercially available sweetgrass braids does not automatically constitute respectful engagement with the plant. Researching the supplier, preferring Indigenous-owned businesses, and understanding what the plant means to the communities that hold it are part of respectful relationship, not merely a commercial transaction.
• Sweetgrass is not a psychoactive plant. Its ceremonial significance is spiritual and cultural, not pharmacological, and it does not alter consciousness through inhalation. References to it as hallucinogenic or trance-inducing in popular wellness content are inaccurate.