13 October 2025
The Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund at PS2025
By: Tanya Kammonen, ND
MAPS Bulletin: Volume XXXIV
“I have a question,” said Lucy Benally, the soft murmur of simultaneous interpretation accompanying her voice. “We’ve gone to MAPS, we’ve gone to the Parliament of the World’s Religions, we’ve put in all this effort to share our messages. What have the results been? Is it making any difference?”
Lucy is Diné from what is now Arizona, and still speaks in her original Navajo language with her family. She is a founding Board and Conservation Committee member of the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund (IMC Fund), and she was asking the question with genuine curiosity at a historic in-person meeting we held in September.
The most significant result from that meeting was that the IMC Fund Conservation Committee — an international group of Indigenous and Traditional community representatives — converted into the official Board of Directors, and updated the bylaws to ensure that current and future Boards are made up of 100% Indigenous and Traditional Peoples. The IMC Fund plays a key role in the intersection of the psychedelic movement with Indigenous spiritual medicines. This decision is profound as we continue our leadership position in these spaces.
At this year’s Psychedelic Science 2025, we were proud to be in this leadership position, where we supported a delegation of almost 50 people to attend, curated two full days of the Plant Medicine track, shared an engaging workshop titled “Plant Medicines, Indigenous Healing Traditions, and Right Relationship,” and participated in several Keynote presentations.
Our presence at PS2025 culminated in the reading of our Second Declaration[1] from the IMC Fund and Partners to the Psychedelic Field. The Declaration itself is one of our most tangible results, in response to Lucy’s question. It is a collective statement from multiple Indigenous representatives in response to the growing pressures from the psychedelic movement.
This second declaration was predated by the first, which came out of the IMC Fund’s participation in PS2023. That first version of the declaration was developed after the conference, and Mona Polacca, of Havasupai, Hopi, and Tewa tribal lineage, and another IMC Fund Board member, read it later that year at Horizons Portland to a long standing ovation. That was a hopeful reception, and it inspired our commitment to update it as part of our participation in PS2025.
Rights-based listening
Rights are a great entry point to understanding, and much of what is in our Declarations is based on rights. A rights-based framework for engagement is ethical; it allows for stakeholders across multiple power balances or imbalances to engage based on explicitly expressed grounds, often by the disadvantaged side or sides. This works for people who are already willing to listen.
There are people who are already open and willing to listen to the messages that Indigenous Peoples share, regardless of the form or tone. There are other people who are more pre-curious or reserved, perhaps having experienced profound benefit from Indigenous spiritual medicines, but who don’t really feel any sense of duty because of that.
“We are Indigenous peoples precisely because of our culture,” shared Daiara Tukano, of the Amazonian Tukano people, during a panel on International Legal Frameworks at PS2025. “So the first struggle was for the recognition of the right to have a different culture, since our cultures were persecuted and denied.”
Christine Diindiisi McCleave, of the Ashinaabe (Ojibwe) Nation, commented, “When people talk about colonization as something of the past, as if we are in the post-colonial era—no, we are not. Colonization is still happening. And it’s not only about land, it’s about resources. And now it is our sacred cultural heritage that is being colonized.” There is an experience of ongoing rights violations from a movement that is supposed to be about healing for all.
When there is a longstanding history of fighting for the recognition of rights, and ongoing violation of those rights, as is the case with Indigenous and Traditional Peoples around the globe, it can be exhausting to continually insist that those rights be respected. At the same time, it is heartbreaking to see sacred practices and spiritual medicines used in ways they’re not meant to be used.
Raine Piyãko, from the Brazilian Ashaninka people, said in a panel on Right Relationship at PS2025, “With respect, I ask for the recognition of the knowledge of our peoples. That we be listened to not only for our words, but also for our medicines.”
Photo Courtesy of IMC Fund
Curiosity and humility-based listening
A supporter recently shared with us about their own healing process, where they reached a point that had a similar energy to Lucy’s question. They had been participating in Ayahuasca retreats for a number of years with a group of skilled, Shipibo-trained westerners. “In the beginning, it did not occur to me to ask more; I was deep in the throes of my own healing, and it was working; I was grateful for it in the form it took,” they shared. “I don’t think I would have been particularly capable of appreciating other people’s rights to things, especially if I perceived it would have interfered with my own self-determined right to healing.”
But at a certain point, this bigger question emerged.
“Where does this medicine really come from?”
That question led them into a much deeper process. It’s natural for people, at a certain point in healing or transformation, to turn outside and ask how they can be of service. In Western society, healing institutions are a natural place to turn, and one of the dangers of the medicalization of psychedelics is the rapid formation of ‘psychedelic clinicians,’ who, for valid reasons, seek known avenues to support others.
This person tried that first. “I was helping others unpack their experiences–to integrate them, but I was left with this experience of futility. Like, if I help someone fit their experience back into a broken system, what service am I really bringing? Is this really the way this medicine is supposed to be used?”
It takes real curiosity and humility to lend the kind of listening that Indigenous cultures and spiritual medicine practices require. “The Lakota way of life comes from stories, everything is connected,” shared Sandor Iron Rope, of the Tetonwan Lakota Oyate, in the IMC Fund’s full-day workshop at PS2025. “The worldview comes from nature, and that is the history of our ancestors. Here in the stories are virtues, respect, prayer, humility, courage, wisdom, but the fundamental thing is kinship. That is what establishes the relationship, and above all, the responsibility in that relationship, a bond created by our mother earth, a responsibility that we create from day one.”
That curiosity and humility-based engagement requires more from us. It paves a way for a rights-based framework, but in and of itself, curiosity and humility are not ethical bases. Ought we be humble? Sure. But can we really be humble and curious, recognizing that the Indigenous representatives are willing to take the time and make the effort to get on a stage to share from their deeply-rooted places of knowledge, and who actually know what they are talking about?
When Lucy asked if it’s making any difference — “it” being the incredible time and energy expenditure to travel to international venues, and share perspectives, requests, and demands with primarily non-Indigenous audiences — there were a few responses from other team members.
One is that the first Declaration received a lengthy standing ovation in 2023, indicating that many people are willing to listen.
Two is that MAPS itself provided us with Keynote space to share the updated Second Declaration at PS2025, in addition to giving us full curatorial power over two days of the Plant Medicine track, and paying for our whole delegation’s expenses to travel to Denver, indicating that the main social force behind the psychedelic movement is willing to reflect and respond to feedback.
Three is that Colorado — where the Natural Medicine Health Act allows legal access to Indigenous and psychedelic medicines in clinical settings — is engaging in deep consultation processes, setting an example for other states looking to move forward with clinical trials and treatments.
Four is more ambiguous. Yes, we’re getting these voices out there. Yes, some people are listening. But in terms of real change at the level needed for the psychedelic movement to not replicate colonial harms, we can’t say we’re there yet. One person can have an incredible ripple effect within their own communities. And while — in the face of the current social, political, and global crises — it is incredibly difficult to put other people’s needs before our own, it is still possible to open ourselves and truly listen. And while the capitalist system likes to place blame on individual end-level users— i.e., if I don’t cut up these six-pack can holders, I might personally be responsible for millions of ducks dying in the wild. Meanwhile, mega-industries can just go on polluting and “offset” it with a handful of carbon credits. This isn’t a blaming stance. This is an invitation to get behind the medicine, to understand where it comes from and who has been stewarding it up until now, despite incomprehensible pressures. And, this is an invitation to understand what those people are doing, what they are asking for, and why they advocate for the ongoing protection of Indigenous spiritual medicine cultures.
So we invite a similar curiosity as you read the Second Declaration from the IMC Fund and Partners to the Psychedelic Field. Yes, it’s based on rights, but it’s also based on millenary spiritual knowledge that has been passed down from generation to generation. The Second Declaration is based on deep-lived experience, sophisticated understanding and analysis, and relational and collective wisdom that we must pay attention to if we want the psychedelic movement to have the wide-reaching and transformative healing it is capable of.
“We invite you into a relationship of true diplomacy, rooted in loyalty and respect, between us as human beings and the sacred medicine,” shared Chief Nixiwaká Yawanawá of the Yawanawá people in Brazil, in a panel on Ayahuasca and globalization. “Only then can we begin to walk a path forward together.”
Footnote
- Declarations are non-legally binding instruments that call attention to imbalances of power between stakeholder groups. Much of the work of the IMC Fund is aligned with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), a major international tool adopted in 2007 by 144 countries and translated into national laws around the globe.
Tanya Kammonen, ND
Tanya Kammonen, ND, is a Senior Communications Advisor with the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund.
The IMC Fund works toward a thriving future for Indigenous Peoples, their medicines and knowledges, for generations to come. To learn more about our work or make a donation, follow us on IG @imcfund, visit https://imc.fund or email info@imc.fund
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