Tending a Vibrant World

Indigenous Traditional Use of Sacred Plant Medicines

Indigenous peoples have stewarded sacred plant medicines for millennia, if not since time immemorial.¹ Sacred plant medicines, in the context of this article, refers to plants and fungi that have a history of traditional ceremonial use among Indigenous peoples. Although we focus on the classic psychedelics, our findings apply to any sacred plant medicine. Many of these sacred medicines—such as tobacco, cedar, sage, sweetgrass, and more recently the ayahuasca admixture and psilocybin-containing fungi—have been commercialized via their entry into the global capitalist economy.²

Early explorers’ and settlers’ unwillingness to acknowledge, or perhaps even their inability to perceive, the legitimacy of Indigenous sovereignty led to the convenient declaration of Turtle Island,³ or North America, as terra nullius, which translates as unused or empty land.⁴ The Roman Catholic Church’s Doctrine of Discovery, issued in the late fifteenth century, decreed that any land that was uninhabited by Christians was terra nullius and could be taken and its occupants subjugated.⁵ Coupled with the view that all our relations—plants, animals, fungi, rivers, minerals in the soil, and more—are resources to be extracted for the benefit of certain humans, the colonization of the Americas was nothing less than an apocalypse for the Indigenous peoples and other nonhuman persons on Turtle Island.⁶

Overlapping and ongoing colonial and imperial projects continue to deny Indigenous sovereignty and exploit our relations. Several thinkers have envisioned the collective healing potential of sacred plant medicines.⁷ Assimilation of sacred plant medicines by the global capitalist juggernaut could entrench colonial and imperial mores rather than support the collective healing potential of these medicines.

We situate this work as contributing to the ontological turn in psychedelic studies. The ontological turn, based on anthropological work with Amazonian Indigenous peoples starting in the 1980s⁸ critiques the totalizing aspects of Western conceptions of reality that obscure or erase the lifeworlds of the global majority. The ontological turn has been productively taken up in various fields beyond anthropology, including science and technology studies, archaeology, and education.⁹ The nascent field of critical plant studies draws heavily on the ontological turn to acknowledge the agency and intelligence of plant life.¹⁰ This article builds on insights from critical plant studies, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, and Indigenous philosophy to present a critically inflected Indigenous perspective on the history of pharmaceuticals, particularly those derived from sacred plant medicines and the plant medicines themselves. This work stretches beyond the acknowledgment that the majority of plant-derived pharmaceuticals are indicated for medical conditions consistent with their traditional Indigenous use.¹¹ Instead, our work emphasizes traditional teachings—in practice for generations—that offer a model for working with sacred plant medicines for the collective benefit of humanity and all our relations, namely, gift logic.

According to Sami scholar Rauna Kuokkanen, Indigenous gift logic is a profoundly different ontological orientation that features giving without the tacit expectation of future reward. It is not a reified construct but “is grounded in an understanding of the world that is rooted in intricate relationships that extend to everyone and everything. Because of these relationships, this logic emphasizes reciprocation with and responsibility toward all others.”¹² Most of the illustrative examples we include here are from Indigenous cultures of Turtle Island and, since both authors have Haudenosaunee ancestry, we emphasize Haudenosaunee teachings. We start by contextualizing the colonization of Turtle Island as a manifestation of neoliberalism and necropolitics, and then we offer Indigenous gift logic as an alternative to the necropolitics of colonial extraction associated with the contemporary psychedelic resurgence.¹³

Neoliberalism, Necropolitics, and Sacred Plant Medicines

According to Wendy Brown, neoliberalism is “an order of normative reason that, when it becomes ascendant, takes shape as a governing rationality extending a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life,” eclipsing the democratic values that are purportedly foundational to Western society.¹⁴ Neoliberal governance does “not dictate precise economic policy, but rather set(s) out novel ways of conceiving and relating state, society, economy, and subject and also inaugurate(s) a new ‘economization’ of heretofore noneconomic spheres and endeavors.”¹⁵ Brown further points out that “democratic state commitments to equality, liberty, inclusion, and constitutionalism are now subordinate to the project of economic growth, competitive positioning, and capital enhancement.”¹⁶ Neoliberalism is viewed by scholars like Walter Mignolo as an extension of the colonial project and by others as deeply implicated in, but not commensurable with, colonialism.¹⁷ Colonialism and neoliberalism are predicated on the logic of wealth accumulation, private ownership of property, and racialized hierarchies that foreclose the richness of Indigenous relationality between humans and all our relations.¹⁸

Western science, and its imperial sponsors, have long construed Indigenous peoples as subhuman or not human at all,¹⁹ which justified the dispossession, assimilation, and extermination of Indigenous peoples.²⁰ The construction of Indigenous racial identity—characterized as child-like, primitive, and already vanishing—is grounded in the politics of elimination, with the uncontested occupation of Turtle Island as the objective.²¹ These racialized hierarchies formed the basis of the European colonial enterprise by dehumanizing and objectifying the subaltern to justify the theft of land and the exploitation of beings Westerners call “natural resources” as well as the attendant brutalities employed to do so. Philosopher Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, “the subjugation of life to the power of death,” builds on Foucauldian biopower and adds a layer of nuance that articulates the myriad forces and their affects in the globalized neoliberal world.²² For Mbembe, the colonial project, under the aegis of Christianizing and democratizing the non-Western world, established “war and race as history’s two privileged sacraments.”²³ We take a broader view and see the colonial project sanctified by war—like Mbembe—and human exceptionalism, or the hierarchization of all life including and extending beyond different humans. Necropolitical logic prefigures the right to determine “who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” and creates what Mbembe refers to as “death-worlds” of spectrality in which the subaltern exists in a kind of liminal space that is neither life nor death, exemplified by the specific configuration of the camp.²⁴ The reserve system in Canada and the reservation system in the United States, apartheid in South Africa, Palestinian life in occupied Gaza, and refugee camps in Europe all exemplify the crepuscular existence that is instantiated and nourished by necropolitical governmentality.

The literal enclosure of the camp also manifests in the “matrix of rules” mostly designed for those human bodies deemed either in excess, unwanted, illegal, dispensable, or superfluous” and can be seen in the insatiable colonial logic associated with the academic desire to know, for prediction and control, the lives of humans and all our relations including sacred plant medicines.²⁵ Literal enclosures such as camps and figurative enclosures like matrices of rules and systems of surveillance are antithetical to the dynamism inherent in Indigenous ontologies. Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor describes Indigenous transmotion as “a visionary resistance and sense of natural motion over separatism, literary denouement, and cultural victimry.”²⁶ In Haudenosaunee thought, reflected in cultural practices such as plant medicine gathering, life is characterized by movement and flux. Containments and enclosures are anti-life, and in this way our traditional teachings align with Mbembe’s necropolitics.

Indigenous peoples of the Americas have been subject to a panoply of necropolitical instruments arguably dating to the late fifteenth century with the introduction of the Doctrine of Discovery granting rights to all lands occupied by “non-Christians”; essentially dehumanizing non-Europeans, legitimizing large-scale colonial land theft, and subjugating a majority of the world’s inhabitants—human and otherwise.²⁷ A more recent legal instrument, the British North America Act of 1867, also known as the Constitution Act, established the Canadian federal government’s jurisdiction over Indigenous peoples. The Indian Act of 1876 included provisions for establishing reserve lands (equivalent to US reservation lands) for habitation and use by Indigenous peoples.²⁸ Without exception, reserve lands are a fraction of a given First Nation’s traditional territory, and the relocation of Indigenous communities to reserves often dislocated people from their traditional hunting, gathering, and agricultural grounds to less productive sites.²⁹ Indigenous people who wanted to leave the reserve, even on a day trip, for example to hunt or gather food on nonreserve traditional territory, required approval from the local “Indian agent,” a government representative. The “pass system” lasted well into the twentieth century.³⁰ Indigenous Peoples have been treated as obstacles to the colonial project on Turtle Island, preventing the peaceful theft and settlement of Indigenous lands and the extraction of “resources” from Indigenous territories.³¹ The matrices of rules restricting Indigenous peoples and the exceptionally repressive treatment that recent Indigenous oil pipeline protesters have received at the hands of the police gesture toward the superfluity, at best, of Indigenous peoples who still present barriers to the rapacious and destructive theft of land and resources under the current necropolitical regime.³² As well as these material dimensions of coloniality, Indigenous peoples are construed as either deficient or broken, according to what Michele Suina refers to as a deficit narrative or repositories of ancient wisdom that could save humanity, the planet, or both.³³ Indigenous peoples have been relegated to a kind of phantom existence, compounding the already difficult challenge of realizing our self-determination.

The various necropolitical enclosures in which Indigenous peoples have been entrapped have also been deployed against the more-than-human. The ethos underpinning the hierarchization of humans, with European men established as a universal, can be found—indeed, may even been preceded by—taxonomic approaches to plant life that were used to categorize, subdue, and harness the vital life force of plants and other creatures for capital gain, among other things.³⁴ We can see a similar confluence regarding the US War on Drugs. A number of the offending drugs are plant-based or plant-derived and have a history of traditional Indigenous use. The War on Drugs has resulted in the mass incarceration of Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous peoples, relegating them to a spectral existence in prisons and in society more broadly in which basic liberties are curtailed by racial profiling, homicidal “wellness checks,” and acts of quotidian discrimination at the hands of police and other representatives of the power elite.³⁵

Many sacred plant medicines, which we view as agentic and having personhood, have been similarly consigned to a shadowy borderland of opaque legality and—much like Indigenous peoples—are reified or fixed according to colonial mores.³⁶ For example, the repeated use of the Nahuatl derived word teonánacatl in the mainstream academic and popular literature to refer to psychoactive mushrooms in the genus Psilocybe seems to be based on only two occurrences in the voluminous writings of two sixteenth-century Franciscan chroniclers, Motolinía and Sahagún.³⁷ To our knowledge, the term teonánacatl has been translated variously as “God’s flesh,” “wondrous mushroom,” and “flesh of the Gods.”³⁸ This term has not been documented in living use by the Nahua or any other Indigenous group, possibly other than those influenced by the Western “psychedelic renaissance,” since it was first recorded by the friars. According to Guzmán, the Nahua of Necaxa in Puebla traditionally refer to two species of sacred mushrooms (Psilocybe mexicana Heim and Psilocybe caerulescens Murrill) as teotlaquilnanacátl, which translates as “sacred mushroom that paints or describes.”³⁹ This is apparently the only name in contemporary Mexican Indigenous use that bears some resemblance to teonánacatl. Endorsing a colonizer-documented name for the sacred mushrooms, particularly one from the sixteenth century that is likely no longer in use, situates Indigenous peoples as historic curiosities and reinforces and reinscribes a Euro-dominant position in the psychedelic sphere instead of elevating the voices, knowledge, experience, and peoples who have engaged in reciprocal relationships with sacred fungi for millennia.

Since the late 1950s, Mazatec curandera María Sabina, Gordon Wasson’s chief “informant,” has been the face representing Indigenous mushroom use. A quick Google images search revealed her likeness on book covers, votive candles, T-shirts, album covers, stickers, bracelets, coffee mugs, posters, murals, and even a Spotify channel featuring her sacred chants.⁴⁰ In Western culture, we see María Sabina’s likeness mobilized to lend an air of authenticity to anything psychedelic-related. On one hand we appreciate that Indigenous people have not been completely erased in the so-called psychedelic renaissance, but we view the one-dimensional depiction of María Sabina as what Tuck and Yang would call a “settler move to innocence,” which through the empty gestures of much non-Indigenous allyship “problematically attempt(s) to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity.”⁴¹ Although a thorough critical analysis of the myriad ways María Sabina’s image and name are invoked by actors in the psychedelic mainstream is beyond the scope of our article, this would be a good subject for further study. The reification of Indigenous culture, whether in the form of antiquated and possibly fabricated terminology or tokenizing Indigenous individuals such as María Sabina contributes to the Western fantasy around Indigeneity and psychedelics, which has paved the way for the wholesale commercialization of Indigenous peoples, material culture, and ways of knowing. A recent noteworthy example can be found in Russell Hausfeld’s exposé of Field Trip Health’s mobile app–based educational campaign featured in Psymposia’s Corporadelic series.⁴² Field Trip Health is a Canadian company that offers ketamine treatment and is apparently interested in expanding to include treatment options using classic psychedelics, many of which are traditional Indigenous medicines. Field Trip’s mobile campaign included a Slovenian stock photo of a model wearing what appears to be a Great Plains Indigenous headdress and playing a flute. The caption associated with this image refers to “shamans,” which is not a term used traditionally on Turtle Island but refers to traditional healers from specific Siberian Indigenous cultures.⁴³ Although Field Trip Health seems happy to exploit a kind of globalized Indigenous culture amputated from territory, Hausfeld points out that Field Trip has publicly stated that they have no intention of engaging in any kind of reciprocity with the Indigenous communities that have stewarded these medicines through the ongoing colonization of Turtle Island. It is unsurprising that this kind of grotesque characterization of Indigenous peoples is found in the psychedelic resurgence, it is a well-documented phenomenon in Western culture.⁴⁴ Despite this, and the possible good intentions of Field Trip Health, it is of critical importance—as we argue in the next section—that actors in this space engage deeply and respectfully with Indigenous peoples if we are going to chart a way forward, together. Indigenous scholars Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel Wildcat assert that everything in the universe is alive and is related through connection to place—more to the point, specific places.⁴⁵ The decontextualization of Indigenous knowledge evident in how Indigeneity is represented by the psychedelic mainstream—as a hodgepodge of cultural practices reconfigured to serve the pleasure of any businessperson, advocate, academic, or actor according to their specific needs at the time. Following Deloria and Wildcat, we suggest that the spectral aterritoriality and marmorealization of Indigenous experience associated with neoliberalism and necropolitical colonialism relegates us to dusty and dimly lit display chambers in the museum that is the Western imaginary and deprives us of the full expression of our personhood and the personhood of the more-than-human with whom we are entangled.

Judith Butler describes how normativity functions—through broader societal discourse—to validate what constitutes the human, those considered “less than human,” and those “not recognized as human at all.”⁴⁶ Indigenous knowledge systems, which are fundamentally incompatible with contemporary Western worldviews, have repeatedly resulted in Indigenous peoples being relegated to the former two categories of existence.⁴⁷ European construction of Indigenous identity is one of several tools used to support the colonial project. Indigenous identity was constructed as a function of prevalent societal norms, such as the universalizing theory of social evolution that held that all cultures begin in a primitive state and work through clearly identifiable stages to “civilization.” Indigenous peoples were portrayed as incompetent and lazy and/or transient and violent.⁴⁸ In early colonial Canada, the “civilized” European had a paternalistic responsibility to the “savage” Indigenous population, which undergirded the dominant narrative, allowing for genocidal and assimilationist residential schools, exclusionary reserve systems and associated land-grabbing with the ultimate aim being an aggressive westward expansion.⁴⁹ Dominant narratives that construct Indigenous identity inform various disciplinary apparatuses of surveillance and control as well as necropolitical domination.⁵⁰ These apparatuses can manifest as (among other things) legal, policy, and regulatory instruments such as the White Paper, Indian Act (and its subsequent amendments), and more.⁵¹ The norms advanced by these documents continue to maintain Indigenous peoples’ marginalized status and support the continued theft of land and the instrumentalization of our more-than-human relatives in Canada; similar legislation serves related purposes in the United States and Mexico.⁵²

Butler maintains that “I cannot be what I am without drawing upon the sociality of norms that precede and exceed me” and that a norm “may also prove to be recalcitrant to any effort to decontextualize its operation.”⁵³ They also introduce the paradox of the norm, which is that “the norm renders the social field intelligible and normalizes that field for us, then being outside the norm is in some sense still being defined by it.”⁵⁴ Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island have experienced as much as 530 years of contact with European colonizers and their norms.⁵⁵ As we see it, a primary challenge facing settler culture on Turtle Island is to support Indigenous self-determination—for example, through reclaiming Indigenous identity norms that have been assailed for centuries—specifically around human–human and human–nonhuman kinship arrangements, many of which may be unintelligible to Western culture.

Butler posits that “certain humans are recognized as less than human, and that a form of qualified recognition does not lead to a viable life. Certain humans are not recognized as human at all, and that leads to yet another order of unlivable life.”⁵⁶ Butler’s counterhegemonic conceptions of personhood and Indigenous notions of relationality with the more-than-human present a challenge to the universalizing Western discourse of humanness that denies both the humanness and “universality” of Indigenous people and culture.

Butler writes about “recognizing a relational view of the self over an autonomous one.”⁵⁷ They explain that an expansion of fundamental categories, “to become more inclusive and more responsive to the full range of cultural populations” is needed for a radical and democratic transformation, specifically regarding gender norms.⁵⁸ The myriad gendered identities to which Butler alludes is comparable to the multiplicity of living and nonliving elements in the natural world, and true reconciliation with Indigenous peoples requires a restructuring of the dominant norms around kinship and the attendant categories of being that value the nonhuman. The ontological acrobatics required for a such a feat are not insignificant given that dominant culture kinship notions are founded on dyadic heterosexual exogamy governed by the incest taboo and Indigenous kinship structures are myriad and likely even more complex.⁵⁹

Narrow views of relationality negate the “personhood” of the natural environment and Western “universalist” norms exert a kind of violence on the natural world and Indigenous peoples as a direct contest to their relational ontology.⁶⁰ We wonder if expanding concepts of kinship or relationality, based on Indigenous cultural and linguistic models, could yield a more open futurity for Indigenous peoples, the settler mainstream, sacred plant medicines, and all the rest of our relations. The next section outlines the logic of the gift as an alternative to the commercial exploitation of sacred plant medicines and gestures toward a rearticulation of place in the global consumerist psychedelic resurgence.

The Logic of the Gift

Jennifer Sumner, food systems scholar and activist, suggests that Indigenous food systems “although crippled by colonization, represent living alternatives to the corporate food regime.”⁶¹ This assertion extends to many domains of Indigenous life across Turtle Island, including traditional medicines and the use of sacred plant medicines. In her influential book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer relates a story that illustrates the gift as living practice in Potawatomi culture:

My dear friend Wally “Bear” Meshigaud is a ceremonial firekeeper for our people and uses a lot of sweetgrass on our behalf. There are folks who pick for him in a good way, to keep him supplied, but even so, at a big gathering sometimes he runs out. At powwows and fairs you can see our own people selling sweetgrass for ten bucks a braid. When Wally really needs wiingashk for a ceremony, he may visit one of those booths among the stalls selling frybread or hanks of beads. He introduces himself to the seller, explains his need, just as he would in a meadow, asking permission of the sweetgrass. He cannot pay for it, not because he doesn’t have the money, but because it cannot be bought or sold and still retain its essence for ceremony.⁶²

Rauna Kuokkanen outlines the genealogy of Western scholars’ interpretations of Indigenous gift logic.⁶³ Kuokkanen identifies Marcel Mauss’s foundational study, which theorizes the gift as inherent in all social domains of Indigenous life and, despite appearing altruistic, is fundamentally interested in “returns” on the initial “investment.”⁶⁴ Further work by Pierre Bourdieu casts the gift as the quintessential form of symbolic violence, as a way of indebting others to oneself.⁶⁵ Kuokkanen astutely points out that “we are doing no justice to the logic of the gift or to the Indigenous social order, which depends heavily on negotiation, cooperation, and non-aggression, when we reduce on of its central structuring principles—the gift—to a form of violence, however subtle and symbolic.”⁶⁶ Even Jacques Derrida interpreted the gift as a “forfeiture of something for the sake of receiving something else.”⁶⁷ In these cases, Kuokkanen notes that Western scholars cannot seem to help interpreting Indigenous gift logic through a Western lens, which for Mauss, Bourdieu, and Derrida include economizing this practice and, for Bourdieu, viewing the gift as a means of achieving power over others. The following text outlines both feminist gift theory and Indigenous gift logic, and we reveal how the gift, in Indigenous cultures, is very different from how it has been construed by early influential Western scholars.

Contrary to Mauss’s explanation, feminist scholar Genevieve Vaughan distinguishes between exchange and the gift.⁶⁸ Exchange, according to Vaughn, is based on self-interest and involves giving in order to receive. This is the foundation of both the trade economy based on barter and the modern capitalist economy. The gift, on the other hand, exists in a kind of subterranean mycelial realm, hypogeous to the totalizing capitalist exchange paradigm ascendant in Western countries and across the world, connecting our relations in a mycorrhizal web of care. The most profound and ubiquitous example of this ethic of care is evident in child-rearing.⁶⁹ The societal contributions associated with child care, historically the domain of women, has been underappreciated and devalued in mainstream culture. This could be viewed as an example of what economists refer to as the “free-rider problem” in which someone, in this case society writ large, derives economic and other benefits from the unpaid labor associated with child care.⁷⁰ Capitalism exploits this free labor as well as “culture traditions and knowledge, (of) ‘free’ or unilateral gifts of the land, and of cheap (even free) labour, especially in the Third World.”⁷¹

Kuokkanen characterizes Indigenous gift logic as contrary to the exchange economy, and says that the gift

is a reflection of a particular worldview, one characterized by the perception that the natural environment is a living entity which gives its gifts and abundance to people provided that they observe certain responsibilities and provided that those people treat it with respect and gratitude. Central to this perception is that the world as a whole comprises an infinite web of relationships, which extend and are incorporated into the entire social condition of the individual.⁷²

The Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen in Mohawk, is a ceremony predicated on Indigenous gift logic. These beautiful words are spoken at the beginning of important meetings to acknowledge nature and to align hearts and minds with all Creation.⁷³ The Thanksgiving Address includes “stanzas” that pay homage to various elements of the natural and cosmological worlds of the Haudenosaunee, including (but not limited to) Mother Earth; eldest brother the sun; grandmother moon; the foods (otherwise known as our sustainers), including corn, beans, and squash; the medicine plants; the grandfather thunders; and the four sacred beings. Each stanza typically praises the element in relation to the Haudenosaunee people and ends with the refrain “and now our minds are one.” For example, the medicine plants and plants in general are praised in this version of the Thanksgiving Address delivered by Chief Jake Swamp to the Fourth Russell Tribunal, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, November 1980:

We greet and thank the medicine plants of the earth. They have been instructed by the Creator to cure our diseases and sicknesses. Our people will always know their native names. They come in many forms and have many duties. Through the ones who have been vested with knowledge of the medicine plants, we give thanks. Now our minds are one.

We give greetings and thanks to the plant life. Within the plants is the force of substance that sustains many life forms. From the time of the Creation we have seen the various forms of plant life work many wonders. We hope that we will continue to see plant life for the generations to come. Now our minds are one.⁷⁴

Delivery of the Thanksgiving Address focuses a group, at the commencement of a meeting or other important event, on relationships central to Haudenosaunee existence. This ceremony contextualizes (as “minor”) divisive issues—ones that might otherwise prevent amicable consensus—so that the meeting can focus on important issues dealing with and expressing gratitude toward the fundamentals of life, such as clean water, healthy food, and more. The Haudenosaunee also further humanity’s connection to the natural world through an annual cycle of ceremonies that give thanks for all that supports and sustains the continuance of life.⁷⁵

Hope MacLean describes the animated and dynamic world of the Wixárika, or Huichol people, whose ancestral territory spans the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range in Mexico.⁷⁶ The Wixárika engage in a pilgrimage to Wirikuta, an arid zone crossing three state borders in northern Mexico, to collect hikuri, otherwise known as peyote. According to MacLean, “the pilgrimage to Wirikuta is undertaken to re-create the world. It ensures that the sun continues to rise, and the rains to fall, and guarantees that people, animals, and crops enjoy good health.”⁷⁷ The Wixárika also engage in a yearly cycle of ceremonies that do not involve pilgrimage, “concerned with the planting and harvesting of the corn, bean, and squash crops and with maintaining the health and fertility of fields, animals, and people.”⁷⁸ Like the Haudenosaunee, the Wixárika engage in ceremonial activities to ensure the continuance of life.

The most cited example of Indigenous gift practices is the Pacific Northwest coast potlatch. The potlatch, which involved lengthy oratory, dancing, and feasting, served many purposes, but chief among them was the redistribution of wealth by giving away food, blankets, eulachon oil, coppers, and other material goods as well as the reenactment of “ancestral encounters with supernatural beings, when important rights were transferred to the human world.”⁷⁹ The Religious Crimes Code of 1883 in the United States and the Canadian Indian Act of 1876, discussed earlier, also rendered illegal important ceremonial activities such as the potlatch system. Kuokkanen draws on the writings of Indian Reserve Commissioner Malcolm Sproat to illustrate how threatening the potlatch was to the settler authorities: “the Patlach [sic] is a form of aboriginal self-government that stands in the way of the Canadian government and its civilizing mission” and that it yields “indigence, thriftlessness, and a habit of roaming about which prevents home associations and is inconsistent with all progress . . . it is not possible that Indians can acquire property, or become industrious with any good result, while under the influence of this mania.”⁸⁰ The potlatch ban was lifted in the 1930s in the United States and in the 1950s in Canada.⁸¹ The potlatch system, still in practice today, serves multiple important functions, including negotiating land tenure for hunting, fishing, and gathering.⁸²

Poet, essayist, and scholar Lewis Hyde draws on Malinowski’s work with Indigenous peoples of the Trobriand Islands in sharing a linguistic example that illustrates the centrality of the gift in Indigenous societies. For the Trobriand Islanders, “to possess is to give.”⁸³ Hyde distinguishes between reciprocal and circular giving. Reciprocal giving, what Kuokkanen refers to as binary or constrained reciprocity, describes the simplest form of gift exchange, in which something is given in direct exchange for another. Circular giving, or circular reciprocity, inscribes a much broader circle of care in which “no one ever receive it from the same person he gives it to.”⁸⁴ Hyde further suggests that the unseen and unknown intermediaries in this gift exchange circle means that when “the gift passes out of sight it cannot be manipulated by one man or one pair of gift partners.”⁸⁵ As Kuokkanen points out, Indigenous reciprocity is much broader than the binary give-and-take that characterizes contemporary capitalism. Circular reciprocity is founded on a logic of “extended circulation aimed at producing surplus” for the collective, including the more-than-human,⁸⁶ rather than the underlying logic of contemporary capitalism, which relies on the accumulation of wealth for a few humans. Indigenous gift logic manifests in different ways depending on the values and protocols of the specific Indigenous nation. For example, in the Haudenosaunee world, circular reciprocity springs from an aquifer of respect that is accessed and nourished by achieving ka’nikonhri:io, or the “good mind” that “occurs when the people put their minds and emotions in harmony with the flow of the universe.”⁸⁷ This respect and circular reciprocity includes many interconnected elements: the birds and other animals who first taught humanity about plant medicines, the places where these medicines grow, the water and soil that nourish them, and all the other more-than-human persons with whom the plant medicines are entangled. These entanglements are traditionally conceived along familial lines, for example, corn, beans, and squash are viewed as sisters and medicine plants growing together are seen as a family.⁸⁸ The healers and knowledge keepers who help us understand and benefit from the medicines must also be respected. Haudenosaunee traditional healers are prohibited from selling or otherwise commercializing plant medicines or knowledge regarding them and are encouraged to nurture sacred plant medicines to support the continuance of human life and the lives of the plant medicines.⁸⁹ Gifts—such as tobacco, cloth, or other items—are typically given to a traditional healer when requesting their help. Although this may seem to be a form of direct exchange, the gifts are used in a ceremony or to make offerings in the service of healing others, rendering this practice consistent with Indigenous gift logic. This is the case for some Cree traditional healers as well.⁹⁰ Respect is also due to the families and people who seek healing from these sacred medicines. Finally, respect is essential for the medicines, for everything that they are and everything that they do for humanity and all our relations. This respect involves working for and on behalf of Creation. We enact this respect in many ways. Harvesting requires giving thanks for the medicine by laying down tobacco or other meaningful things and being very specific about the healing request when gathering the medicines—if possible, naming the people who seek healing and the specific conditions that will be addressed by the medicines.⁹¹ Tobacco is typically offered to the first plant encountered of the kind sought. The first three or first five plants are not gathered in case those are the only ones in a given area, ensuring the continuance of those plants and their offspring into the future.⁹² We offer this brief sketch of gathering practices and protocols for engaging with traditional healers to illustrate how sacred plant medicines could be approached, in relation, and as gifts.

Circular reciprocity, treating our relationships with sacred plant medicines as gifts, could serve to reinscribe a more-than-human relationality between humanity and the rest of the vibrant world. The Haudenosaunee teachings that we shared exemplify Indigenous gift logic in practice. Enacting Indigenous gift logic in the psychedelic sphere demands nurturing the “good mind” to ensure right relations with each other, with the medicines, and with Creation. The alternative, enclosing sacred plant medicines in the extractive and exploitative flow of global capital, may still yield healing for individuals but will foreclose the kind of planetary healing possible through circular reciprocity. To illustrate, Indigenous healing practices are numerous and varied, but one thing that we have encountered is the absorption of illness, or the cause of illness, by the traditional healer when they use certain treatments on patients with specific maladies. For example, Evgenia Fotiou outlines the use of la chupada, or sucking, by ayahuasqueros to remove the “physical manifestation of disease or, in cases of sorcery, the ill will of the sorcerer.”⁹³ Following this reasoning, we wonder about the effects of subjecting sacred plant medicines to global capitalism—which as we have seen is characterized by extraction and exploitation—on the medicines, the healers, and those seeking healing.

In Haudenosaunee traditional medicine, disease is viewed as (among other things) imbalance.⁹⁴ Every aspect of the healing process must work with, rather than against, natural cycles or what Tim Ingold might call affective flows.⁹⁵ The Original Instructions, or Natural Laws, inform how we work with those natural cycles of Creation. The Original Instructions, according to Akwesasne Notes:

direct that we who walk about on the Earth are to express a great respect, an affection, and a gratitude toward all the spirits which create and support Life. We give a greeting and thanksgiving to the many supporters of our own lives-the corn, beans, squash, the winds, the sun. When people cease to respect and express gratitude for these many things, then all life will be destroyed, and human life on this planet will come to an end.⁹⁶

For instance, specific times of year, phases of the moon, and even times of day are indicated for harvesting medicine plants.⁹⁷ These protocols are not uniform but vary by plant, and the intent is to ensure that the vital energy of existence is not contained or enclosed but can continue to circulate, in dynamic flow. Many of our traditional teachings are derived from observing the natural world; we see Indigenous gift logic as directly derived from ontological understandings of the circulatory flow of the vital energy of existence. To be fully aligned with the gift, sacred plant medicine practice must respect and work with the natural cycles and flows of Creation. Among other things, this involves ensuring that our harvesting and medicinal use practices do not compromise the circulation of life’s vital energy. Haudenosaunee traditional practices, especially those associated with sacred medicines, are carefully considered and enacted so as to ensure the continuance of life. When Psilocybe mushrooms (or any other sacred medicine) are grown in a lab facility and traded in the capitalist marketplace, extracted from their natural environment—away from all their relations and the cycles of life that animate and sustain existence—that natural vital life force is interrupted and contained, which leads to an imbalance and ultimately illness if balance is not reestablished. Following Indigenous traditional teachings, such as the Haudenosaunee principle of kasasten’sera or the continuance of life and our Original Instructions, aligns our intent and our activities with the natural, cyclical flows of Creation.⁹⁸ The implication of sacred medicines in the necropolitical global capitalist economy aligns those medicines and the resulting healing practices with myriad apparatuses of death and suffering. While we recognize that pharmaceutical medicines and medicinal plant products, both of which are bought and sold, can provide healing benefits to people, we also know that the full potential for collective and planetary healing is impossible when these medicines are made unwilling accomplices in the global extractive economy.

In addition to the harmful logic of accumulation and resulting power asymmetries implicit in the global capitalist economy, another feature of this pervasive system is the disarticulation of the more-than-human—including sacred plant medicines—from place. This “view from nowhere” characterizes contemporary Western thought and is the antithesis of Indigenous knowledge systems in which specific lands are central to Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and systems of thought.⁹⁹

This congruence is place-specific; for example, in the Great Lakes region of Turtle Island North, we have four seasons, and our summers are characterized by high temperatures, high humidity, and frequent thunderstorms. Proximity to the lake moderates seasonal temperatures and traditionally provided us with sources of sustenance and inspiration and served as a conduit for visiting family, friends, and hunting and gathering grounds nearby. The plant, animal, and human communities that have evolved here over millennia are attuned to this place, and this place is attuned to us. Working with the affective flows of the Great Lakes is different from working with the circulatory flows of, for example, the Chihuahuan Desert, the Sierra Mazateca, or the Amazon River basin. Working with sacred plant medicines using ceremonies, songs, and sacred objects that are disconnected from place—for example, in ayahuasca ceremonies in the Northern Hemisphere—can yield spiritual growth and healing for people and the small groups participating in ceremony. However, connecting with and mobilizing the vital life force of Creation—or what linguist Andrew Cowell refers to as more-than-human power—in the specific place where the ceremony is happening is fundamental to fully realizing the potential of and with these sacred medicines.¹⁰⁰ The final section offers several recommendations that could help reorient collective mainstream thinking in the psychedelic resurgence.

Recommendations

Decolonization, predicated on radical recognition, in the psychedelic resurgence requires that Western culture takes seriously Indigenous onto-epistemologies of kinship. This radical recognition and enactment of a kin-centric cosmology in the psychedelic sphere and beyond—per Butler and Mbembe—is necessary for the psychic and physical survival of humanity.¹⁰¹ In the Haudenosaunee world, this involves ceremonial activities that honor, for example, Mother Earth, Grandmother Moon, the Three Sisters, and the familial nature of medicine plants growing in the natural world. We make several suggestions for a generative path forward in the psychedelic resurgence. These include dispelling harmful narratives that stereotype and tokenize Indigenous peoples; adopting Indigenous linguistic and conceptual frameworks that embrace the personhood of the more-than-human; indexing sacred plant medicines to place; and advancing the practice of Indigenous gift logic.

1. Deconstruction of harmful narratives about Indigenous peoples and the adoption of Indigenous nomenclature and linguistic constructs could inform a more kin-centric approach to the psychedelic resurgence and a more authentic understanding of Indigenous ontologies. Gayatri Spivak provocatively asks, “can the subaltern speak?”¹⁰² A more appropriate question, raised first by Kuokkanen, would be “how can the Western mainstream learn to ‘hear’ Indigenous onto-epistemologies?”¹⁰³ We suggest that this hearing will require archaeological excavations on the part of Western culture, through layers of the colonial “palimpsestic narrative” to clear away the effacing layers that obscure Indigenous knowledge, perspectives, and lifeways.¹⁰⁴ A profound outcome of this kind of archaeological work could yield a more nuanced understanding of our interdependence with the more-than-human. Butler suggests that “the task, it seems, is to compel the terms of modernity to embrace those they have traditionally excluded” through reappropriating language to establish “an unknown future, provoking anxiety in those who seek to control its conventional boundaries.”¹⁰⁵ How could contemporary language be reappropriated to broaden mainstream concepts of relationality and kinship, with a view to Indigenous reconciliation? Cadwallader suggests that Butler’s ideas are bound by the hierarchical constructs implicit in the English language: “for the most part her articulation of her argument is delimited by an English dependence upon the copula, creating a temporal, causal and/or logical hierarchy and implying an ontology as a result.”¹⁰⁶ We suspect that every language has structural elements that influence thought and communication. However, it is noteworthy that many Indigenous languages of North America are considered zero-copula languages, that is, they do not rely on variations of the verb “to be” to link words in a sentence, and a number feature third-person obviation (a grammatical way of distinguishing multiple third persons) that encompasses human and nonhuman nature.¹⁰⁷ Perhaps adopting Indigenous terms or terms inspired by Indigenous languages could facilitate an “ontological breakthrough” in English (and other colonial languages) to allow the settler mainstream on Turtle Island to more easily recognize nonhuman relationality. Potawatomi botanist Robin Kimmerer wrote an article for Orion Magazine that detailed her explorations of language, relationality, and the natural world on a field trip with a group of undergraduate students. She discusses how the Potawatomi language recognizes animate nature with the word Aakibmaadiziiwin, which refers to a “simple but miraculous state of just being,” and she derives a pronoun for animate nature from that word, the singular being ki and the plural kin.¹⁰⁸ Kimmerer provocatively demonstrates how pronouns derived from Indigenous words can be used to reorient our relationships with the natural world by including student reactions to the use of ki and kin. One of Kimmerer’s students indicated that “having this word makes me regard the trees more as individuals. Before, I would just call them all ‘oak’ as if they were a species and not individual.” Another student voiced a shift in her view of animate nature’s agency, specifically regarding providing kindling from trees: “using ki made me see everything differently, like all these persons (the trees) were giving gifts—and I couldn’t help but feel grateful.”¹⁰⁹ In addition to the example that Kimmerer shared, nomenclature used by Indigenous peoples of Mexico for different mushrooms in the genus Psilocybe includes names that personify the mushrooms, such as apipiltzin for Psilocybe aztecorum Heim, which is Nahuatl for “rain-water child,” santitos or “little saints,” and niños santos or “saint children.”¹¹⁰ Adopting terminology from Indigenous languages (with the appropriate permissions) or identifying local culture-specific names that situate sacred plant medicines in a web of reciprocal relationality could shift the psychedelic resurgence toward a more relational mode.

2. Sacred plant medicines must be indexed to the places where they are being used. The disarticulation of sacred plant medicines from their home territories is evident in the globalized use of ayahuasca, Iboga, Psilocybe mushrooms, mescaline-containing cacti, tobacco, sweetgrass, and sage. These medicines are beings in their own right, with their own responsibilities to Creation, and like us they are indexed to place. For example, in a previous publication¹¹¹ we describe the relational entanglements between sacred plant medicines, other beings and territory for the Wixárika (Huichol) of northern Mexico, hikuri, or the peyote cactus (Lophophora williamsii) is one of a trinity of beings anchoring the ceremonial life and the material and spiritual well-being of the Wixárika. For the Wixárika, deer-maize-hikuri are one, and they are one with the Wixárika as well.

   Sacred plant medicines offer humans a conduit to the vital life force of Creation, or more-than-human power. The relationships and alliances, formed with our nonhuman kin and anchored in place structure Indigenous ontologies,¹¹² and are arguably the unacknowledged heart of all Western thought as well. The full power and potential of these sacred plant allies can only be realized when we are connected with the affective flows and relational alliances in the place where the sacred plant medicines are being consumed. For example, employing an Amazonian medicine like ayahuasca in the Great Lakes region without understanding the spiritual and ecological lay of the land here will, at best, yield a half-baked experience. This concept is developed further in the final suggestion.

3. Indigenous gift logic must be enabled and nurtured in the psychedelic resurgence. We recognize that the global capitalist system is pervasive and powerful, and that some people will benefit significantly from safe access to sacred plant medicines in the market. However, as mentioned earlier, we also understand that the imbrication of sacred plant medicines in the systems of exploitation and oppression that are foundational to global capitalism will limit the extent to which these medicines can lead to collective healing for humanity and for all our relations. We suggest that laws, policies, and cultural practices need to be created so that circular reciprocity—according to Indigenous gift logic—is supported rather than thwarted. The enactment of gift logic in the context of sacred plant medicines must be specific to the people, place, and medicines being used. Earlier we shared a brief description of the values and practices that structure Haudenosaunee sacred plant gathering practices. From our understanding, although the specific practices may vary, many of these values are held across Indigenous groups on Turtle Island. These values include a recognition of the personhood of the more-than-human, a willingness to engage in giving without an expectation of receiving directly from the person to whom the gift was originally given, a focus on the continuance and flourishing of more-than-human life, a recognition that humans are in relationship with the rest of Creation, and that we have responsibilities to all of our relatives including our ancestors and future generations.¹¹³ For people without a culture of land-based ceremonial practice, we recommend attending to affective flows associated with the land to which one belongs, including all our relations that inhabit that place. The level of attention required is a kind of attunement to the lives and habits of the more-than-human, starting with simply noticing and observing ourselves in relation to the world around us. How do we feel when we see fruiting clusters of honey mushrooms (Armillaria mellea) decorating the forest floor, when we brush against a sweet gale bush (Myrica gale) on our way to the rich and muddy lakeshore, when we marvel at bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) soaring on thermals, hundreds or even thousands of feet in the air? Once we have familiarized ourselves with our neighboring kin, deepening that relationship can entail a willingness to be vulnerable, to open ourselves up to our relations, by relying on them to support our healing, to nourish our bodies, to provide us with aesthetic inspiration as artistic and craft materials. In gathering these plants, fungi, and other relatives, we confront their vulnerability. For example, if we overharvest them, they will not continue. If we mistreat the land, the land’s ability to support life—including the foods and medicines that we gather—will diminish. This shared experience of vulnerability can knit us together with each other and with the medicines in a web of circular reciprocity that is the foundation of ceremonial practice founded on gift logic.¹¹⁴ Finally, we suggest that non-Indigenous people who are engaged in the psychedelic resurgence begin to build relationships with local Indigenous communities and their knowledge systems to better learn the particularities of human connection to place where the medicine is being taken.

Global capitalist exchange is profoundly at odds with Indigenous conceptions of relationality and territory and the ways we view sacred plant medicines. We recognize that it is not pragmatic to expect the whole world to immediately jettison the logic of accumulation, private property ownership, and racialized hierarchies associated with global capitalism. However, we urge everyone involved in the psychedelic resurgence—such as therapists, researchers, educators, community members, rule-makers, businesspeople, and philanthropists—to work away from the ancestral apocalypse of colonization and towards creating space for gift logic, recognition of the personhood of all our relations, and articulation of sacred medicines to the places where they are being used as well as where they have been traditionally used for millennia.¹¹⁵ We see gift logic as having the potential to shift the exploitative foundation of capitalist exchange toward a more equitable future for all people and all our relations.