Psychedelic Renaissance and Religious Appropriation

Katie Hamaker
Jul 19, 2023
10 min read

Updated: Sep 22, 2023

I'm about to head to the 2023 Parliament of World Religions in Chicago to speak about cultural and religious appropriation. This is a topic near and dear to me because -- well a simple acknowledgement of my position in the world as a white woman engaging with sacred plants in a way that is informed by the Shipibo, an Indigenous community in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest might suffice.

But if it needs more explanation, I wake up every morning and ask, what can I do to repair the relationships around me? As I ask this question, it is the Indigenous communities that come to the forefront of my mind most often. One answer I come back to often is to speak up. If you are curious, the rest of this writing is the talk I am sharing this summer in Chicago around religious appreciation and religious appropriation.

Land Acknowledgement

First I'd like to start with a land acknowledgement. I live on unceded land in Berkeley, California. For thousands of years, the land in Berkeley was inhabited by the Ohlone people. I want to acknowledge that it is an honor to live here. I also want to acknowledge the ancestors who came before me -- They worked to cultivate relationships with the plants and animals. The Ohlone people have survived over 2 centuries of genocide and colonization – an impact that resulted in part from my ancestors and is a legacy that I work to repair in this lifetime. Today many of the indigenous communities near me are revitalizing their cultural practices. I’m grateful for their work because they remind me of the importance of caring for the soil, the water, the trees and mountains as well as the non-human and more than human spirits that live among us.

As a visitor to Chicago, I want to acknowledge that I am grateful to be on the land of the Council of Three Fires – the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations. it’s an honor to be here on this land and with these ancestors.

Finally, for those of you here seen and unseen, with indigenous blood, I’m sorry. I’m learning, and I am working to repair the relationships that have been broken.

Land and Cultural Theft

Today I am here to talk about cultural appropriation and inside of cultural appropriation – to explore this idea of religious appropriation within the current resurgence of a psychedelic movement.

But first, I want to go back to land because there is a belief system in my family around land ownership. I come from a long line of people who believe land could be owned. My ancestors came from Europe in the late 1600s. When we came here, we knew about geopolitical boundaries and taxes and held the idea that land is profitable. So when my family arrived on the mayflower and we learned from the indigenous communities that lived here that the land was valuable, we took it. This is the trickery of our story, we first took the land by drawing a line around it, then we denied that we took it, then we forgot that we stole it, so it never happened.

I begin today with the theft of land because cultural appropriation is a kind of theft. A theft that implicates a possession of property. For me concepts of possession and property are murky because these are ideas that have been applied to capitalist and neoliberal notions of land ownership. And possession of property has been critiqued by many Indigenous people. While my family believed in land ownership, indigenous wisdom teaches today about ideas of land stewardship – that we don’t inhabit the land, the land inhabits us.

It was Mona Polecca, a Hopi Grandmother and who happens to be here speaking at the Parliament, and a member of the international council of the 13 grandmothers that carry medicine, who shared that her connection to land is connection to life. She is the one who helped me to see that the taking of land is also the taking of life.

Here we are today day, many centuries, wars, and generations after my family arrived, talking about the real and devastating experience of the theft of something that can’t be owned. The US has a long history of taking what can’t be owned without consent – land, labor, exploitation of bodies, as well as the taking of culture.

Cultural Appropriation vs Cultural Appreciation

Belinda Eriacho a Dine and Zuni elder said that cultural appropriation is the inappropriate or unacknowledged adoption of culture. She says that cultural appropriation is when someone is emulating a sweat lodge without understanding the origin of how to do certain things within the ritual of a sweat lodge. In the context of plant medicines, cultural appropriation is calling oneself a shaman and hosting ceremonies with plant medicines after traveling to the Amazon rainforest once or twice and participating in a few ceremonies.

On the other hand, Belinda says that cultural appreciation is when someone seeks to learn about another culture in order to broaden their own perspective and to connect with others, cross culturally. In order to share cross culturally, you need permission to be in that ceremony or ritual. Then when you come to that ritual, sharing occurs. In this way, there’s an exchange instead of a taking of those wisdoms.

But let’s hold these thoughts for a moment and explore sacred plants and the psychedelic movement today.

Psychedelic Renaissance

From a culturally western perspective, the psychedelic movement is an idea that speaks about psychedelics, sacred plants, entheogens, drugs, medicine and references both plants and pills. Today western awareness of psychedelics is having a moment. While this topic and consumption of sacred plants is growing once again, some are calling it psychedelic renaissance or psychedelic’s second wave. I won’t go into it much, but the first wave took place in the 50s and 60s, primarily from a culture of resistance to the Vietnam war and the hegemonic norms of the West.

Starting in the 1970s US presidents began to impose and reinforce drug policies under a program known as the “war on drugs.” The political effort placed most psychedelic plants on a restrictive, schedule I category. Stemming from racist origins, the war on drugs had lopsided impacts on Black and Latin Americans who were labeled as deviant drug users and imprisoned. The policies also banned Indigenous people from practices informed by their own cultural traditions.

Today after nearly a 50-year lull, psychedelics are coming back around and into western discourse. Some scientists, anthropologists and theologians are finally catching up to indigenous knowledges only to discover that the consumption of sacred plants has been an aspect of indigenous culture and ritual for thousands of years. And unfortunately today, much like the exploitative endeavors of the European Renaissance, appropriation and re-invention of indigenous spiritual rituals are being passed along within a psychedelic renaissance.

Religious Appropriation

Let’s move into the consumption of psychedelics and religious appropriation. So what is religious appropriation?

Maybe we start with why a church might want to serve a psychedelic as a sacrament. It could be that churches in the US are adapting to include a sacred connection with the non-human and the more-than-human. It could be that folks are looking for ways to reconnect with each other, the earth, and sacred plants offer spiritual experiences that engage ideas of oneness, interconnectedness, and connection with the divine. Theologians might reference syncretic traditions and offer a perspective that it is natural for people and cultures to share, trade, evolve. Some might say that we take part of cultural negotiations as a part of our evolution. After all, the Santo Daime is an ayahuasca based syncretic religion originating out of Brazil that is part Afro-Cuban, Catholic, and Indigenous and exists in over 60 countries today.

But if we look at the history of cultural appropriation and theft in the US, we might be informed differently about the idea of religious appropriation. Sandor Iron Rope, a Lakota man also here at the Parliament, spoke of churches in the US, appropriating ritual, and culture without consent, in order to enhance status. He has noticed church leaders without any lineage or history of the rituals being used calling themselves shamans and healers of that tradition.

So how is this harmful? I spoke with a friend of mine – a white man who serves ayahuasca within his church. He shared with me his intention of indigenous allyship. His church is currently challenging the law, the DEA, and if he wins, he will be part of the liberation of some of these sacred plants from the Schedule I list – which could ultimately support Native American churches in practicing their rituals.

But he got me thinking, when indigenous communities are prevented from practicing their own cultural traditions, or if they do practice, they must do so within a structurally white institution like a church, I wonder, is my friend’s church just another form of white privilege in a racist society?

Liz Bucar explores in her book, Stealing My Religion how western engagement in yoga has led to a kind of religious appropriation that has had the impact of silencing Indic Yoga practitioners in the US. Exploring the intersection of yoga and neoliberal spirituality, Bucar shows how Western yoga has also become understood as a capitalist endeavor where purchasing power builds spirituality within. Using the words, “religious appropriation” Bucar makes space to investigate how power dynamics rooted in racism have silenced and removed Indic practitioners from their own rituals. If we apply Bucar’s lessons of Western yoga to the psychedelic renaissance, then perhaps we can ask who is being silenced while westerners adopt spiritual and religious rituals of Indigenous peoples?

Sacred plant medicines have been undergoing a whitening process. I share from the perspective that whiteness is responsible for creating today’s culture, and because of that it is difficult to separate injustices from whiteness.

Can we even explore the spiritual consumption of sacred plant as benign? Bucar writes, “If white people have institutionalized and generational access to power, a power that nonwhites don’t have, then is the western consumption of sacred plants – plants consumed by many indigenous communities’ – considered religious appropriation? What if the primary spokesperson for these cultural and spiritual traditions eventually becomes the white person?”

Indigenous Wisdom

I want to talk about an Indigenous concept called the law of origin.

Mona Polecca, the Hopi Grandmother I just spoke about shared her perspective on the law of origin. While many of us in the West use the word “law” to represent a penal system, Grandmother Mona, shared that it’s a way of guiding human interactions with the natural world – the law of origin is more of a way of life as opposed to a set of rules.

The law of origin contains beliefs that are deeply intertwined with cultural identity and spirituality. It is a set of ideas that views the land and humans and spirits as interconnected and serves as a guide for care of not just each other, but for culture, plants, spirits, soil, water, wind, mountains, trees. The law of origin implies relationship – an evolution of relationship. And relationship implies reciprocity.

She asked, what happens when we take more without giving? We become out of balance – out of balance with the spiritual laws of life. Reciprocity and balance are concepts with a social justice impact. They are concepts that tend to the unbalanced relationships. In other words, reciprocity is meant to tend to those on the unbalanced end that are suffering.

So, reciprocity is a reminder of a relationship with life and land. And the indigenous law of origin ensures that the places of origin of ancient technologies like these sacred plant medicines, are cared for. Therefore, we must work together to protect habitats, biodiverse ecosystems in order to protect culture and therefore life.

Conclusion

So, is it ok for someone like me, a white woman of mixed European descent to take ayahuasca? When I first started exploring this question, I read the spoken works of Ayahuasceros from the 4th Indigenous Conference on Ayahuasca who strongly cautioned against someone like me from consuming ayahuasca. Then I thought about the time that I have been offered consent by a Shipibo family to adopt their cultural and religious practices that include the consumption of ayahuasca. Who’s right? Who’s not? The problem is that the answer to this question always leads me back to a yes or no – a kind of binary authoritarianism steeped in an unfortunate blend patriarchy and hierarchy.

Knowing that this answer will change, I decided I would try to ask that question every morning I wake up and see what happens. One morning I remembered that we don’t all wake up to the same starting point. That morning I decided I needed to ask a different question altogether. Here’s what I chose: “How am in contributing to the uneven relationships that matter so much to me?” And “how do I work to repair this lopsidedness?” Because, ultimately claiming the neutral consumption of ayahuasca without examining the power dynamics between the cultural exchange, means I run the risk of not exploring unequal representation, issues of extractivism, and exclusion. The very lessons Bucar ran into with her research of western engagement with yoga.

About a month ago I had the opportunity to listen in on a webinar with a group called Ligare – a Christian psychedelic society. The leaders of this call shared such beautiful messages – messages about what it means to welcome Christians back into the fold of Christianity as they found new understandings of divinity and spirituality through the consumption of sacred plants. They spoke about offering prayers, hymns, bible stories as tools for connecting with the divine.

But while I’m listening to this call, a funny thing happens, I begin to feel the hair rise on the back of my neck. And then I start reading the discomfort from some other audience members in the chat– I’m not alone. I couldn’t really make sense of it until the end call when I started thinking about the harm that Christianity has done to Indigenous people, to non-Christians, and to Christians alike – all in the name of Christianity. And I realized that the problem wasn’t what the speakers were saying, it’s what they weren’t saying. None of the Ligare speakers started with an acknowledgement of harm and a need to heal and repair relationships.

Restorative justice is a concept which comes from indigenous wisdoms. It is rooted in the idea that no one escapes the destabilization of harm, not victims, not witnesses and not even perpetrators. To me this means we will struggle to move forward until we acknowledge that hurt has been done.

Belinda Eriacho the Dine and Zuni elder I previously mentioned shared that

“…acknowledgement held with respect can be the key to holding a conversation that moves from cultural appropriation and into cultural appreciation.” This question of cultural theft vs cultural exchange comes down to right relationship. She said, “When you begin to acknowledge that hurt has been done, then you can begin to have a conversation about that.”

So, I’ll conclude with this last question, if western consumption of sacred plant medicine is such a fraught practice, why do it at all? The irony of this question is that the consumption of ayahuasca, as a student of the Shipibo tradition, has been the very thing that brought me the ability to question whether or not I should be consuming ayahuasca – and I don’t always know how to make sense of that. But what I do know is that instead if bringing me away from critical thinking, a spiritual practice involving plants as teachers has helped direct me into thinking more critically. It’s helped me find the courage and humility to join conversations about appropriation, theft, and reparation. And helped foster the desire to carry my story forward with a much needed apology so that we all can begin to have a conversation about that.