13 March 2026
Cosmic Diplomacy: Kinship, Confluence, and the Future of Psychedelics
By: Glauber Loures de Assis, PhD, Adana Omágua Kambeba, MD, Daiara Tukano, MHR, Jairo Lima, B.Ed.
MAPS Bulletin: Volume XXXVI
The Threshold We Stand On
Every generation needs a story that explains its time. For the last decades, the phrase “psychedelic renaissance” has said it all, shifting the imagination of the public and policymakers from prohibition to possibility, from stigma to legitimacy, from the underground to clinical trials. However, every metaphor eventually reaches its limit. A renaissance is a rebirth, a revival of what was assumed lost. Yet despite the violence of criminalization and colonial erasure, the songs never really went silent: Native Americans, Indigenous people across the globe, Afro-diasporic traditions, and underground therapists in Europe and across the Americas kept the flame alive over generations.
What is happening right now is not a rebirth of something forgotten, but a collision of multiple currents meeting in turbulent waters. The present crossroads we find ourselves in is more complicated than a renaissance, and may have bigger implications. The status quo seems set on forcing psychedelics into the bureaucratic corridors of medicalization, sold as treatments without context, and distributed in pharmacies stripped of ritual, culture, or responsibility. In this path, psychedelics dissolve into charlatanism, consumption, and savior myths, accessible to anyone – and only those – who can pay for or get away with it. This urgency is motivated by real pain, and these medicines offer real promise, but it must be possible to honor the suffering of our traumatized, our addicted, and our marginalized without perpetuating the economic, political, and social ruptures at the root of their disintegration.
The Multiplicity of Psychedelics
Psychedelics are irreducibly plural. They live simultaneously in research centers and rainforests, synapses and spirits, ceremony and clinic, philanthropy and protest. No single lens can exhaust their meaning, and understanding them requires a coalition vast enough to include research and ritual, philanthropy and grassroots, family and university, academic and Indigenous sciences.
Recognizing this shows us that another path is possible: one that builds a politics of kinship, confluence, and relationality, and that refuses to let modernity drain the soul out of our sacred plants and spirit molecules. This is the work of Cosmic Diplomacy.
Cosmic Diplomacy is more than just punchy jargon — it is emerging as a practical framework and approach: a method of recognizing that no single perspective – whether biomedical, philanthropic, political, or spiritual — can encompass or contain the full multiplicity, potential, and promise of what the Western world calls psychedelics. If the renaissance was about proving psychedelics have therapeutic use, cosmic diplomacy is about deciding how psychedelics will impact how we live and flourish – and whether they will really help humankind around the globe.
Isabelle Stengers calls this cosmopolitics: a space where no discipline or worldview claims supremacy, and the plurality of voices emerges as an assembly of different interests. With psychedelics, this is unavoidable. Neuroscience cannot outweigh cosmology. Business cannot supersede service. Therapy cannot replace ceremony. Diplomacy is the art of letting multiple truths negotiate without collapsing, and right now we need it more than ever?
Taking this one step further, Bruno Latour once dreamed of a “Parliament of Things” in which rivers, mountains, and nonhuman beings would have political representation. What might it mean if we lived in a world where the biocultures of ayahuasca vines, peyote cacti, psilocybe mushrooms, iboga roots, and the ecosystems that sustain them had agency and their own rights? If we are here to learn from the mystery and heal with the unseen, must we not insist on a politics that includes their ancestral stewards, cosmologies, and habitats as part of the negotiation?
Putting it into Practice
MAPS’ Psychedelic Science 2025 Conference, held in Denver, Colorado, in June, offered a paradox — a place where glimpses of this framework came through the cracks of a system trying to absorb an entirely new paradigm. Clinicians, healers, philanthropists, investors, psychonauts, advocates, territorial authorities, and global Indigenous voices alike spoke to an equally diverse audience – simultaneously inspiring new horizons while reinforcing obsolete worldviews.
As Donna Haraway said, it is time to “stay with the trouble”: to resist quick fixes and inhabit complexity. And in this sense, PS2025 was a rich space of plurality and controversy – with flaws, problems, and challenges that need to be understood and confronted. This year, the community took one step closer to that depth: the conference had children in the conference hall, elders in dialogue, and parent-focused spaces alongside the scientific panels. The Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund sent a delegation of nearly 50 heritage-holders to PS2025 not merely to attend, but to raise Indigenous voices and call for a paradigm of healing grounded in cultural integrity and respectful interaction with communities. Their Second Declaration makes clear that healing in the psychedelic field must respect ancestral traditions, prioritize communities, and address free, prior, and informed consent, an agenda that not only respects Indigenous peoples but also different cosmologies.
This is significant because it symbolizes how kinship is entering the mainstream discourse in the US psychedelic field, not as theory, but as practice. Some of the authors of this article previously identified this shift as The Kinship Paradigm, in which healing is not a solitary hero’s journey into the self, but rather the reweaving of relationships. Safety and efficacy might be measured by a clinical protocol, but they also happen through song, in care, and in community with shared responsibility.
Earlier in 2025, another gathering offered yet another example: in January, the fifth Indigenous Ayahuasca Conference occurred in the sacred village of the Yawanawá people, bringing together leaders from more than 30 Indigenous nations from different continents in the same place. Supported by committed donors and partners from the Global North, it was an absolute success at every level. After almost a decade of slow effort, partnerships between Indigenous leaders and non-Indigenous allies have created a living environment that not only hosted the gathering but also reverberated around the world. This is philanthropy as diplomacy: a partnership that strengthens sovereignty, sustains biocultures, and seeds projects that will flourish long after the event has ended; its legacy will nourish future generations and strengthen ongoing projects across the Amazon rainforest and beyond.
Bringing it all together, Indigenous-led institutes, such as the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute, and Global North organizations, like ICEERS, have woven together an international coalition that is now giving rise to the World Ayahuasca Forum, to be held in Girona, Spain, in September 2026 — the world’s largest gathering dedicated to the biocultures of sacred plants. Like PS2025, it will bring together Indigenous leaders, scholars, activists, and decision-makers from across the globe. However, we hope it pushes the movement’s horizon even further into a collectively woven, increasingly relational future.
Confluences Create Challenging Currents
Confluence can also bring conflict, and the psychedelic movement has seen a lot of it: biomedical models clash with ancestral traditions, corporate clinics clash with grassroots practitioners, and philanthropic reporting requirements clash with ancestral time. To ignore these tensions is naïve, but to abandon confluence is to run the river dry. Diplomacy can keep the confluence alive, not by smoothing over differences but by learning to negotiate without erasure. A quick case illustrates our point.
At PS2025, some Indigenous leaders brought rapé — a tobacco snuff — to serve during the conference; for them, being invited to an event means more than just showing up with their bodies, but also with their cosmologies and practices. While well-intended, the venue strictly prohibited tobacco in all its forms, making no distinction between smoked tobacco (which is, of course, capable of triggering fire alarms) and powdered tobacco, which is also legal but probably unfamiliar to the people enforcing the venue’s rules.
This cultural clash could have hardened into a conflict between divergent perspectives, but instead became the spark for a deep, frank conversation between MAPS leadership, Indigenous representatives, legal professionals, and community partners. This moment that unfolded at the Psychedelic Parenthood Community booth — in the middle of the packed expo floor on the last day of the event — truly encompassed the paradox of trying to bring worlds together. It strengthened our alliances and even inspired the very writing of this essay.
Diplomacy Reimagined
Diplomacy has long been the art of states. Ambassadors negotiate treaties, prevent wars, and represent interests. But in an age of climate collapse, renewed wars on drugs, and Indigenous genocide, diplomacy must expand.
Cosmic Diplomacy is diplomacy for a planet in crisis. It is not only states but forests, rivers, ancestors, families, minorities, and plant medicines that demand representation. It is not merely a negotiation between governments, but between cosmologies. In international relations, diplomacy is about interests. In cosmic diplomacy, it is about relationships. The goal is not to secure advantage, but to sustain kinship and life itself.
That is why the Indigenous philosopher Ailton Krenak called the Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa a cosmic diplomat. As a shaman and the author of The Falling Sky, Kopenawa speaks to humans and spirits, translating worlds and negotiating humanity’s possibility of survival.
Knowledge is never born in isolation, and psychedelics make this visible: a molecule is never just chemistry but also law, philanthropy, ancestry, story, and prayer. The very notion of “psychedelics” can be limiting, obscuring that we are dealing with biocultures and systems of knowledge transmitted across generations. To practice diplomacy here is to admit multiple perspectives and that no single domain can rule.
Cosmic Diplomacy is therefore a coalitional ethic: only together can we face what is coming.
And here we end where we began: at a threshold.
A genuine paradigm shift will not come from repeating the limits of psychiatry with more efficient tools, but from dialogue and productive friction between epistemologies, generating new ways of producing knowledge and practicing science capable of confronting ecological destruction, human-rights violations, and the plurality of cosmologies, freedoms of consciousness, and territorial rights.
The psychedelic renaissance opened a doorway; Cosmic Diplomacy names the passage into its next historical phase. We witnessed signs of this at PS2025. For this reason, rather than deepening divisions in the field, we call for confluence: respecting differences while trusting dialogue and the global scope of the causes we share.
As Benki Piyako, Ashaninka leader and President of the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute, reminds us:
“This is my call for all the peoples of the world to stand as one. Either we unite now to shift the path ahead, or we will witness the greatest unmaking this planet has ever known.”
The arrow has been released.
The river of confluence flows.
The kinship paradigm calls.
The only question is: will we be brave enough to answer as cosmic diplomats?
References
Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Harvard University Press.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Stengers, I. (2010). Cosmopolitics I & II. University of Minnesota Press.
Simondon, G. (2020). Individuation in light of notions of form and information (Original work published 1964). University of Minnesota Press.
Strathern, M. (1988). The gender of the gift: Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. University of California Press.
Kopenawa, D., & Albert, B. (2013). The falling sky: Words of a Yanomami shaman. Harvard University Press.
Krenak, A. (2020). Ideas to postpone the end of the world. House of Anansi Press.
Bispo dos Santos, A. (2015). Colonialismo, quilombos: modos e significações.
Tukano, D. (2019). Memory, territory and the future of Indigenous struggles. Selvagem.
MAPS Public Benefit Corporation. (2023). Phase III trial results on MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021–2024). Drug overdose deaths in the United States.
Vera Institute of Justice. (2023). Mass incarceration: The whole pie.
Global Witness. (2022). Defending tomorrow: The climate crisis and threats against land and environmental defenders.
Psychedelic confluence at PS2025: The watershed beyond the renaissance. (2025).
The kinship paradigm: How relationship can reshape research, ethics, and healing in the psychedelic field. (2025).
Glauber Loures de Assis, PhD
Dr. Glauber Loures de Assis is a sociologist, Indigenous rights activist, and researcher of Indigenous biocultures. He serves as Executive Director of the Psychedelic Parenthood Community, collaborator of the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute, and member of the organizing committee of the World Ayahuasca Forum. His work operates at the intersection of Indigenous knowledge systems and contemporary psychedelic science, and he is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on ayahuasca. He is the father of three children.
Adana Omágua Kambeba, MD
Adana Omágua Kambeba, a woman of the Omágua people, is a physician, activist, educator, and actress. She is a member of the Indigenous Movement of Brazil, Director of Community Health at the Psychedelic Parenthood Community, and a prescribing physician of cannabis. She was elected one of the inspiring people of the year in 2025 by The Guardian and is committed to promoting dialogue between Indigenous traditional medicine and Western medicine.
Daiara Tukano, MHR
Daiara Hori Figueroa Sampaio (Duhigô), a woman of the Ye’pá Mahsã (Tukano) people from the Upper Rio Negro, is an artist, activist, educator, communicator, and guardian of memory. She holds a Master’s degree in Human Rights, is co-founder of the Indigenous Ayahuasca Conference, Vice-President of the Uhtã Bo’ó Wi’í Institute, and Cultural Advisor to the Federal Government of Brazil.
Jairo Lima, B.Ed.
Jairo Lima is an Indigenist and Senior Founding Advisor of the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute. He has worked with Indigenous peoples of the Brazilian Amazon for more than 35 years. He is co-founder of the Indigenous Ayahuasca Conference, music producer and founder of Sananga Records, co-organizer of the World Ayahuasca Forum, and chronicler.
Become a MAPS Member with a monthly donation
As a Member, you’re not just making a donation — you’re joining a community that is at the forefront of advancing research, changing policy, and evolving education around psychedelics. Join us in shaping a future where these life-changing tools are available to those who need them most.