A high school teacher friend of mine recently shared this picture of a meditation she offered during class. It was a meditation collectively born out of a weekend in ceremony with sacred plants. She brought it to the classroom and to her students, as a way of helping them to connect with peace. What I love about this meditation is its intention to connect with others. One begins with peace in the heart, then moves that feeling throughout the body, and eventually peace becomes a part of the space of daily interaction and engagement with one another. Every day, I become more curious about how healing and community, work together. I suspect that as we learn together, we also create possibilities for healing our world together.
Western ontologies are mostly framed in isolation. For example, when we are ill, we go to the doctor and take a pill to get well. In this way, illness is a symptom of an isolated individual while healing occurs in isolation. Exploring another perspective, Indigenous ontologies are framed in relationship. For the Shipibo, a community of Indigenous people who live in the Amazon rainforest in and around Peru, illness occurs when they are out of relationship with one another. And healing comes as a result of righting that relationship.
Indigenous wisdoms makes me think about the colonial efforts of the US and the mind set of the rugged individual who sources strength from within to combat the world outside. As a westerner situated on unceded land in Ohlone territory, I think a lot about decolonizing. Lately, I have been thinking about how to decolonize my relationship with psychedelics. There is a modern movement around the consumption of psychedelic plants -- a renaissance where the political, social, scientific and spiritual revival of psychedelic exploration is re-emerging within the context of a western counter-cultural movement. Using the language of renaissance carries the reminder of the exploitative endeavors of the European Renaissance. From this perspective, a modern-day psychedelic reawakening allows for an exploration of the ways in which people and societies construct psychedelic meaning along dominant western paradigms, like that one of the rugged individual.
What I'm curious about is how to trouble my own colonial assumptions that encourage meaning making from the consumption of psychedelic plants in spiritual and religious settings? I wonder what is a good indigenous relationship? And what does it mean to consume and share sacred plant medicines in a respectful way? And are these even the right questions to ask?
I have yet to find a single answer for my western body to rest on. There is no isolated formula. And to quote Bia Labate, the executive director of The Chacruna Institute, “this is knowledge under construction.” In fact, what I share today is simply a gesture or a set of thoughts and ideas that I hope will move you to ask even more questions about how we can be in relationship with each other and with the more-than-human and non-human worlds. And not just during ceremony, but all the time.
I’m struggling with where to begin because the number of different groups of people who come from different histories, who are informed by any number of trajectories, and are rooted in various territories, may come to answer this question differently. To complicate things even further, different plants like peyote, mushrooms, iboga, and ayahuasca all come from different socio-cultural contexts. Because of the diversity of each situated group, along with each plant, there are differing ideas of social justice and varying interpretations on language like race, cultural appropriation, Indigenous, Native American, and shaman.
So, I center this question about how to decolonize ceremony by attempting to come to terms with the often hidden and narrowly defined Christian and Eurocentric language of either/or (dualisms).
Nego Bispo, a Quilombola philosopher rendered the word, decolonization to an academic theory, not a way of life. He said that the prefix “de-” means the removal of something. Bispo spoke of decolonization as something that is for white people in the North – the removal of an oppressive way of being, knowing, thinking, and doing. As an Indigenous person who has survived colonization, he does not seek decolonization. In fact, he asked God to protect him from both colonizers and decolonizers alike. Refusing to play the colonizers game, he preferred the language of counter-colonization.
A schoolmate recenly asked me, "If colonizing is the problem, then why start with it? Why not start with a ceremony that is indigenous and explore what that means?" To her point, a trick of decolonization is the deterritorialization of the practice. She's wondering if it's even possible to create an indigenous ceremony away from its place of origin?
Indigenous wisdoms have helped to trouble and call into question colonial belief systems like the belief in a natural divide between human/nature, mind/body, and spirit/human. It is a belief in divisions like these that keep us separated and prevent us from exploring more nuanced perspectives like Bispo’s. His inquiry and even distaste for the word decolonialism is a reminder that the act of decolonizing could simply be yet anther binary and therefore reactionary response to colonialism – dualism rising out of the ashes once again.
More recently I’ve seen a number of IG memes about the anti-shaman and even the anti-fake shaman. I’m troubled because even these memes are overly concerned with simply righting a wrong. They appear to be more shallow covers that showcase what it means to oppose colonial power. At the very moment, I’m wondering if the many western decolonizing debates I've engaged in are just more arguments to show moral culpability and signal that I identify with decolonial attitudes? And all the while, as we debate, Indigenous communities are still suffering, and our earth is still in serious disrepair.
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass about a time when she was teaching. She asked her students to name a positive impact that humans have had on the environment. Not one of her students could answer. It made me think about my own belief system about humans and the natural world. Her story asked me to confront my own narrative about humans being the scourge of the earth. But if we look outside western narratives, we can find regenerative relationships involving humans, with non-humans, and more-than-humans. Being in ceremony with plants means being in a relationship with those plants, those spirits, those humans in the room.
For Kimmerer, relationship is key. She wrote, “[W]e can’t meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without ‘re-story-ation.’ Our relationship with the land cannot heal until we step into a different story, which re-orients us to other beings and the environment we share, and changes how we relate to them.”
Like Kimmerer, the Indigenous elders around me are constantly reminding me about relationship. I think this is why there is no single answer to decolonizing ceremony. It takes relationship and relationship takes an adventure out into the unknown to build coalitions together, in community.
If I think about things that bring me into relationship with ayahuasca, I think about the Shipibo family in Peru I have come to know and love, who grow the vine and leaf on their land. I think about the Shipibo women in Pucallpa and their journey through colonization and genocide brought on from settler missionaries wishing to convert them – a practice that is still happening today. I’m reminded of the revitalization of the Shipibo culture and language that, in part, has come from economic investment by folks in the Global North interested in learning about ayahuasca and spirituality. And I’m reminded that the buying and selling of ayahuasca experiences at retreat centers in the Amazon rainforest is also layered with its own set of exploitative ills and colonial endeavors aimed at commodifying God.
I also think relationship is key to ceremony. It is relationship and community that brings us to healing. And maybe healing does not occur in isolation but only when we find the edges of ourselves bumping into the edges of another (spirits and plants included).
As a final contribution to this writing, I’m going to leave a few tips I gathered from a workshop led by the Chacruna Institute on how to decolonize ceremony. If you are someone who is doing this work as well, please reach out and share with me. I would love to learn more with you.
Begin with cultural sensitivity – learn your own roots and the history of the land you are on
Learn the original names of territories and peoples
Learn other languages as a basic means of countering US ethnocentrism
Engage with Indigenous people beyond the topic of psychedelics
Do not center your own needs
Practice informed consent – always consult with community before starting new projects
Read the Indigenous declarations to the psychedelic field
Read literature on the rights of nature
Support indigenous-centered community driven projects
Create and foster dialogue between shamanism and science
Promote epistemological justice (this is the idea that different kinds of knowledge should be taken seriously and as equally valuable. This is also the idea that it’s not indigenous wisdom seeking to get science to value it but to see it is as multiple systems of knowledge with the same level of respect.)
Engage in co-authorships and collaborations (and if you’re white, seek out collaborations with not just white folks.)
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