I have never eaten peyote, but I am curious about it as medicine. Not curious enough to seek it out, but having partaken in psilocybe cubensis and LSD a few times in my late 20s and “broadening my perspective” on cognition I was once on fire for these “other” cosmologies and transmissions of knowledge. In those days, I felt like my family’s culture was fatally diseased and I was striving to connect with anything else like a baby born on a burning boat. Although, I quickly began to understand at the time that it was less about a specific “drug” and more about connecting with other understandings and learnings of this world.

Sorry, if this is abstract, but it was a confused time, trying to navigate a path of integrity to adulthood after being birthed and raised in something I wanted less and less to do with, though it was all I knew. I wasn’t socialist (yet) but I tried to find anything I could about the peoples who came before me that had any alternative way of seeing and being. You can imagine all the weird, anglo-fabricated things I found, as a young person having no connection to any indigenous community and not wanting to burden any with my problems.

As luck would have it, in my early 30s, I was invited to work at an environmental education / outdoor school among the Diné. It just sort of happened because of people I knew and what knowledge the school was looking for. So I jumped at the chance. Of course, by that point, I was more focused on what connection I had found to the world: the environment, gardening, landscaping, food, and agriculture. By that point I had worked for years as a laborer in various tiny communities far from any road, and later done a few years of formal coursework in soils, climate, biology, etc. so I had found some kind of way to see the world, rooted always in an affection for it.

To cut to the interesting part, there was an incredible library there including a translation of the Diné Bahane’. one of my co-workers there–a local who I had become friends with on long afternoons spent talking about fencing, cattle, weather, and food–saw me looking at it and he said, “you should check that out.” happy to report we still stay in touch some 15 years later! anyway, after reading it, our conversations sprawled outward into everything. like we had a new shorthand full of inside jokes and deeper meanings. anyway, some afternoon back then, after we had gone back and forth a few times telling stories about whatever and laughing ourselves to tears, he told me of his first experience in the peyote ritual. the way one is located, what happens, etc. he knew i had had psychedelic trips before by this point and read a few books by and about bilagáana that had been invited to psychedelic rituals among other peoples. for me, i had invariably gone with friends “camping” out in nature where things were quiet, calm, beautiful and reassuring and no one was pressured into partaking.

i’ll spare everyone my description of his description except to say that, logistically it wasn’t all that dissimilar. now, obviously, the internal experience was completely different and i would never expect that to be the same even between twins. but the external setting, the control of the set and setting, the place, the mood, and the provided support was similar. we had constructed our own process out of wanting to feel safe and connected while we sought introspection, not by trying to imitate any indigenous ritual.

of course, what i was doing with my friends out on some remote campground would have enraged my parents, had they known, and my grand parents would have thought i was willingly condemning myself to everlasting damnation in hell. absurd to me now, but back then could fill me with dread and fear.

after he finished his story, i asked him, what prompted his seeking out the ritual when he did. he said, with some mild annoyance, “ugh, my grandma told me i should” sort of using a tone like the way someone might describe an authority figure doling out some chore that one knew needed to be done, but had very little interest in.

we both starting laughing, but in the years since that moment, i am perennially struck by how absolutely distinct and different our lived experiences and community upbringing were, but despite all that we had come to the same place. physically and geographically, sure, but also in other ways.

all that to say, i wish bilagáana could understand that they don’t need to do these things to find what they are looking for. as someone who was once lost in the same way, i empathize with why they feel driven. i also don’t know how to tell them that what they seek is all around them and doesn’t require all this attempted imitation, or whatever it is that they’re doing. i know many who have gone on these long trips to partake in various rituals and i know that could have just as easily been me if i had more money and time in those days, so i feel embarrassed too.

i would like to believe the medicine will overcome the disease in the west among those who partake, but frankly i don’t know if it can when the setting becomes monetized and a mechanism for the further accumulation of settler wealth. and the potential of it becoming scarce due to overharvest fills me with grief. i don’t have any answers, just stories.

if you read all this, thanks.