Sage smudging, which involves lighting sage, extinguishing the flame and then spreading the scented smoke, is an indigenous practise. A peaceful practise meant to cleanse negative energy and bless the space. It’s a respectful and beautiful AMERICAN historical practise, by AMERICA’s native peoples.

The fact that anyone could be arrested for that seems like pure insanity! However, the people who are supposed to protect and serve us decided at a Trump protest back in July that holding a handful of smoldering sage and protesting peacefully was against the law and Josie Valadez was arrested. Her sage was even stamped on, in utter disrespect.

The video can be seen below:

Josie was arrested and given a court case for apparently disobeying a lawful order to put out an active fire. Clearly that was BS as there was no active fire.

Josie reacted with her own video statement, below.

She was also quoted as saying:

“The police told me I disobeyed a lawful order to put out an active fire. There was no active fire, for sage burns after you remove the fire from it. Now they crushed my sage in the street. Smudging sage is an Indigenous practice that has happened for generations upon generations on this very land. It is used to cleanse negative energies and bless the space. They (DPD) by crushing my sage and prohibiting me from practicing my spirituality, they are actively abridging upon my constitutional rights. I can practice my spirituality in whatever form I choose. Their law enforcement is actively anti-indigenous, anti-brown and the folks that arrested me were actually brown folks themselves and if that doesn’t tell you something I don’t know what does.” – Josie Valadez Fraire

WORD!

We gotta stick with out native brothers and sisters, the fact that the dumbass police had no understanding of her practise is outrageous. Shouldn’t you be trained on cultural sensitivity?

Josie gathered a lot of support on social media and from the activist community. When her court date came in August he case was thrown out, as it should have always been. Josie’s time and money should NEVER have been wasted.

Now, things get better. Josie is using the opportunity as she should and wants to bring charges to the officer who detained her.

This NEEDS help, we need signatures to help her on this and a Petition is setup on CHANGE.ORG here. https://www.change.org/p/mitchell-r-morrissey-denver-district-attorney-justice-for-josie

Let’s GET JUSTICE FOR JOSIE.