7 February 2024
Indigenous-led Medicine Conservation
Essential Strategy for Successful Interaction with the Psychedelic Boom
By Miguel Evanjuanoy and Miriam Volat
MAPS Bulletin: Volume XXXIII Number 3 • 2023
The connection between the psychedelic movement and Indigenous medicine is complex and multifaceted. Western science has classified and redefined as “psychedelic” several plants and substances that hold transcendent value for many Indigenous cultures around the world. These ancestral medicines are deemed sacred and are used in ritual contexts to mediate healing and communication with the spirit world, gain insights, and treat various physical, mental and spiritual ailments.
Indigenous-led Medicine conservation is biocultural conservation. It is NOT an effort to simply preserve these medicines (and supply chains) – or their constituent molecules and/or specific habitat – but the entire ecological, social and cultural milieus within which they exist, and from which they cannot be separated without compromising the system as a whole. This holistic conservation, in turn, prompts the conservation and revitalization of vast ecosystems – rainforests and deserts – benefiting the entire planet, protecting our biodiversity (31 of the 36 recognized global biodiversity hotspots included Indigenous lands, among them, 79% have experienced armed conflicts in recent decades; Beatie et al., 2023; Raman et al., 2023), and ensuring a good home for humans and medicines for future generations.
The interaction between Indigenous cultures and the psychedelic movement is evolving; the latter is recognizing that Indigenous wisdom has informed the way psychedelics are being used clinically and therapeutically; and the former are emphasizing the importance of localized, heritage and culturally informed “set and setting” in which medicines like Peyote, Ayahuasca, Iboga and Mushrooms are actively utilized by highly trained practitioners today and directly support the health of Indigenous communities.
“One of the things that always crosses my mind is, our purpose for living this life is to prepare [our] offspring to enjoy and to live in this world, to give them the skills they need to enjoy and to survive,” says Steven Benally, a board member of the Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative (IPCI). We are “the bridge between elders and future generations,” says Lucy Bennally, Steven’s wife and an IMC Fund Conservation Committee member. People in the 50+ age category have an essential role, to pass “ancestral and cultural information to our children and grandchildren.”
The pace of the Western world is not the same as in Indigenous societies. “The time in the community is governed by natural cycles, not by consumerism” – says Osiris Garcia, PhD, a Mazatec researcher and community member working to understand the needs of the Mushroom-using Mazatec people in the Sierra Mazateca in Mexico. “Many psycho-emotional illnesses are the result of the pace and pressures of modern societies.” So-called progress and modernity are destroying our sense of collective-self and we’re becoming oblivious of the visceral bond that ties us to mother earth and natural rhythms.
Compared with the fast-paced and consumption-oriented mindset of the West, Indigenous ways of being look at the past to understand the present as we prepare for the future. Biocultural medicine conservation is always this eye toward a future of abundance, deeply fortified knowledge systems, and everything in place to support future needs for healing and health. Unlike modern environmental efforts, biocultural conservation does not separate humans from their environment.
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The mission of the IMC Fund is ensuring a future where Indigenous peoples, their territories, their medicines and their knowledges thrive for generations to come. Imagine 50 years from now, a psychedelic boom that addresses mental health, addiction, trauma, and supporting healthy communities, has accomplished its healing goals without being another extractive pressure harming ancient wisdom, cultures and knowledge, and has in fact deeply supported the peoples and lands they are entwined with, ensuring healing for all (Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund, accessed February 2024).
We emphasize that Indigenous-led strategy and implementation are key for the success of biocultural conservation. The people who have lived in these regions and maintained practices with these sacred medicines, the environments in which they grow, the diverse cultural and social structures and even languages that have stewarded their existence for generations – these are the people who know best what is needed.
The intention of this article is to share some uplifting success stories from our partners on the ground, sharing some windows into the territorial, language, and health-oriented strategies needed to ensure protection and abundance of these precious medicines, and also the complicated realities of the details that go into the work.
Blessings of the Forest is an organization working in Gabon, supporting environmental and traditionalist organizations, Indigenous communities and administrative authorities committed to the preservation and sustainable development of the country’s natural and cultural heritage. BOTF works to uplift the Iboga bioculture and Iboga-using Bwiti and Pygmy communities in one of the places most strikingly affected by the current psychedelic mental health efforts.
Working with over a dozen villages, BOTF has planted and conserved over 25,000 Iboga trees, but focusing only on the trade and conservation/reforestation of Iboga would be a simplified response to what the organization recognizes as a complex biocultural problem. Their strategies are diverse and their activities include everything from beekeeping, agroforestry training, and even school support for 117 village children over the last two years; all contributing to the possibilities for them and their culture.
Ibogaine has become increasingly in demand in treatment centers for addiction, PTSD and other illnesses, supporting hundreds of Military Veterans to recover and lead balanced lives. Despite efforts to emphasize the use of synthetic ibogaine in clinical settings, the demand on wild populations of the Tabernanthe iboga bush has grown unsustainable. Coupled with a law rendering export of Iboga from Gabon illegal, a thriving black-market trade means more and more Iboga is harvested, traditional Iboga-using communities have harder and harder times accessing their own medicine, and they don’t receive any benefits from the international trade. Enter the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing: Gabon was the first country to ratify the agreement from the UN convention on biodiversity, and a major piece of work that Blessings of the Forest has been carrying out is applying the Nagoya protocol to the fair trade of Iboga and elements of Bwiti culture (music and art), ensuring feedback to traditional communities, a landmark event for traditional medicines (Blessings Of The Forest, accessed February 2024)
The Unión de Médicos Indígenas Yageceros de la Amazonia Colombiana (UMIYAC) is an organization of spiritual authorities from five amazonian ethnic nations: A’I’ Cofan, Siona, Inga, Kamentsá and Corebajú. UMIYAC is a key partner of the IMC Fund, and their work focuses on strengthening every aspect of community life. Implementation of Indigenous autonomous governance, land conservation, strengthening ancestral medicinal knowledge and practices, revitalizing botanical knowledge, support for midwives and bone setters, implementation of biocultural education in rural schools, and organizing all-year-round spiritual health brigades are some of the activities supported by UMIYAC’s programs. Their strategies are multi-faceted and aimed at detaining and reverting the ‘risk of cultural and physical extermination,’ recognized by the Colombian Constitutional Court in 2009 within the frameworks of ‘Indigenous life plans’ and Colombian transitional justice.
According to UMIYAC’s men and women elders, spiritual and medicinal cultural practices are inextricably tied to the land, and to all the visible and invisible ecosystems that make up the Amazon rainforest. Extraction and replication of ancestral and medicinal spiritual practices away from the Amazon is a fallacious and perilous idea that is bound to have negative outcomes for both Indigenous people as well as urban patients and practitioners. UMIYAC’s rural health brigades respond to multiple needs including curing the effects of war-traumas, including woman survivors of sexual attacks, in Amazonian communities resisting a permanent armed conflict caused by the voracious appetites of markets in the global north for other precious Amazonian resources such as minerals, oil, and coca for the production of cocaine.
The UMIYAC recently purchased land for reforestation and to build a cultural and healing center – by Indigenous people and for Indigenous people. Land tenure, access and sovereignty is essential for biocultural medicine conservation. Something that is really remarkable about UMIYAC’s recent expansion and activities is the development of their women’s programming, the largest in terms of budget and population involved. This program includes intergenerational workshops for knowledge exchange, manufacturing of medicinal/botanical ointments and remedies, women’s-leadership strengthening activities, advocacy, and traditional artisan craftwork. The success of this program has set a great landmark within the organization and it is fueling everyone with hope and enthusiasm for the work to come (UMIYAC, accessed February 2024).
The Organización Intercultural Oni Xobo (Oni Xobo) is based in Pucallpa, Peru and works with the Shipibo people. They have programming in the areas of health and ancestral medicine, education, arts and culture, and environment and in a few short years have managed to establish many firsts: they have an agreement with the regional ministry of health, have opened an intercultural mini-clinic, and they held a congress on the situation of Educacion Intercultural Bilingüe as it pertains to the Shipibo people. They have been holding workshops on traditional and modern arts practices in local schools and have a cultural center (another first) where every Saturday, sabios (knowledge holders) in particular crafts give workshops. Over the past year they have been working particularly actively in the area of art and culture, honoring traditional and ancestral wisdom and integrating modern expressions of painting, embroidery work, song and dance. They see the arts as a vehicle to connect with the general Shipibo population, working to unify a collectivity that has been severely divided over the past few decades since the influx of Western and capitalist culture. A large part of this influx has to do with interest in ayahuasca, as well as extractive industries like timber and oil that create pockets of wealth but don’t address systematic problems like access to modern healthcare and quality of education. Repeatedly, projects have initiated and failed, creating a baseline distrust from the people toward organizations working in the area. Part of the strategy to conserve the practice of ancestral medicine is to strengthen all parts of the culture, so that from now and into the future, the medicine will still have a vibrant container in which to exist (Onixobo, accessed February 2024).
The Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative (IPCI) The Peyote gardens span a region in South Texas where the land is privately owned, and in order to legally distribute Peyote, a license from the DEA is needed. Native American Church members fought hard legal battles to ensure their ancestral right to practice their Peyote traditions. These legal and regulatory realities have separated Native American Church members from the direct responsibility of being in relationship with their medicine. Conservation begins with reconnection: reconnection to the land, to spiritual and ecological harvesting, to ensuring sustainability, protection and maintaining old-ways of understanding the life-cycle of the plant. Biocultural conservation includes this reconnection, while also choosing new ways of using technology like GIS to tend the medicine gardens and reconnect to regenerative harvest, including youth and elders in every stage of the process. IPCI purchased a 605-acres plot of land in the Peyote gardens, and among other programs, hold traditional harvests where children, for the first time in generations, have been able to learn the proper ways to harvest the cactus and bring home spiritually harvested medicine to their communities. This is directly connected to a future where Indigenous peoples, their medicines and their knowledges are thriving, ensuring sovereign community health systems and spiritual and religious freedom for generations to come (IPCI, accessed February 2024).
Thank you. “We are always taught to take what you need and leave some,” says Mona Polacca, a Hopi/Havasupai/Tewa elder and member of the IMC Fund Conservation Committee and co-author of a recent Declaration from an Indigenous delegation to the MAPS Psychedelic Science 2023 Conference (IMC Fund Delegation Declaration, 2023). “Our communities have lived through unimaginable traumas, but so have people on the whole planet. If we want healing, we need to respect the medicines and we need to respect the people and cultures who have stewarded these medicines for so many generations.” Indigenous Medicine Conservation leadership is grateful to those who organize their work in this latest psychedelic wave to Do no harm and build respectful relationships with the original keepers of these medicines. Respect means listening to and protecting the guardians of these territories and knowledge and supporting our communities with what they need for their well-being and navigating the modern world with autonomy and self-determination. Thank you for working as allies to change the narrative so that our voices are central. This is how we can work together for all of our health, and for the health of the planet.
References
barbara. (n.d.). Inicio. UMIYAC. Retrieved February 5, 2024, from https://umiyac.org/
Beattie, M., Fa, J. E., Leiper, I., Fernández-Llamazares, Á., Zander, K. K., & Garnett, S. T. (2023). Even after armed conflict, the environmental quality of Indigenous Peoples’ lands in biodiversity hotspots surpasses that of non-Indigenous lands. Biological Conservation, 286, 110288. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2023.110288
Blessings Of The Forest – We honour the benefits of GABON’s Forests. (n.d.). Retrieved February 5, 2024, from https://blessingsoftheforest.org/
Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund. (n.d.). Retrieved February 5, 2024, from https://imc.fund/
IMC Fund Delegation Declaration. (n.d.). Retrieved February 5, 2024, from https://imc.fund/journal/declaration
Oni Xobo. (n.d.). Oni Xobo. Retrieved February 5, 2024, from https://www.onixobo.orgRaman, S. (2023, October 19). Study: Despite armed conflicts, Indigenous lands have better environment quality. Mongabay Environmental News. https://news.mongabay.com/2023/10/study-despite-armed-conflicts-indigenous-lands-have-better-environment-quality/
Miguel Evanjuanoy Chindoy
Miguel Evanjuanoy Chindoy is a member of the Inga people from Putumayo, Colombia. He was born in a beautiful hilltop village part of an Indigenous territory named Yunguillo, where the local cosmovision and collective work are the pillars of community life. Miguel is a community leader and environmental engineer and has been devoted follower of yagé (ayahuasca) medicine since his childhood years. He acts as a spokesperson for the Union of Indigenous Yage Medics of the Colombian Amazon (UMIYAC). Specifically, his work focuses on the role that Indigenous spirituality plays in territorial defence and environmental conservation. He is also interested in how yage medicine practiced by local, Indigenous traditional healers contributes to peacebuilding, the improvement of community health, and the reconstruction of the social fabric in war torn rural Colombia.
Recently Miguel has been speaking internationally about the impact that development models based on extractive economy and on the depletion of earth’s vital resources are having on the Amazonian biocultural ecosystems. On behalf of his organization and community, he is also taking a stand against cultural appropriation and the indiscriminate commercialization of Indigenous practices and sacred plants, with the claim that this “marketed spiritualty” is negatively impacting both Indigenous peoples and urban users alike.
Miriam Volat
Miriam Volat M.S., Co-Director of Riverstyx Foundation, is an educator, organizer, facilitator and ecologist with a passion for soils and nutrient cycles. She works Nationally and Internationally to increase health in all systems. She is dedicated to the biocultural conservation of Peyote and other medicines supported by the IMC Fund, and works in any way she can to ensure the conservation of these medicines for Indigenous communities and their precious ways of life. As a mom, she is fortunate her daughter, Cora, also supports her work.
