I have also been thinking about what to do when ceremonies are described in detail, and/or misrepresented, on the Internet. Part of this is due to finding bad, and sometimes detailed, descriptions of ceremonies on Wikipedia, and having to decide how to best deal with those (it can be overwhelming), and also from coming across outsiders misrepresenting ceremonies in online discussion groups, journals or blogs.
Often the white people who misrepresent and appropriate seem to think First Nations people don't exist, or would never hear about this behaviour (because of course only white people have computers. < / sarcasm >).
It seems to me that if someone is misrepresenting a ceremony online, even if they are not asking for money from people to read the page, it is analogous to a teaching situation and therefore needs to be confronted. Large numbers of people may read their statements about the ceremonies; far more than might ever attend a class. And now with google, someone may innocently search on a traditional term, find this misinformation, and then they may well go imitate these things, leading to the further degradation of the actual traditions. So in that way, I think someone posting online can have more impact than someone teaching a small group of people.
If the person posting the misinformation is also an author or workshop leader, it could also be considered that their appropriation and misrepresentation of ceremonies is an effort to raise their profile and hence increase their marketability among Newagers. So, not without financial and ego motivations.
In the cases where they are trying to present misunderstood Lakota traditions (for instance) as being from some European culture (by simply putting another name on it), they are doing violence to more than one culture in the process.
I'm rambling a bit here, but I'm trying to work out what to do when someone is shooting their ignorant mouth off online, and engaging in stolen ceremonies in their personal life, as well as admitting this behaviour in public, but not taking money for teaching it (as far as we know). So far I've just confronted it as it comes up, but as people can ban you from their journals, that only goes so far.
