Some Native Americans are deeply offended by a movement to decriminalize peyote along with other psychedelic plants.
For Navajo spiritual leader Steven Benally, saving a Native American religion from extinction means preserving those diminishing lands where hallucinogenic peyote grows wild.Preservation also means battling activists in the California Bay Area and other cities who want to legalize consumption of the psychedelic cactus.Advertisement
But some Native Americans are deeply offended by the inclusion of peyote in the surprisingly popular decriminalization movement and worry about the impact it could have on diminishing populations of the ground-hugging cactus. Steven Benally shows visitors around his property in the Navajo Nation of Arizona. Benally is a “healer” in the Native American tradition of religious worship using peyote, a hallucinogenic derived from a cactus that grows in the desert southwest.
“This is a very complicated issue,” said Miriam Volat, a soil scientist and co-director of the RiverStyx Foundation, a philanthropic group that has helped fund the preservation of land in Texas and Mexico, where peyote is threatened by poaching, mining, the petroleum industry, urban encroachment and cattle ranches operated by unsympathetic landowners.
After all, these Native Americans pointed out, there are other natural sources of mescaline such as San Pedro cactus that do not carry the same ecological and cultural implications. Steven Benally, a “healer” in the Native American tradition of religious worship, holds a peyote button. The hallucinogenic is derived from a cactus that grows in the desert southwest.will be a polarizing topic if experts from around the world, including Native American spiritual leaders, still gather in San Francisco’s Mission District in April at ato discuss the legal, cultural and political issues surrounding the emerging psychedelic renaissance.
“To us, peyote is an ancestor and a living relative,” she said. “Cultivation of peyote outside of the ancient terrain it shares with indigenous people is a step toward hybridization and commercialization.”
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