ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Annette McGivney is an award-winning investigative journalist and the author of six nonfiction books, including her most recent work Plastic Shaman. Her book, Pure Land, about the murder of Tomomi Hanamure in Grand Canyon, won the National Outdoor Book Award in 2018. Annette is a frequent contributor to the Guardian, Outside and Arizona Highways; her articles focus on Southwest culture, the environment and Indigenous issues. She is a professor emeritus in Journalism at Northern Arizona University and lives in Cortez, Colorado.
ABOUT THE BOOK
PLASTIC SHAMAN: The True Story of a Deadly Self-Help Retreat and America’s Misguided Quest for Wellness.
A spiritual quest turns into a fatal disaster in this gripping true crime investigation of the wellness industry.
In October 2009, more than fifty people attended a $10,000-per-person wellness retreat led by a celebrity self-help guru. For these enlightenment seekers, their time in Sedona, Arizona, culminated in a fake Native American sweat lodge ceremony. Three of them would not make it out alive.
This tragedy exposes the dangerous truth about the booming $2 trillion wellness industry where promises of spiritual awakening and financial success often mask dangerous practices underpinned by cultural appropriation and commodification of nature. Journalist Annette McGivney explores this world, exposing the manipulation and greed that allow charismatic influencers to prey on vulnerable people in search of happiness and healing—no matter the cost.
Plastic Shaman is a fascinating, deeply personal investigation of a despicable grifter, James Arthur Ray, whose New Age scams led to the gruesome deaths of four people. Ray falsely claimed to be an expert practitioner of sacred Native American rituals learned from a Lakota medicine man. McGivney reveals how the appropriation of spiritual traditions by “pretendians” like Ray is a lucrative, dangerous racket that does tremendous harm to genuine Indigenous peoples.
—Jon Krakauer, author of Under the Banner of Heaven
In her latest book, Annette McGivney offers up a blend of narrative elements that readers who care most deeply about the American Southwest will find bracing, provocative, and potentially transformational. This is a true-crime thriller that may well alter (and will surely challenge) the way you think about the New Age, self-help, and wellness industries. It is also an edifying memoir infused with all the searching introspection and unsparing honesty of an author who is willing to confront the darkness and hypocrisy residing not only within her subject, but also deep inside her own past. More than anything else, however, Plastic Shaman stands as a profoundly unsettling treatise on the toxic legacy of our nation's treatment of its original inhabitants, told by a writer whose wisdom, eloquence, and moral courage continue to grow with each new title she brings into the world.
— Kevin Fedarko, author of The Emerald Mile and A Walk in the Park
Blending investigative reporting and memoir, Plastic Shaman digs deeply into the longstanding white American desire to seize Native American culture and identity. Annette McGivney’s account of James Arthur Ray’s deadly New Age appropriations asks readers to confront a timeless question: can non-Native settlers create a spiritual life in harmony with the lands of this continent—and do so without shamelessly stealing life and breath from Indigenous people? This riveting narrative seeks, with compassion and rigor, after an answer.
—Philip J. Deloria, author of Playing Indian and American Studies Chair at Harvard
As a Yavapai-Apache whose spiritual homelands are located in Sedona’s Red Rock country, I’m often asked, “what’s the real harm in appreciating—even mimicking—Native American culture and ceremonies?” McGivney’s masterful Plastic Shaman is the answer. With remarkable insight from years of careful research, she explores the tragic events of James Arthur Ray’s fatal 2009 Spiritual Warrior Retreat and the ensuing criminal trial, exposing the dangers, lies, and greed behind the New Age wellness industry. Plastic Shaman’s greatest achievement is the poignant manner in which McGivney gives voice to the spiritual seekers and their families whose lives were shattered by Ray’s “sweat lodge,” and how some of them found ultimate healing with the help of actual Native Americans. Readers would do well to heed McGivney’s concluding invitation to find rootedness in their own land and culture, not as New Age culture vultures whose practices actively harm themselves and Native Americans.
—Maurice Crandall, PhD (Yavapai-Apache), Associate Professor of History, Arizona State University; author of These People Have Always Been a Republic