With private investment in psychedelic development, the FDA anticipating approving the first psychedelic medicine within the next years, U.S. cities decriminalizing enforcement, and corporate psychedelic retreats considered to stimulate employee creativity, in practice, unregulated psychedelic experimentation is becoming popular and more dangerous in the West. Ethical concerns exacerbate the need for safe understanding of these medicines and warn against its use without corresponding evidence and epistemic and material abuses and violations against the rights of Indigenous communities. This panel explores Indigenous Spirit medicines and their appropriation in Western psychedelic research and practice, encouraging scholars to explore frameworks for decolonizing psychedelic research. The session considers Indigenous Peoples’ experiences and perspectives, the trajectory of the psychedelic experience and its relation to psychotic events, warnings of drug development and clinical trials, and ethical considerations for research imperative to the resurgence of the therapeutic use of Spirit medicine (aka psychedelics) in the United States.
In this paper I center the White Shaman mural, ancient rock art located in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas. Responding to the theme of “La Labor de Nuestras Manos,” I consider the work of our ancestors’ hands along what is now known as the Mexico-US border, the land of Kickapoo, Jumanos, Lipan Apache, and Coahuiltecan peoples. The White Shaman is considered one of the oldest manuscripts in North America at approximately 2,000 years old and it has been interpreted by art historians and Indigenous descendants to reveal compelling philosophies, astronomical patterns, and ritual processes (Boyd, The White Shaman Mural, 158). In this paper I propose a set of prepositions to guide engagement with the White Shaman: thinking from (land-based creation stories and cosmovision), being with (Indigenous ritual relationships), and moving towards (decolonial futurities). This requires addressing colonial legacies and exploring questions of Indigeneity in the borderlands.
Fruitful comparison of psychedelic, spiritual, and psychotic experiences requires a degree phenomenological nuance. Some shared features, such as encounters and communications with supernatural entities, are obfuscated by scientific and clinical terminology. Other supposed distinctions are based on an atemporal view of dynamic experiences. The trajectory of the psilocybe mushroom experience – from illness-like feelings during the comeup, to often awe-inspiring peak experience, to relief in the comedown – maps, at different points in time, onto different facets of spiritual and psychotic experiences. Acknowledging these temporal dynamics helps inform cognitive scientific perspectives on religion and 'spirit medicine'. For example, the psychedelic transition from illness-like comeup to peak experience supports the idea that stress triggers a detection of supernatural agency. Additionally, while most comedowns are characterized by love, peace, and calm, a minority resemble manic states. We provide examples of how spiritual traditions guide psychedelic-like compensations to stress (e.g., shamanic sickness) towards prosocial outcomes.
Spirit medicines elicit experiences of fundamental and enduring subjective spiritual and psychological variations in self-concepts and ontologies. Given such implications, a rigorous evaluation of ethical frameworks must require considerations beyond the physiological functions and effects that are now central to Western psychedelic research and praxis. The Indigenous ethical framework proposed safeguards the contemplative qualities of prosocial and collective engagement of Indigenous lineage holders through principles of flourishing social transformation. These include contemplative aspects of inquiry, relationality, and meaning guided through the Spirit medicine experience; the direct participation of Indigenous Nations in the decisions that impact their rights to tangible and intangible heritage currently violated by the Western psychedelic system; the prevention of harm to human subjects, including the respect of autonomy and agency pre-during-post treatment; and mind-body-spirit practices centered on right relationships intra and inter-species. Thus, evolving Indigenous contemplative frameworks ensure psychological, social, and judicial transformation beyond religion, medicine, and policy.