Said the tongue of my forebears
in the navel part of Abya Yala
that long ago—so far back that time was not yet born
when the world was just begot
the gods came together to make those to roam on Earth.
They wanted beings of Spirit, beings of flow.
Yet, easier said than done,
as you and I know,
only practice leads to progress,
even for the gods.
And so, for each attempt, a sun became:
the sun of Earth,
the sun of Wind,
the sun of Fire,
and sun Sol of Water.
Every time the gods failed miserably.
The creatures turned out rigid and uptight,
arrogant and full of deceit.
So, the gods sent chaos to these creatures:
jaguars to devour them,
gusts of wind to blow them away,
fires to scorch and blaze them,
and floods to dilute and drown them.
And yet, the gods gave up not.
Decided, they tried one last time
and made our current sun:
the Sol of Movement,
who keeps all things warm
and changing in constant flux.
The solar god Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent,
descended to the Mictlan, the land of the dead.
He went to bring the precious bones of previous eras,
the seeds from which—hopefully—
a new kind of being would emerge.
Arriving before the Lord of the Dead, he said:
“I have come for the bones you safeguard.
We need them to sprout new beings of Spirit.”
And so replied Mictlantecutli:
“You will have the bones only after you play the sacred conch
and walk four times around the seat of precious stones.”
The shell, however, had no holes.
Quetzalcoatl called on the brother worms
to make the holes, and so they did.
Without delay, the gentle sister bees flew in
and buzzed within their most mellifluous chant.
When you listen carefully
deep within your heart,
you may still feel the bee’s vibration
coming from their song
deep within the heart of the earth.
Mesmerized by the sound,
Mictlantecutli gave the bones;
but once out of the trance,
he wanted them back!
Trick after trick, he tried to retrieve them
but time and again, the Feathered Serpent recovered them.
Finally, leaving the Mictlan,
Quetzalcoatl ascended to the Tamoanchan,
the place of the eternal life
and gave the bones to the Greatest Mother Goddess
Quilatzi Cihuacoatl Tlazolteotl
the Warriorress Snake Goddess
of Purification and Renewal.
She threw the seed bones in her earth womb
and kindly and lovingly ground the bones to ashes.
The Feathered Serpent bled his lightning rod on the ashes
and together with Mother Goddess
churned blood and ashes into human form.
The new creatures were hungry
but there was nothing for them to eat.
Sister red ant told of the sacred maize
hidden in the caves of the earth.
Turned into a black ant, Quetzalcoatl
together with red ant brought the maize,
the gods chewed on it to make a paste
and placed it on our lips.
So, we came to life
Our human communities have been dislocated and used as weapons against each other. How can we compost the continuous, internalized coloniality from systems that humiliate, erase, and disregard our traditions and knowledge? Ancestral knowledge teaches that we can become food for others through harmonious relationships with environmental communities. What are these skillful pathways?
For millennia, Indigenous traditional medicine systems have gathered extraordinary wisdom on the healing properties of natural beings for wounds of the soul and the soil. More than only addressing disease and distress, these medicines are aimed at gathering spiritual meaning, balance, and belonging. Indigenous Peoples on all continents learned through observation and experience about these medicines’ properties, benefits, interactions with other remedies, dosages, and side effects. To this day, three-quarters of the population in the Global South continues to use and rely on traditional medicine from plants, fungi, animals, microorganisms, and mineral sources.1 For thousands of years, they depended on their traditional systems for health and happiness. That is, before Western medicine began to exploit this tangible and intangible Indigenous heritage by isolating and synthesizing ingredients and developing drugs that would be administered in pill form and expected to have rapid results that would require very little orientation or integration. To grow medicine and health care into booming economic industries.
Pharmacognosy (medicine knowledge and the development of drugs from natural sources) has extracted most of its discoveries from the traditional systems preserved by Indigenous Peoples. To this day, even in the Global North, almost half of the drugs in the United States are derived from the traditional use of natural ingredients, and a quarter of all prescription drugs contain at least one natural source ingredient.2
Yet traditional systems remain dismissed as ineffectual or superstitious, relegated as inferior to Western medicine. In some regions of the world, practitioners are denigrated, persecuted, criminalized, and threatened. Indigenous traditional doctors are painfully underpaid, follow the same trends as their people for lower life expectancies, and lack the resources to practice their healing traditions effectively. In other words, Western medicine has appropriated, capitalized, and commodified Indigenous knowledge for its sole health and economic benefit.
In recent years, no other medicine research has attracted as much interest and investment as that of Spirit medicines, or what the West calls psychedelics. The hype has taken over pharmaceutical and medical research and public interest, with estimates of 50 million US users propagating a burgeoning multibillion-dollar industry. This fast-growing field is severely concerning for Indigenous Peoples with long-standing traditional use of Spirit medicines. If history has anything to tell us, this trend threatens to damage their traditions and Lands irreversibly.
Indigenous traditional healers feel a solid commitment to participating in social justice struggles because these extractions are wounding Mother Earth. Agricultural multinationals poison the soils with pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides that erode the Lands, as if the West had declared war against Nature. If She is sick, no medicine grows. There is no life; there is no humanity. We know that if She hurts, so do humans. The diseases of the body and the mind—supremacy, individualism, greed, discrimination, loneliness, isolation, and so on—result from a total disconnect from spirituality. Lack of harmony results in more disease and increased desperation to find solutions that are harder to find.
Indigenous Elders have warned that medicines are hiding away deeper into less disturbed areas. Alarming changes are happening due to the climate emergency. Rising temperatures affect the life cycles and health of plants, fungi, animals, and minerals, resulting in too-variable-to-predict times for harvesting. Climate burdens are not the only problem. Finding medicine, even for traditional local use, has become more challenging due to overharvesting for tourist demands. Spiritual consumerism, environmental degradation and deforestation, monocropping, traditional transformation adopting imported medicines, and local conflicts between communities competing for funding to cater to Western demands are excruciating challenges that Indigenous traditions increasingly face.
The most challenging of these concerns is the clashing of ways of being. Indigenous traditions consider the use of Spirit medicines as sacred. The sacred cannot be negotiated or commercialized. Its approach is ceremonial wisdom to learn aspects of our spiritual relationship and responsibility to our planet. The medicines open spiritual gateways to our past and emerging Ancestors of blood and Lands. They dissolve the obstacles of the narrow human mind that has lost its ability to be in community and promote an experience of transcendence through kin relationality and ecological belonging to Nature, the Universe, and Spirit.
Indigenous traditions regard these medicines as revealers of the animating principle of life, Spirit. In contrast, Western approaches regard the human mind as a singular atomic entity. The term psychedelics—coined by Humphrey Osmond in 1957—suggests they can manifest the mind or reveal its beneficial properties. The term strips the medicines from their spiritual aspect, reducing them to servants of the human mind alone.
In the West, the medicalized, self-development, and recreational use of psychedelics focuses on the benefits to the individual—from mental health disorders targeting treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and addictions to achieving the highest human potential or creativity to recreational use at festivals or for individual use. Using classic psychedelics—such as ayahuasca, psilocybe mushrooms, and peyote—has also spawned markets, from psychedelic churches to festivals and underground therapies in which Western facilitators charge thousands of dollars per service.
How do we overcome the communication divisions between such different worldviews and different Peoples?
Mutually beneficial relationships can only happen through cultivating repair. Acknowledging when there have been violations and committing to reparations can ensure a path toward reciprocal, respectful, and culturally informed systems.
After many years of research and activist work regarding the stark realities of Western extraction, exploitation, capitalization, and commercialization of our tangible and intangible heritage, it became evident to me that the detriment to Indigenous Peoples, traditions, and our environments needs justice. I centered on properly recognizing Indigenous traditions as the origin of Spirit medicine, educating research institutions to commit to ethical practices and sharing benefits with Indigenous communities. I sought ways to support traditional medicine by establishing lines of reparation and beneficial relationships between Indigenous and Western medicine systems based on international frameworks protecting Indigenous rights. Above all, I demanded the representation of Indigenous voices in developing Western psychedelic research to restore the authority of Indigenous goals, methodologies, and approaches to Spirit medicines and to benefit all communities involved, as is aligned with our traditions of collective well-being.
I realized it was crucial to amplify the voices of the traditions that the Western appropriation of Spirit medicines has impacted the most. In desperate search of justice and solutions, I convened a group of Indigenous traditional medicine practitioners, activists, Tribal lawyers, and scholars from around the world to discuss skillful actions and joint initiatives decided by consensus and to counteract Western predatory practices.
While still federally criminalized in the United States, many states are preparing legislation to make psychedelic medicine widely available. This growing availability is alarming since no international framework refers explicitly to protecting and regulating Indigenous traditional medicine to ensure its ethical use at the local, regional, and international levels.
With very different influences and stages of development, some frameworks have explored the access and regulation of herbal medicine, but none regarding Spirit medicines. Among those that mention herbal medicine are Decision 391 on the Common Regime on Access to Genetic Resources of the Andean Community (CAN) and its modifications in Decisions 423, 448, the International Conference of Drug Regulatory Authority (ICDRA), the Pan American Network for Drug Harmonization and Regulation (PANDRH), and the International Conference on Harmonization of Technical Requirements for Pharmaceutical Products for Human Use (ICH). These documents are discussions between regulatory authorities and the pharmaceutical industry on scientific and technical aspects of pharmaceutical products to develop guidelines for use and regulation in the pharmaceutical sector. None discuss the participation of Indigenous Peoples nor respect our rights to free, prior, and informed consultation regarding access to our tangible heritage of herbal medicine.
The Convention on Biological Diversity and its Protocol of Nagoya and the Declaration of Sharms are the only international agreements that promote and safeguard the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits derived from the use of Indigenous genetic resources. The Protocol provides a solid foundation for greater legal certainty and transparency for both providers and users of resources. The provisions of the Protocol regarding access to traditional knowledge of Indigenous and local communities, when such knowledge is related to genetic resources, strengthen our communities’ capacity to benefit from using their knowledge, innovations, and practices. However, not all countries are signatories of this Convention. The United States is not a signatory and is unlikely to become one in the near future.
With this in mind, the group I convened created a manifesto to protest the current state of psychedelic research and to propose solutions for rightful relations with Indigenous Peoples. This consolidated document, entitled “Ethical Principles of Indigenous Traditional Medicine to Guide Western Psychedelic Research and Praxis” was published in The Lancet Regional Health: Americas on December 16, 2022.3 This article presented eight ethical guidelines that explore pathways of reparations to Indigenous traditions for the violations of our heritage.
In this chapter, I have expanded these guidelines to ten principles that may serve to establish right and respectful relationships with Indigenous wisdom traditions that lead to collective flourishing.
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Acknowledgment |
Reverence Respect |
|
Education |
Reckoning Responsibility |
|
Reparations |
Regulation Reparation |
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Belonging |
Restoration Renovation |
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Reemergence |
Reciprocity Reemergence |
For a world of flourishing kin, there is no other way onward than to have a rooted self-identity of ecological belonging. Such a view restores dignity by establishing relationships based on Ethical Principles for collective flourishing: (1) reverence, (2) respect, (3) reckoning, (4) responsibility, (5) regulation, (6) reparation, (7) restoration, (8) renovation, (9) reciprocity, and (10) reemergence.5
The worldviews of Indigenous Peoples are cosmogonic; that is, they come from or originate from the cosmos or universal wisdom. Mother Earth is the vision and explanation of the world of life. Therefore, our practices are values that relate to and explain life in terms of the relationships within living systems. These worldviews lay the foundations for kin relationality. They foster the unity and harmonic balance necessary for developing spiritual and material life. Indigenous spiritualities transcend the dogmatic views of reductionist, essentializing perspectives. Many Indigenous practices integrate the physical with the subtle. Indigenous traditional medicine is a system of holistic balance through ethical values that interrelate humans and the environment in the form of temporal interrelatedness known as spiral time. This system is based on reverence for all life forms and a commitment to preserve them. It prompts insights into compassionate living and an awareness of collective care, with each action impacting the sustenance and well-being of future generations. Reverence for Mother Earth, Her Peoples, and all phenomena is our key to collective well-being.
A respectful approach to Indigenous ways of being, thinking, and doing requires interacting with Indigenous knowledge systems through authorized traditional knowledge holders within specific contexts. This includes not only respectfully following protocols but also receiving authorization to use and modify Indigenous knowledge in new contexts.
Reckoning with the perpetuation of colonialism and coloniality against Indigenous cultures involves fierce scrutiny and examination of Western practices of domination, extraction, and appropriation of Indigenous heritage. The West must not only acknowledge but also be held accountable for these ongoing destructive practices and for the white-supremacist legacies in research systems and education.
The erasure and exclusion of Indigenous sciences by research institutions was used to justify genocidal practices and our systemic oppression. The scientific and academic communities must address their participation in imperialist, capitalist, and white-supremacist education systems that exclude non-Western religious traditions, philosophies, and ways of knowing. If academic institutions can acknowledge these failures, hold themselves accountable, and practice diversifying and decolonizing their approach toward research and education, Indigenous communities can begin building a bridge toward ethical and sovereign weaving in of Indigenous Knowledge systems. Research institutions can strive toward genuine relevance by weaving in Indigenous Knowledge systems, with the participation of Indigenous Peoples. We look for a commitment to removing barriers to equitable and inclusive education access. We create spaces of relevance to communities by incorporating Indigenous traditions through local, communal, historical, and sacred understandings of cultural practices and traditional worldviews, espousing concern in promoting Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty.
We call for the creation of a strict legal mechanism for intellectual property that recognizes the right of Indigenous Peoples to their intangible inheritance and provides them with the benefits derived from the use and development of medicines and practices of Indigenous origin—particularly those that were extracted and appropriated without their free, prior, and direct informed consent. Returning the benefits to the communities of origin requires a direct commitment to the established rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Reparation systems are required to promote and safeguard Indigenous self-determination: the practice and revitalization of cultural and spiritual traditions and customs; the maintenance and development of past, present, and future manifestations of cultures; the repair and restitution of appropriate cultural, intellectual, religious, and spiritual property without free, prior, and informed consent; the right to maintain, control, protect and develop cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and manifestations of science, technology and culture; the recognition and protection of social, cultural, religious, and spiritual values and practices; the fair and equitable sharing of benefits derived from the use of genetic resources, as well as proper cross-border cooperation and increased awareness, capacity building, and technology transfer, collaboration, and cooperation; the use, administration, and conservation of natural resources and community health services that are under the responsibility and control of Indigenous Peoples; and the guarantee of intercultural education at all levels.
Restoring places of authority in the decision-making processes that impact Indigenous Peoples in the ethical guidelines of research fields and of the institutional review boards (IRB) demonstrates a direct commitment to reparations and involvement and collaboration led by Indigenous practitioners through free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) and within the cultural protocols of the communities. This collaboration will be dictated by the rights of intellectual property, data science, and knowledge sovereignty that establish the position of Indigenous Peoples on the ethical use of traditional medicine and the main focus on relationships between humans and more-than human-beings, the non-commercial use of ancestral medicine, and these ten ethical principles focused on the well-being of the planetary community.
Indigenous traditional knowledge systems should involve local, national, and international cooperation with governmental and non-governmental organizations and humanitarian and environmental bodies to establish restorative and transitional and transformative justice procedures to highlight Indigenous discourse and promote capacities rooted in Indigenous ontologies (ways of being). We call for an Indigenous body in the form of a review board or council that ensures that these ten ethical principles are enacted across research, training programs, facilitators, and so on.
Reciprocity exists in relationships of equality. Extreme power differentials impede reciprocity with Indigenous people disproportionately suffering from military, political, and economic forces, globalized tendencies, and practices of extraction. Paths to reciprocity must be preceded by transitional and restorative justice where safe spaces and equal access to influence and decision-making are possible.
The initial cycle of Flourishing Kin along the spiral path of collective well-being is reemerging. The enduring tale of our capacity for contemplation keeps returning to the observation, embodiment, storytelling, and reflection of shared experience. It serves as a reminder that although challenges will inevitably arise, the slow route proceeds in a spiral. This pattern sums up life as ever-evolving and cyclical. It is reminiscent of continuous progress that keeps returning home to a familiar place, yet never meeting on the same grounds. It is an homage to our continuous transformation and reemergence.
This last principle requires a pause and a turn to a new cycle of the spiral path. We move to a new beginning, a new story.
The next chapter is a culmination and invitation to a new cycle. We dive deeper into this crucial principle of reemerging. Please consider it a more extended contemplation into truth, flourishing, reverencing, and healing through bliss.