Annette McGivney had been interested in the self-help and wellness movement as a way to heal from a traumatic childhood.
"I had been dabbling in all types of wellness literature and books and things like that," she said. "My antenna was up."
But McGivney, a journalist, writer and editor who has written five books, said she became interested in a 2009 event where three people lost their lives during a sweat lodge ceremony led by celebrity self-help guru James Arthur Ray in Sedona.
"I started following it," she said.
That interest in wellness and in the man whose negligence and ignorance of the proper way to conduct Indigenous ceremonies spurred McGivney to devote six years to researching and writing a new book on Ray's career. She also explored how
the wellness and self-care industries have stolen aspects of Native spirituality and how celebrity gurus exploit people seeking purpose and prosperity.
"Plastic Shaman: The True Story of a Deadly Self-Help Retreat and America's Misguided Quest for Wellness," which will be released Sept. 15, tells the story of Ray's rise to celebrity status, and the lives of Kirby Brown, 38; James Shore, 40; and Liz Neuman, 49, who died in the sweat lodge.
Ray was also implicated in the suicide of another of his followers, Colleen Conaway, who was forced to participate in a humiliating exercise and whose ideas of reinventing herself were ridiculed at a Ray seminar.
The October 2009 sweat lodge ceremony capped a wellness event where people paid $10,000 each to engage in Ray's philosophies of self-empowerment, based on pseudoscientific principles and positive thinking.
Nearly two years after the disastrous sweat lodge incident, Ray was tried and sentenced to two years in prison on a charge of negligent homicide. After his release in July 2013, he restarted his self-help company anew — but without sweat lodges.
Ray died suddenly in 2025 at age 67.
However, the $2 trillion self-help and wellness industry roars on.
McGivney traced the origins of the industry, how it grew in the wake of people who were desperate for meaning in their lives, how it lifted facets of Native spirituality wholesale and then sold their teachings for up to thousands of dollars, and how this huge movement lacks any regulation or restrictions.
She also learned of a group of Native people who had been advocating against the fake ceremonies at Angel Valley Resort, which is on the lands of the Yavapai and Apache peoples, and developed a relationship with local Native rights advocates Ivan Lewis, Lance Morris and Sylvia Wilson to share their story in the book.
'Spiritual void' leads many to charlatans
During the six years she spent researching and writing "Plastic Shaman," McGivney said she learned that many seekers feel culturally adrift.
"There's this spiritual void because of people who were cut off from their ancestral rituals in Europe," she said. "There's this hunger for it."
Those people are ripe for the picking by con artists exploiting that hunger, McGivney said. "'Sign up for this seminar and you'll become enlightened.'"
McGivney said she was aware of settler colonial history and has reported on various aspects of Native issues in the Southwest in her career.
"But, I never really thought about how deprived the settlers were," she said.
"We always think about how Native Americans really were harmed by all this, and that's true. But so were the white people and their lack of ancestry," she said.
"How could people not see like how horrible (Ray) is and all that?" McGivney said. "But when you're in the thick of it, like a cult expert said, once you're so deep, it's easier to keep going along than breaking away."
McGivney said she wanted people to walk away with this thought: "Two things can be true at once. You can be a good person and do lots of good things and you can also be descended from a harmful, violent culture that you're benefiting from.
"But you are still a good person."
Native people call for 'war' against cultrual exploitation
As far back as 1992, Native rights advocates have been exposing fake shamans and gurus as nothing less than cultural thieves.
McGivney said that the National Congress of American Indians issued a resolution in 1993 condemning "the exploiters of Lakota spirituality."
The wellness and self-help movement draws heavily from Native spirituality and practices, including the use of California white sage. The demand for sage resulted in poaching the plant from tribal, public and private lands in Southern California and Baja California. Tribes have decried the trend, which has left large areas of sage habitat denuded and barren.
Joseba I. Arregi, an associate professor at the University of the Basque Country, is one of many researchers and Native rights advocates who have condemned self-help gurus and their practices as "old colonialism dressed up in new clothes."
Janet McCloud, a Tulalip tribal member and Native rights activist said in a 1990s interview: "First, they came to take our land and water, then our fish and game. Now they want our religions as well." McCloud railed against "unscrupulous idiots running around saying they're medicine people" who would sell a spot in a sweat lodge ceremony for $50, a practice she said was not only wrong but obscene.
"Indians don't sell their spirituality to anybody, for any price," she said. "This is just another in the very long series of thefts from Indian people and, in some ways, this is the worst one yet."
McGivney will appear atChanging Hands Bookstore in Tempe Sept. 23 to discuss the book.
Debra Krol reports on Indigenous communities at the confluence of climate, culture and commerce in Arizona and the Intermountain West. Reach Krol at debra.krol@azcentral.com. Follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, @debkrol and on Bluesky at @debkrol.bsky.social.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: How self-help guru James Arthur Ray used Native ideas to win followers
