As I mentioned in the first post of my series, anthropologists and ethnobiologists have played an outsized role in studying and popularizing ayahuasca and Amazonian shamanism, and more recently, attending to its internationalization. This history affords anthropologists a stake in discussions of drug policy issues pertaining to the subjects; one might even suggest it requires their participation as a matter of ethical concern. One topic of interest among scholars and activists right now is whether and how to regulate ayahuasca practices within a framework of increasing legalization and legitimation in the global north. Some scientists and activists seem to believe that legality alone will bring increased transparency and safety by eliminating the need for practitioners and participants to navigate in what is effectively a criminal underground. However, the assumption of legality among the practitioners and participants of the new ayahuasca churches, particularly Ayahuasca Healings, sheds light on numerous other problems that legalization alone will not solve—in fact, may exacerbate. These include the misappropriation of indigenous culture, the hyper-commodification of spirituality, and a rapid increase in demand for the vine, which is already being overharvested in some areas.

As we saw in post #6, a major issue that arises in the face of legalization is how to ensure the physical and psychological safety of participants and the qualifications of practitioners—an issue which remains problematic even in the Amazon. How would ayahuasca practice be regulated and policed if it were legalized in North America—or should it be? Scholars and researchers are beginning to discuss options for such a scenario (Blainey 2015; Haden et al. 2016). However, given the privileged role of religion in U.S. culture and the lack of regulatory oversight of religious organizations and their leadership, even in the face of some of the nefarious practices associated with religion in our country, it is questionable whether legalization under the rubric of religious freedom will provide for the safety and wellbeing of participants—especially given the rise of these new ayahuasca churches, their often young and inexperienced leaders, and the DEA’s lack of regulatory powers with regard to the level of training and experience of “ministers” or “clergy.”

Contributing to this issue is the lack of discernment engendered by anything-goes New-Age eclecticism and the emotional neediness—and therefore, vulnerability—of a population scarred by the excesses and violence of modernity. Such a population is easy prey for a charismatic leader promising transformation, awakening, and freedom. While such leaders, and the dangers they represent, are not confined to ayahuasca shamanism, it may be that ayahuasca use exacerbates the problem. Despite the common wisdom that ayahuasca “dissolves the ego,” the very opposite may be true. One gringo shaman that I know calls it “the ego explosion.” “We warn people about it when they come to visit our center,” he said. The UDV has systems of accountability in place that help keep a lid on excessive egotism and ensure acceptable behavior from leaders and members. Traditionally, the egalitarian social structure of Amazonian culture has performed the same function. However, with the expropriation of ayahuasca use to new cultural settings, particularly the Western world where personal freedom and individuality are cherished above all, social controls over individual transgressions are in short supply. Thus the privileged position of religious freedom in U.S. culture, along with the premium placed on individual freedom, are a recipe for danger when it comes to the legalization of ayahuasca within the current framework.

Whether or not Ayahuasca Healings succeeds in winning their DEA exemption—and most observers believe that they won’t—the controversy has exposed the ongoing rift between the neo-shamanism community in the United States, which invariably lays claim to romanticized images of Native American and indigenous Amazonian spirituality and worldviews, and various sectors of the Native American community, in this case, the Native American Church. It is a humorless irony that the new ayahuasca churches purportedly idolize and seek to mimic those very Native American peoples who have consistently denounced such misappropriation of Native American spirituality and culture, and who have so consistently and vehemently distanced themselves from James Mooney and ONAC.

The disjuncture is not just between New Age and Native American spirituality, but also between Amazonian and Native North American forms of shamanic and religious practice, colonial histories and socioeconomic settings. Contemporary ayahuasca shamanism evolved in a context of interethnic travel and trade. Shamanic power in the Amazon relies on the ability to live, act, communicate, and negotiate across the boundaries between various groups of humans, between human and non-human, and between material and spiritual worlds. Kinship and personhood among indigenous Amazonians are based more on relations of nurturance and reciprocity than on genetic speciation. Jaguars, for example, may be considered people, even kin, whereas members of other tribes may be considered not fully human. Within the field of genetically human relationships, where the social structure is based on colonial ethnic hierarchies, the use of ayahuasca is used variously to index ethnic distinctions, to subvert them, and to blur them in the process of interethnic alliance building. Ethnicity in the Amazon tends to be fluid. This cosmopolitanism, the cross-boundary exchange and multi-ethnic eclecticism that characterizes Amazonian shamanism has made it a good fit for an international audience. Furthermore, due to the interethnic nature of Amazonian shamanism, services have historically been rendered for a fee. This practice was readily expanded to incorporate the current wave of seekers to the Amazon.

In North America, however, ayahuasca shamanism has been juxtaposed onto an indigenous context that is completely anathema to the commodification of anything spiritual, and in which ethnicity is far from fluid. In Native North America, ethnic identity is measured by blood quotient and by registration in a federally recognized tribe, and identity politics are a serious issue with very real ramifications for tribal membership and access to the benefits that it affords. Furthermore, New Age appropriation of indigenous spirituality has been a sore spot for Native American people for decades, and even inter-tribal appropriation (e.g. the Sun Dance and sweat lodge ceremonies), as well as the sale of native spirituality by indigenous people to outsiders, have led to bitter acrimony within the Native North American community (Churchill 2003).

Equally salient are the different religious and colonial contexts that predate contemporary indigenous spirituality in North and South America. Ayahuasca shamanism developed largely within the socio-cultural and economic context of Jesuit missionization, which was relatively tolerant of shamanic practice, even incorporating it into the Jesuit system of indirect governance. Similarly, Amazonian healers often eagerly adopted the symbols and imagery of their powerful Christian counterparts. Some scholars claim that the ayahuasca ceremony itself is a hybrid form born within the missions that later spread to the hinterlands (Gow 1994). To the contrary, Native North American peoples still remember vividly the missionary boarding schools to which their grandparents were abducted, where they were violently stripped of their families, their languages, and their cultures. They also remember vividly the centuries of persecution that they suffered for the practice of their religions. The passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act have only begun to repair this damage, and yet it is these hard-fought and long-suffered victories to which proponents of New-Age indigeneity now lay claim.

One one level, the Ayahuasca Healings story is just one example of many in which non-indigenous people seek to appropriate indigenous culture and in so doing, colonize the territory of the spirit in the same way we have colonized their lands. On another level, the Ayahuasca Healings story is one of youth, idealism, and naiveté, coupled with a millennial culture of narcissism, self-promotion and entrepreneurialism, inflamed by the runaway egotism that appears to be a possible side-effect of frequent ayahuasca use. On all levels, however, the story is a cautionary tale about the practical, ideological, and ethical problems that confront the legalization of ayahuasca, problems that the current framework, based on a religious-freedom exemption, fails to address.

Author’s note: Thanks to Jade Grigori for help with wording. Also thanks to the editors and April guest blogger of Savage Minds for allowing me to overstay my welcome and continue posting until the story was complete.

Works Cited:

Blainey, Marc G. 2015. “Forbidden Therapies: Santo Daime, Ayahuasca, and the Prohibition of Entheogens in Western Society.” Journal of Religion and Health 54(1):287-302.

Churchill, Ward. 2003. “Spiritual Hucksterism: The Rise of the Plastic Medicine Men.” In Shamanism: A Reader, edited by Graham Harvey, 324–333. New York: Psychology Press.

Gow, Peter. 1994. “River People: Shamanism and History in Western Amazonia.” In Shamanism, History and the State, edited by Nicholas Thomas, and Caroline Humphrey, 90–113. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.

Haden, Mark, Brian Emerson, and Kenneth W Tupper. 2016. “A Public-Health-based Vision for the Management and Regulation of Psychedelics.” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 48(4):243-252.

Last week (March 18, 2017), I received an email that read, in toto:

Just like I promised:
Get the free eBook here (right click, “Save Link As…”)
I wrote this back in 2010, and the secrets contained within this eBook, have allowed me to create and live the most beautiful, fulfilling life I could have ever imagined.
It is actually a “channeled” book, are you familiar with what channeling is?
Back in 2010, I met The Teachers who showed me how to create my ideal life experience, no matter where I was at.
(The Teachers are the true authors of this eBook)
Following Their words, led me down a path more magical, more beautiful, more filled with joy, love and freedom, than anything I could have ever dreamt up.
Because they taught me, how to truly follow my heart. There’s no secret, that following your heart, is
the key to creating the life of your dreams.
The question is:
How?
You know you want a life of freedom, but how do you get there?
The mind can be so strong in it’s fears and doubts.
And we can be so controlled by other people’s expectations of us…
So the question is, above all of that, how can you still follow your heart?
This is the key to your most fulfilling life, ever.
And this eBook gives you the answers, and shows you, how you can move forward, to create the life that your heart and soul, so deeply yearn for.
It’s time!
So enjoy this eBook, and I’ll talk to you soon! [To be continued..]
With infinite gratitude, so happy to share this,
Trinity de Guzman & The Ayahuasca Healings Family

About once or twice a week I get a missive like this from Trinity, the messianic young founder of Ayahuasca Healings Native American Church. Since I initiated my membership in the Ayahuasca Healings community (by reluctantly giving them my e-mail address), I have received at least 48 of these love bombs, with subject lines ranging from “Welcome Beautiful Soul” to “Day 6 – How To Choose The Right Shaman” to “…I’m going to be a father!! Yay!!”

Gayle Highpine likens Trinity’s writing to a New Age version of prosperity gospel:

Psychological triggers are his stock in trade. “You can manifest the life of your dreams” is powerful bait, not a religious teaching. Who wouldn’t want to live like Trinity, traveling the world skiing and surfing and having adventures? If he has any metaphysical beliefs, they appear to be “The Secret,” the New Age version of prosperity gospel, which uses the “law of attraction” and the “art of manifestation.”

Prosperity gospel just happens to be the brand of Christianity with which Donald Trump has aligned himself—and one that many Christian groups themselves have a hard time stomaching. The promise of wealth, power, and success in exchange for unlimited and unquestioning faith is a powerful draw for the suffering. Someone ought to do a thesis on the parallels between Trumpism and Trinity-ism—call them legion, for like the biblical demons of the man of Gadarenes, they are many.

A few prelims

In my second post of this series, I mentioned the existence of a set of organizations calling themselves branches of the Native American Church who, under the aegis of the Oklevueha Native American Church (ONAC), claim to be serving ayahuasca legally in the United States. I’ll be calling these groups the “new ayahuasca churches” (to distinguish them from the Santo Daime and UDV). I also characterize these groups as “neo-shamanic.” A complete unpacking of this term is beyond the scope of this discussion, so for the sake of the current argument, I’ll define “neo-shamanism” as any of a variety of novel forms of shamanic practice based on the Amazonian model but modified significantly through their adoption into a New-Age, Western, scientific-industrial cultural context. Changes generally include the elimination of tobacco smoke, the erasure of sorcery, the lack of knowledge or use of the sopla and chupa (blowing and sucking) methods of curing, the use of bottled ayahuasca bought on an underground market, the use of recorded and non-Amazonian music, an ideology heavily influenced by Eastern religion and medicine, and the appropriation and incorporation of idealized elements of indigenous and Native North American religious culture. I’ll also recognize that neo-shamanism and “traditional” ayahuasca shamanism represent points on a spectrum of shamanic practice, as even “traditional” ayahuasca shamanism is adaptive and eclectic.

It’s also important to clarify up front that ONAC is an organization drenched in controversy. They’ve been repeatedly renounced in the press and in the courts by the National Council of Native American Churches, the governing body of legitimate NAC organizations in North America. ONAC’s leader, James Mooney, claims membership in a branch of the Seminole Tribe that, according to the Seminole Tribe, doesn’t exist. Most recently, they’ve had a very public and tawdry falling out with their own lawyer that appears to have culminated in the installment of Howard Mann, pornography and gambling magnate, as head of ONAC. But I’m going to hold off on the ONAC discussion for now, and lead instead with the Ayahuasca Healings story, which brought ONAC to our attention in the first place.

On with the story:

Among the new ayahuasca churches, Ayahuasca Healings, also known as Ayahuasca USA and Ayahuasca Healings Native American Church (AHNAC), is the youngest and newest, has (or had) the biggest ambitions and the most successful marketing operation, and as a result, gathered the attention of the press, the National Council of Native American Churches and, finally, the U.S. federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

Ayahuasca Healings came on the public scene in the second half of 2015. They immediately claimed to be the first, public, legal ayahuasca church in America, a feat accomplished, they asserted, through their affiliation with the New Haven Native American Church. They advertised retreats both  in Peru and on their 160-acre retreat site in Elbe, Washington. The domestic retreats were offered in exchange for a “suggested donation” of $1497 to $1997 for a four-day retreat (Ayahuasca Healings 2016a). Their stated mission was to build 30 retreat centers in the U.S. at the rate of two per year until 2032, “the start of our New Golden Age” (Ayahuasca Healings 2016b). [Note: The content of some linked webpages may have changed since the date of research, and thus do not reflect statements made in this post. The bibliography at the end of this post will provide original access dates, and archived pages are available from the author upon request.]

The tone of Ayahuasca Healings’ message and mission are characteristic of the general tenor of public conversation around ayahuasca: That it’s a panacea, that it’s a step to ultimate awareness and personal empowerment, that ayahuasca will change the world:

Just like yoga and meditation have come from the East to help Westerners return back to the essential Truth of Presence & being in the heart…
Ayahuasca has come from deep within the jungles of the Amazon, for the exact same reason.
And I truly believe that Ayahuasca will be just as ‘mainstream’ as yoga & meditation are becoming…
We’re going through a massive, collective Awakening.
[automated email, “Day 2: The Great Awakening & Ayahuasca”]

Ayahuasca Healings is headed by a messianic young leader named Trinity de Guzman who says that in his first ayahuasca session in 2013, “I was curled into a fetal position, crying, shaking, and vomiting. And I knew that at that moment that I was here to share [ayahuasca] with the world” (Rose 2015). Formerly an internet marketer who was making five figures a month by the age of 19 (by his own account), De Guzman is profiled on the website Entrepreneurs for Change under the episode title, “Travel The World For Years While Your Remote Team Does All The Work” (Li 2016). After people began to look more deeply at Ayahuasca Healings, this profile story became the focus of significant criticism, especially de Guzman’s statement that he paid his offshore employees a dollar an hour for their work, saying, “that is actually a normal, good wage in these countries where we’re hiring.”

De Guzman is flanked by Marc “Kumooja Banyan Tree” Shackman, whose now-defunct website (http://balancingbetweenworlds.com)/ billed him as a “contemporary shaman, transformational life coach, inspirational guest speaker and Heart Energy Medicine therapist.” Videos released by the group (here, here and here are but a few) show a small group of young people, working and living together on their land in Elbe, celebrating, sharing food and the warmth of a fire, expressing their joy at the transformations they’ve experienced through ayahuasca and the hope that they feel at being a part of this new spiritual community.

AH’s promises of love, healing and community; the charisma of their leadership and of their young and idealistic participants; and particularly the promise of legal and open ayahuasca ceremonies in the United States attracted a ready following and a significant amount of press coverage both in the local press and online media outlets such as Reset.me, Munchies and The Daily Beast (Rose 2015, Siegel 2015, Malandra 2016). It didn’t hurt that de Guzman has a professional background in internet marketing. In fact, Ayahuasca Healings’ ability to market themselves appears to be one of the factors leading to their downfall, when it brought them to the attention of James Mooney and the ONAC church. On Dec. 3, 2015, in two posts on its Facebook page, ONAC disavowed knowledge of New Haven NAC, under whose aegis Ayahuasca Healings purportedly was operating, and asserted that only those groups and individuals with an explicit relationship to ONAC enjoyed the legal protections they offered. In a Dec. 4 comment to one of these posts, a Facebook user posted a comment which stated (incorrectly) that only two organizations in the United States had the right to administer ayahuasca in their religious sessions: the UDV and ONAC. Following the opening comment was a piece of text entitled “Buyer Beware,” which detailed why Ayahuasca Healings was not protected. The comment appears to be signed by a “Chief Oklevueha NAC,” presumably Mooney, although my queries as to the authorship remain unanswered.

That same day, Dec. 4, 2016, the “Buyer Beware” text appeared on the website of anthropologist Bia Labate, expert in the internationalization of ayahuasca, as an anonymous blog post (Anonymous 2015). Differences between the blog post and the Facebook comment suggest that one was not a cut-and-paste of the other. Instead, they appear to be two derivations of the same source material, making the apparent signature of “Chief Oklevueha NAC” intriguing indeed—and ironic: Did Labate begin her series of anti-AHNAC blog posts with a piece written by James Mooney, head of ONAC, or one of his proxies?

What is clear is that Ayahuasca Healings had attracted Mooney’s attention—and that he was not happy with the fact that they were operating as a branch of his church without his acknowledgement and blessing. On Dec. 4 Mooney issued (via Facebook) a 2-page letter to the New Haven NAC disavowing their relationship to ONAC and demanding that Ayahuasca Healings deal directly with ONAC. Mooney closed by stating that his lawyers would be in touch with a formal cease-and-desist order, and that ONAC would notify local law enforcement of NHNAC and Ayahuasca Healings’ activities. “They will have to decide at that point whether to arrest you and those you participate with, or leave you alone.” (Council of Elders, Oklevueha Native American Church. 2015. “Letter of Distrust.” Posted to Facebook.com/OklevuehaNativeAmericanChurch/, Dec. 4. Accessed May 25, 2016.) The next day, Ayahuasca Healings announced their intention to join ONAC.

By this time, however, ayahuasca watchdogs had had enough. On Dec. 7, 2015, another post appeared on Labate’s blog, this time written by a law expert, exposing the false claims of legality offered by ONAC (Hudson 2015). The post also detailed AH’s market-oriented approach:

The [Ayahuasca Healings] website is a lead generation factory collecting email addresses. The multi-step marketing process…can have the unfortunate effect of entrapping customers in commitment-to-buy. This is Sales 101…It exploits people.

The scary thing is that so many people have bought into this in the past week that Ayahuasca USA stopped accepting applications.

Ayahuasca Healings, however, continued to move forward with their plans. On Dec. 12, they announced a formal affiliation with and blessing by James Mooney, whom de Guzman, in his enthusiasm, described as “literally no higher authority in the Native American Church in all of America” (Ayahuasca Healings 2015).

On the same day, Labate released another blog post, this one entitled “The ‘Legality’ of Ayahuasca Churches Under the Oklevueha Native American Church” (Highpine 2015a) examining the specifics of ayahuasca law in the US, how the UDV had gained their exemption, and why ONAC’s (and therefore AHNAC’s) claims to the legal use of entheogenic sacraments were false. On December 21, Indian Country Today published an opinion piece denouncing ONAC and the use of marijuana in Native American ceremonies—a piece that drew a swift and sharp rebuttal from Mooney (Hopkins 2015, ONAC 2015). The next day, Highpine published another blog post on Labate’s site examining the legal status of ayahuasca in the United States (Highpine 2015b). These blog posts had become a five-part series targeting Ayahuasca Healings, and they managed to get the attention of some members of the public. Using the blog posts as fodder, moderators of some of the ayahuasca forums initiated conversations about the issue, and the news media, who had previously covered the story uncritically, began to look more closely at the claims and ambitions of de Guzman and ONAC (Malandra 2016).

Finally, on January 11, 2016, a Facebook group was launched called “Ayahuasca Healings Is NOT Legal.” “This group is dedicated to refuting the claims of ‘Trinity de Guzman’, James ‘Screaming Eagle’ Mooney, the ONAC, et al. in regards to illegitimate claims of their ability (and intent) to distribute ayahuasca in the state of Washington legally,” the description reads. Their first post was a link to the Dec. 12 Highpine article, “The ‘Legality’ of Ayahuasca Churches Under ONAC.” Membership of the Facebook group approached 150 people by March. However, in Elbe, things continued as planned, with the group’s first weekend retreat taking place on Jan. 22 (automated email, “Please Help”).

Towards the end of January, Trinity’s business partners in Peru sent out a press release disavowing any relationship with Ayahuasca Healings and clarifying that de Guzman’s role in their operation was as investor and booking agent, nothing more (Polley 2016). At least one more well-known retreat center in Peru later declined to do business with Ayahuasca Healings after learning of the controversy. And on January 24, a former member of the Ayahuasca Healings inner circle released a YouTube video denouncing the group on the basis of four major complaints: the lack of elders within the operation, the lack of indigenous representation, the excessive price of the retreats, and the lack of support from within the “global medicine community”—in addition to the overarching fact that they were telling people their U.S. retreats were legal, but they were not (Montgomery 2016).

The Ayahuasca Healings controversy attracted the attention of the Native American community as well. On Feb. 18, Indian Country Today published a formal statement by the National Council of Native American Churches denouncing ONAC and the use of any sacrament other than peyote in NAC ceremonies. Although this was the same message they had issued in various amicus briefs and other memoranda in the past, this time they named ayahuasca specifically:

Some of these illegitimate organizations, comprised of non-Native people, are now claiming that marijuana, ayahuasca and other substances are part of Native American Church theology and practice. Nothing could be further from the truth. We, the National Council of Native American Churches are now stepping forward to advise the public that we do not condone the activities of these illegitimate organizations. [NCNAC 2016]

Then, sometime in the end of February, Ayahuasca Healings received a “friendly” letter from the DEA requesting that they file a formal petition for exemption under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (automated email, “Please Help”).

On March 8, 2016, Ayahuasca Healings announced that they had made the decision to go on a “temporary hiatus,” and that they would “not be conducting ceremonies or holding retreats for a limited period of time” (automated email, “Please Help”).  Their stated intention was to bring the operation into full alignment with RFRA, and yet later in the letter, they assert, “Although AHNAC has repeatedly faced criticism from detractors who believe that our interpretation of the law as it currently stands is mistaken, we are 100% confident that what we are doing here is 100% legal.”

The news of the hiatus came as a shock to those “members” who were in the process of packing for their pre-paid ayahuasca retreat in Elbe. No refunds were offered, as the money had apparently all been spent. Besides, as AH’s new representative pointed out, AH’s terms and conditions stated that monies paid would be considered a gift or an investment in the future of the church, not a fee for service (Dylan Ayahealings, Facebook comment, April 15, 2016). Participants quickly discovered that the credit card companies were treating the situation as a case of fraud and refunding payments on that basis. Meanwhile, de Guzman had been in Peru since February, and according to complaints from AH members, neither he nor Shackman were in contact with members or with the public.

As of March 8, according to the new homepage of the Ayahuasca Healings website, information on retreats would be available only to members. The first step in obtaining a membership was to provide your email address, at which time they would begin to send you one email a day for ten days. The welcome letter, which, like all missives from AH, is signed by Trinity de Guzman, reads:

Together, we are going to take a journey. The Inner Journey.
The most valuable, beautiful, rewarding journey we could ever take.
The emails I send you, will be like a map for you. To a treasure chest.
To the peace, love, joy, and happiness you know you came here to live.
A way out of being trapped by society. A way out of any depression or anxiety.
And a way to let go of the deepest rooted fears that keep you stuck.
So please follow these steps to make sure you receive our emails from here on.
If you are using Gmail, here’s how:
[automated email, “Welcome beautiful soul!”]

To be continued.

Works Cited (links without parenthetical citations will be listed, in order of appearance, at the end)

Anonymous. “Let the Buyer Beware: Advertised ‘Ayahuasca Healing Retreats’ Are Not Legal in the United States.” 2015. Bia Labate Blog. Accessed April 19, 2016. http://www.bialabate.net/news/let-the-buyer-beware-advertised-ayahuasca-healing-retreats-are-not-legal-in-the-united-states.

Ayahuasca Healings 2015. “Ayahuasca Church in America, Video Blog – Week 1, CELEBRATE!” Dec. 12. Accessed April 19, 2016. https://youtu.be/Ek0HtGxQfCo.

——— 2016a. “FAQs.” Accessed May 24, 2016. https://ayahuascahealings.com/faqs/.

——— 2016b. “ONAC of Ayahuasca Healings – Vision, Mission & Philosophy.” Accessed May 24, 2016. https://ayahuascahealings.com/ayahuasca-usa-church-vision/.

Highpine, Gayle. 2015a. “The ‘Legality’ of Ayahuasca Churches Under the Oklevueha Native American Church.” Bia Labate Blog. Dec. 12. Accessed April 19. 2016. http://www.bialabate.net/news/the-legality-of-ayahuasca-churches-under-the-oklevueha-native-american-church.

——— 2015b. “Is Ayahuasca Actually Illegal in the United States?” http://www.bialabate.net/news/is-ayahuasca-actually-illegal-in-the-united-states. Published Dec. 22, accessed April 19, 2016.

Hopkins, Ruth. 2015. “Pot and Pretendians.” Indian Country Today. Dec. 21. Accessed April 19, 2016. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/12/21/pot-and-pretendians.

Hudson, Hamilton. 2015. “Don’t believe the hype about the ‘Legal Ayahuasca USA Church’ Going Around Facebook—It’s Not Legal, It’s Dangerous, and Here’s Why.” Bia Labate Blog. Dec. 7. Accessed April 19, 2016. http://www.bialabate.net/news/dont-believe-the-hype-about-the-legal-ayahuasca-usa-church-going-around-facebook-its-not-legal-its-dangerous-and-heres-why.

Li, Lorna. 2016. “Travel the World for Years While Your Remote Team Does All The Work – Trinity De Guzman.” Entrepreneurs for a Change. Accessed May 25, 2016. http://www.entrepreneursforachange.com/25/.

Malandra, Ocean. 2016. “A Closer Look at That ‘First Legal Ayahuasca Church in America”’ Story You’ve Seen Hyped In The Media.” Reset.me. Feb. 1. Accessed April 19 2016. http://reset.me/story/first-legal-ayahuasca-church/.

Montgomery, Scott. 2016. “USA Plant Med Communities! Ayahuasca Healings: An Ex-Insider’s Fiery Perspective.” Jan. 24. Accessed April 19, 2016. https://youtu.be/Ti_YUXmrF5M.

NCNAC (Native American Church of North America). 2016. “National Council Does Not Condone Faux Native American Churches or Marijuana Use.” Indian Country Today. Feb. 18. Accessed April 19, 2016. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/02/18/national-council-does-not-condone-faux-native-american-churches-or-marijuana-use-163464.

ONAC 2015. “Pot and Pretendians: ONAC Rebuttal.” Indian Country Today. Dec. 29. Accessed May 24, 2016. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/12/29/pot-and-pretendians-onac-rebuttal.

Polley, Lara. 2016. “Media Release–El Jardin de la Paz and ayahuascahealings.com.” January 27. Accessed. April 19, 2016. http://www.eljardindelapaz.com/#!Media-Release-El-Jardin-de-la-Paz-and-ayahuascahealingscom/cay8/56a968a10cf215a9bb9eacdd.

Rose, Nick. 2015. “America Is Getting Its First Legal Ayahuasca Church.” Munchies. Dec. 11. Accessed May 17, 2016. https://munchies.vice.com/articles/america-is-getting-its-first-legal-ayahuasca-church.

Siegel, Zachary. 2015. “America’s First Legal Ayahuasca ‘Church’.” The Daily Beast. Dec. 6. Accessed May 17, 2016. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/07/america-s-first-legal-ayahuasca-church.html

Other links:

https://ayahuascahealings.com/

http://www.bialabate.net/news/the-religious-freedom-restoration-act-the-dea-exemption-process-and-ayahuasca-healings

http://www.npr.org/2017/01/13/509558608/with-his-choice-of-inauguration-prayer-leaders-trump-shows-his-valueshttps://www.ncronline.org/blogs/small-c-catholic/beware-prosperity-gospel-trump-administration

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2017/january-web-only/paula-white-donald-trump-prayer-partner-inauguration.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/15/how-the-prosperity-gospel-explains-donald-trumps-popularity-with-christian-voters/

https://nativeamericanchurches.org/

http://www.newhavennativeamericanchurch.org/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek0HtGxQfCo
https://youtu.be/dAYl3yv4ZGk

https://youtu.be/wp5UlFyBTDw

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1019591274765819/?ref=br_rs

Yesterday I sat in on a webinar sponsored by ICEERS (the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service) and organized by anthropologist Bia Labate. Entitled “Myths and Realities about the Legality of Ayahuasca in the USA,” the webinar featured three experts on the subject. The first was Jeffrey Bronfman, a leader of the União do Vegetal church in the US whose shipment of ayahuasca (the UDV calls it hoasca) was seized in 1999, leading to a protracted court battle and, eventually, a supreme court decision in favor of the church’s right to use the tea as their sacrament. The second was Rob Heffernan, member of the Santo Daime church (which also uses ayahuasca as a sacrament) and chair of its legal committee. The third was J. Hamilton Hudson, a recent graduate of the Tulane law school who has been following legal developments surrounding ayahuasca-using groups who are affiliated with neither of the aforementioned churches.

The webinar—and the series of which it is a part—are a response to the apparent confusion regarding the legal status of ayahuasca in the United States. This confusion, and some of the factors contributing to it, came to light over the past year and a half with the rise and fall of a group called Ayahuasca Healings, the self-proclaimed “first public legal ayahuasca church in the United States.” Also known as Ayahuasca USA and Ayahuasca Healings Native American Church (AHNAC), AH is one of a number of groups who use ayahuasca in a neo-shamanic setting and, more importantly, who claim that they have the legal right to do so. Unfortunately for AH, they don’t, and a friendly letter from the DEA (U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency) was enough to finally convince them of that fact—at least for now.

AH is one of a number of groups under the aegis of a shady organization called the Oklevueha Native American Church (ONAC), which promises its branches and branch members legal protection from controlled substances laws. ONAC rests its claims on the idea that, if such substances are used in a religious context by members of a church congregation, then that use is protected by laws such as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by congress to protect the use of peyote (which contains mescaline, a controlled substance) in the context of the Native American Church. ONAC’s claims, however, are false; thus, the churches under ONAC, which claim to serve ayahuasca legally, are acting in contradiction of the law and endangering the people they purport to serve.

In a series of blog posts this month, I’ll look at this whole story in quite a bit of depth, from the fundamental issue of why ayahuasca is (for most users) still illegal in the United States, to the rise and fall of Ayahuasca Healings and the ongoing developments in that story. I’ll also pull back for a look at the bigger picture of ONAC, its founder and the controversies therein, and the various other groups serving ayahuasca and other sacraments under ONAC’s aegis. Finally, I’ll discuss why all this activity is a kick in the teeth to the Native American Church and to the indigenous people of North America more broadly. Anthropologically speaking, one of the keys to the issue is the incongruity between attitudes toward religion and spirituality, race and ethnicity in the Amazon and in the United States—and how the superposition of an ethnomedical practice from the Amazon onto the religious structures of North America is like trying to put a square peg in a round hole.

Next time I post I’ll get started with a little more explanation of what goes into ayahuasca that makes it the concern of the DEA, and why some people in the U.S. can drink it legally while others can’t. Stay tuned.

I’m guessing that by now most of my readers will have heard of this stuff called “ayahuasca.” Everyone from Stephen Colbert to the New Yorker is talking about it, some in terms more cringe-inducing than others. A quick primer for those who don’t know: Ayahuasca is a psychoactive (read: psychedelic) brew developed by the peoples of the Amazon for ritual purposes ranging from ethnomedicine to divination. It’s just one in a pantheon of sacred plant and multi-plant concoctions used by Amazonian shamans, but it’s one that has sparked the fascination of peoples everywhere, from the Amazon itself to the distant corners of the urban and industrialized nations. Ayahuasca, along with other “entheogens” such as psilocybin mushrooms and LSD, is a centerpiece of the new Psychedelic Renaissance, an artistic and scientific movement which has, as one of its primary aims, the legitimization of these currently illegal substances by researching and promoting their efficacy as treatments for intractable ailments, usually psychological, including depression, end-of-life anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Once a footnote in the annals of Jesuit missionaries and Spanish explorers, Western awareness of this mind-altering and nausea-inducing beverage grew slowly throughout the 20th century, with not a little assistance from anthropologists and ethnobotanists such as Richard Evans Schultes, the father of ethnobotany; his student, the golden-penned author Wade Davis; and the well known ethnographer-turned-shamanic evangelist, Michael Harner. In Brazil, awareness and use of the tea spread to urban areas with the development and growth of two syncretic religions that use ayahuasca as their sacrament: the União do Vegetal and the Santo Daime. Elsewhere in South America and the world, Amazonian shamans traveled to urban areas and later, to distant countries to perform healing ceremonies for growing audiences of gringos looking for emotional release, a spiritual experience, or physical healing. Today, numerous US and European practitioners, some trained in the Amazon, some not, have taken it upon themselves to serve the brew and to conduct ceremonies. Therein lies the subject of my guest series for Savage Minds.

To be continued.

Just over a month ago a Peruvian indigenous federation circulated remarkable video footage showing about a hundred isolated (so-called “uncontacted”) Mashco-Piro Indians just across the river from a Piro indigenous village along the Rio de las Piedras in Peru. They  appeared to be asking for food and trade goods like rope and metal tools. The Piro and Mashco-Piro languages are close enough to allow communication. Hoping to avoid direct contact and the possibility of disease contagion, forest rangers at Monte Salvado floated a canoe laden with bananas across the river. After a tense three-day standoff, the Mashco-Piro eventually disappeared back into the forest. No one is quite sure why the Mashco-Piro — who have so steadfastly avoided such contact until recently — suddenly showed up. Many suspect that illegal loggers active throughout the region have disrupted their usual migration routes.

In late 2011, a different group of Mashco-Piro living near the border of Manu National Park shot and killed Shaco Flores, an old Matsigenka friend of mine, with an arrow. Having lived among the Piro for many years and learned the Piro language, Shaco had been patiently communicating and trading with the Mashco-Piro for over twenty years, always maintaing a safe distance but slowly drawing them closer with his gifts, food and conversation. But something happened on that fateful day in late November: perhaps the Mashco-Piro were spooked by Shaco’s appearance with several relatives at the manioc garden on a small river island where he had been allowing the Mashco-Piro to harvest his crops; perhaps there was internal disagreement among the Mashco-Piro whether or not to accept Shaco’s long-standing offer to bring them into permanent contact. We may never know.

Just a few days earlier, a Spanish ornithologist had been staying at Shaco’s house and photographed a small group of Mashco-Piro across the river through a birding scope. It is possible that the powerfully built, somewhat bearded man pictured in these photographs is the same one who fired the single arrow that killed Shaco. After Shaco’s death, these sensational photographs, like the Mashco-Piro video clips this year, went viral across the internet, briefly drawing the attention of international media outlets including the BBC, MSN, Huffington Post and even Fox News. Our overly connected, globalized world is fascinated with stories about “uncontacted” peoples, especially if those stories involve violence.

Today the Mashco-Piro are entirely nomadic hunters and gatherers who keep no gardens and make no permanent houses, just lean-to palm shacks under the forest canopy, sometimes woven from living, standing palm saplings. Yet they are hardly throwbacks to the “Stone Age,” as some media outlets present them. In fact, the Mashco-Piro are every bit as modern as, well, the automobile and the rubber tire. In the late 19th century, before John Boyd Dunlop invented the pneumatic tire and Henry Ford drove the first “horseless carriage” out of his shed in Detroit, the Mashco-Piro inhabited the upper Manu River in settled agricultural villages. In 1894, the infamous “King of Rubber” Carlos Fermin Fitzcarraldo, hauled a steamship across a small hillock into the Manu River basin and opened this isolated region to rubber tappers. This historical event was immortalized (and heavily fictionalized) by Klaus Kinski’s signature performance in Werner Herzog’s film, “Fitzcarraldo.” After the “Mashco” (as they were then called) resisted Fitzcarraldo’s incursions, his men slaughtered them in a gory battle that was said to have left the river water undrinkable from so many corpses (see Shepard et al. 2010). Apparently, surviving Mashco-Piro took to the woods and have maintained a nomadic lifestyle ever since, hunting and gathering in several distinctive local groups throughout a wide territory between the Piedras and Manu Rivers in Madre de Dios, Peru.

It is hardly appropriate to call such peoples “uncontacted,” since their very isolation occurred in the aftermath of a particularly violent form of contact. For this reason, I coined the term “indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation” in 1996, when I wrote an open letter to Mobil Oil warning the company as well as the Peruvian authorities and several indigenous federations of the many dangers of oil exploration along the Piedras River, where the Mashco-Piro are known to circulate. Then again, “voluntary isolation” may also be another kind of misnomer, given their forced, almost refugee-like status. But the concept of “voluntary isolation” caught on in Peru and elsewhere in Amazonia, emphasizing the important fact that most such groups are not Stone Age innocents, isolated and left behind by Progress, unaware of modernity and all its wonders and discontents. Rather, the Mashco-Piro and other groups have chosen ongoing isolation as a conscious strategy for survival, and have actively resisted  repeated attempts by missionaries, tourists, film crews and even well-meaning indigenous neighbors to establish “first contact.” In addition to the cultural erosion and personal indignities recently contacted groups usually endure, they also inevitably suffer severe, often fatal epidemics of viral diseases, including the flu. Amazonian groups like the Mashco-Piro who have been isolated since the turn of the 20th century essentially re-live (and often die from) the great flu pandemic of 1918, and all its virulent permutations since then, when they enter (or re-enter) “contact.”

Aside from questioning popular notions about “primitive” nomadic societies, the recent appearance of the Mashco-Piro at Monte Salvado asking for food brings up vexing issues about the ethics of isolation and contact. In Peru’s close neighbor, Brazil, the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) and its predecessor, the Indian Protection Agency (SPI), throughout much of the 20th century pursued an aggressive strategy of locating and contacting isolated indigenous groups who were dangerously close to (or in the way of) expanding frontier zones. The tragedy of this official policy became especially apparent during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, as rapid road construction and colonization accompanying the “Brazilian miracle” devastated huge swathes of forest and threw hitherto remote indigenous groups like the Cinta Larga, Waimiri-Atroari, Arara, Surui, Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau and others into apocalyptic situations of demographic and cultural collapse. In 1987 FUNAI reversed this policy under a new “Department of Isolated Indians,” focusing their efforts on locating, demarcating and protecting territories where isolated groups live  in order to avoid contact as long as possible. Contact, carried out by teams with long-time field experience, is considered a final, emergency option if a particular group is in imminent threat of conflict with outsiders. Such was the case in 1996 when a FUNAI team contacted a small group of the warlike Korubo (known locally by the quaint moniker of “head smashers”) in the vast Javari River indigenous reserve, close to the Peruvian border. This group had apparently split off from the main population in the center of the reserve and moved dangerously close to the reserve’s border, entering into conflict with local non-indigenous populations. FUNAI decided to contact this one group, giving them vaccinations, health care and other assistance but maintaining them in a state of partial isolation to this day.

In Peru, however, there is no such agency as FUNAI with the funding, institutional presence and field experience (however tragically earned) necessary to carry out such contact operations and protect recently contacted groups. In the past, missionary groups have typically been the ones to handle (and often initiate) contact situations in Peru. Yet neither missionaries of various denominations nor the anthropological team of Manu National Park were able to respond quickly or effectively enough to the Nahua (Yora) contact on the Mishagua river in 1984-1985, leading to the death of nearly half the group (Shepard et al. 2010).

The Peru-Brazil border region has perhaps the world’s largest concentration of isolated indigenous groups, and is also beset by numerous problems associated with illegal logging, gold mining and drug trafficking, rapid deforestation along the new Interoceanic (Trans-Amazon) Highway, and a boom of oil and gas exploration and extraction. FUNAI has long sought institutional partnerships with the Peruvian government to deal with these often overlapping problems across the porous, mostly invisible border, but so far little progress has been made. The indigenous federation in Madre de Dios province, FENAMAD, has taken on the role of recognizing and defending Peru’s isolated indigenous populations in the face of self-serving denials by loggers, oil and gas companies and even government agencies themselves as to the very existence of such groups. FENAMAD, like FUNAI, supports a fundamental policy of “no contact”, respecting such peoples’ apparent choice of isolation.

But what if the Mashco-Piro, for whatever internal reasons or external pressures, return to Monte Salvado to ask for food and gifts in the future? What of the risks of flu contagion, or worse, as these exchanges continue and perhaps intensify? In addition to the risks of of contact or near-contact to isolated groups’ health, Shaco’s tragic death underscores the risks that isolated groups can pose to local populations. Peruvian protected area management plans, anthropological impact studies, and oil exploration projects in the Madre de Dios region and elsewhere now often include “contingency plans” for dealing with isolated indigenous groups. The improvised yet apparently effective (for now) response to the tense situation at Monte Salvado shows that this process of reflection and planning has paid off; the forest rangers, rather than succumbing to the usual paternalistic instinct to give not just food but clothes, matches, and so on to the “poor naked savages,” took the precaution of floating their food gifts across in a canoe, reducing the chance of direct disease contagion. Yet what would happen if a Mashco-Piro were to come down with a cold? Is there an emergency medical-anthropological-indigenous team in Peru that could be put into action on short notice to contain an epidemic outbreak before it decimates the group? How could Peru take better advantage of the experience of FUNAI’s Department of Isolated Indians in neighboring Brazil to prepare itself for the real and possibly imminent contingencies of contact with the Mashco-Piro and other isolated groups?

I don’t claim to have the answers to these difficult questions, but I do hope this posting will provoke useful debate.

Glenn Shepard is an anthropologist, ethnobotanist and film-maker now working at the Goeldi Museum in Belém do Pará, Brazil. He has done field research in Amazonian Peru and Brazil as well as in Mexico, Asia and the Middle East. He writes on topics ranging from shamanism to human ecology to indigenous modernity. He blogs at “Notes from the Ethnoground” and is on Twitter @TweetTropiques.