Collective Resistance and Resilience at Psychedelic Culture Conference
Part one of a two-part series.
Two presenters at the 2025 Psychedelic Culture conference in San Francisco, CA last month were denied entry into the U.S. as they attempted to cross the border from Mexico and Canada. Conference organizer Bia Labate, executive director of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines, which organized the event, said that three Brazilian participants were denied visas, including two Chacruna team members and a journalist who covers the field. She said that a Peruvian Shipibo healer was also denied a visa.
Despite deep concerns about present U.S. border policies and the actions of agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) participants at the conference honored the wisdom of leaders from global plant medicine communities and called for collective resistance and resilience.
“Its incredibly disheartening to see these unjust practices of our authorities, disregarding experts and making other countries look poorly at how the U.S. treats the international academic community,” said Labate. “Fortunately, we are resilient and plan to continue to build spaces that are global, community based and welcoming of multiple voices and perspectives.”
Defending Indigenous Access To Hikuri
The annual gathering, which took place from March 29-30 at the historic Brava Theater, featured a range of Indigenous perspectives and warnings from members of communities throughout the Global South. One of the opening sessions entitled, “Hablemos de Hikuri: Indigenous Perspectives on Peyote Conservation in Mexico,” was to have included biologist Bryan Alejandro Chavez Meda who, according to organizers, was not permitted to enter the country from Mexico.
Despite the challenges that Meda encountered at the border, co-presenter Ana Lisbeth Bonilla Carillo, a linguist from the Wixárika (Huichol) community in Guadalajara, Jalisco, brought participants up to date on current threats to the peyote – or what her Indigenous community calls hikuri. Central to the spiritual life of the Wixárika, who live in the Mexican states of Jalisco and Nayarit, the cactus is gathered by the Wixárika only in the desert region of Wirikuta, San Luis Potosí where it can take 15-20 years to reach maturity.
For Wixárika, “It’s a deity, a living being, a teacher,” says Carillo of hikuri, “It is a guide that merits respect, defense, and has been protecting the Wixárika since time immemorial.”
Carillo explained that the Wixárika participate in an arduous, collective pilgrimage to gather hikuri which follows traditional spiritual practices to honor the plant. While this journey is unfolding over several weeks, community members back home keep a vigil in ceremonial spaces and celebrate the return of pilgrims. “Hikuri is integral to the Wixárika culture,” said Carillo. “If hikuri disappears, it spells a sense of disappearance for Wixárika culture.”
According to Carillo, hikuri was first noted by the Spanish colonizers from 1542 to 1600 who attributed it to demonic forces and prohibited its use in 1620. It wasn’t until 1975 that the Mexican state allowed its use by Indigenous people under Mexican law and prohibited the planting, harvesting, acquisition, and consumption for people who are not Indigenous. Despite these protections, hikuri continues to be threatened.
Carillo says the Wixárika work together with biologists and anthropologists in an interdisciplinary group called “Hablemos de Hikuri” (Let’s talk about Hikuri) to join scientific and traditional knowledge, raise awareness about the critical status of hikuri, and assist the Wixárika people in reforestation and sustainable harvesting. According to Carillo, growing threats to hikuri include commercial chicken farms, mining, cattle grazing, trash dumps, green houses, illegal harvesting, peyote tourism, demands from recreational users spurred by cultural appropriation, and “trafficking of spirituality” by intermediaries. A festival in Mexico City in 2012 to raise awareness about the impact of mining had the opposite effect, says Carillo, bringing more recreational users.
“There are attempts to change the laws, to reclassify peyote so it can be consumed by more than just Indigenous people and amplify people who can harm it,” said Carillo. “All of these concepts are foreign to Wixárika culture and Wixárika people don’t understand the reclassification and these are also threats.”
Resilience and A New Legacy of Decency
A following panel entitled “Resilience in the Face of Power, Discrimination & Privilege in the Psychedelic Space,” offered an illustration of how allied communities can address both U.S. immigration issues and the endangerment of hikuri. Panelist Courtney Watson, founder of Doorway Therapeutic Services, noted that Meda was denied entry at the border. She challenged conference participants to resist and contribute, if they can, to help pay for an immigration attorney to assist him. “If your practice does not include standing against ICE deportation, if it is apolitical, then your practice perpetuates harm against people and is indeed a colonized plant medicine practice,” Watson said.
Watson added that she has made a personal commitment to never consume peyote. “I encourage everyone in the audience who doesn’t have lineage rights, or right, to take this commitment and encourage those around you to make that commitment as well. If you have experienced peyote or hikuri without lineage rights, you can take that experience as your final one and make the commitment not to engage again.”
Watson, who is a licensed therapist, added that we all have access to our own individual ancestry and that other plant medicines offer a direct line to our own ancestors, to deities, and plant spirits. She said these medines empower us to remember, pray for assistance, and pick up the pieces that have been broken from colonialism and lost to enslavement, genocide and internal stigmatization. “Particuarly as Black folks, there is so much stigma around our indigenous practices, or Hoodoo or Voodoo or ‘that’s that bad stuff, that black magic, that witch doctor.’ That’s what was imposed on us when they took our medicines from us.”
Panelist Dee Dee Goldpaugh, who is also a therapist, added that as a white person of European ancestry she has felt a “deep wound” from feeling disconnected in the work she does with plant medicines and any form of her own ancestral practices. “One of the first things I realized is it wasn’t going to be bought at a retreat. And it wasn’t even going to come from my parents or any living person who had any living memory of what was lost, which is an earth-based practice that even exists in my European ancestry,” said Goldpaugh. “And so the only place that I could look was the earth that was actually under my feet in that moment. And in that way, I could connect to my ancestors. It was incredibly simple to walk on the earth alone in nature and listen to the songs that the earth was giving me.”
Goldpaugh added that she didn’t need to ingest any plants to access that wisdom. She said she had already learned from the plants that this is a living tradition that felt to her like a deep ancestral practice – accessible to everyone no matter the shame or harm in one’s personal legacy. “I could be the first ancestry in a new tradition that actually could bring these things back and start to heal these wounds by listening to people who can teach me about harm and trying to be accountable for that in any small way that I can. But also to start in a new legacy of decency, which is about protecting the earth and coming back to these person to person practices that are about listening and receiving. And in that way heal my heart.”
Another panelist, therapist Wilhelmina de Castro, noted that since plant medicines have the potential for spiritual bypass, the next evolutionary phase is to move on from individual experiences at retreats to those rooted in communities that dismantle systems of oppression. “How do you galvanize that energy into the collective, into self, into the collective versus just keep on going back to the retreat to feel that one moment or that medicine, that one moment of being free, but the art of weaving this into life, weaving this into the collective, that is the next step,” said de Castro.
The panel’s moderator Jamilah George, swept up in the momentum of the energetic conversation said, “When we talk about dismantling systems of oppression,there’s no level of education, no degree, no retreat, no single crystal, no single anything that can take us to that point. It is a collective collaborative journey. And so the more that we operate in this individualistic frame, the further we get from the collective healing, and the way that we move toward the collective healing, has to be intentional. It has to be purposeful.”
The panelists agreed that while a community response to people who have been harmed by those who work with plant medicines is the way forward, Goldpaugh noted that communities should also work on prevention and hold the perpetrators accountable in community and move them away from working in isolation. “I think when we talk about collective healing, it’s also collective accountability,” said de Castro.
Whenever they work with someone new, de Castro says they invite the client to ask about whether there has ever been harm, how de Castro might repair harm if any occurs, and to identify the core of people who could help them realign. By engaging in that conversation instead of holding a power dynamic, de Castro says they get specific about, “Hey, this is who I go to. This is where my teachers are. This is who I seek counsel from. But that is all the kind of collective accountability and support.”
Shipibo Healers Offer Warnings About Lack of Training
Traditional Indigenous healers speaking at the conference offered their perspectives on the challenges presented by the growing demand for healing with traditional plant medicines. They called for greater discernment and reflected on how healing is addressed in their own communities.
During the panel entitled, “Intercultural Encounters in Psychedelic Plant Medicine Spaces,” Panshin Nima Walter López, a Shipibo teacher and ancestral doctor, reflected on what he saw as the ongoing appropriation of traditional healing practices with ayahuasca in ways that are damaging to his community. He says people are no longer conducting ceremonies the same way they were done ancestrally. “We are no longer dedicated to doing it through tradition and knowledge, but through selling that knowledge. We are more worried about selling than maintaining,” said López.
López said that the present focus for those members of his community who are in this position is the continuation of their traditions. He notes that this knowledge contains important values to teach their children as a culture and as a people. His community must value themselves first and foremost , says López, and become empowered through these actions. “At least be able to counteract this threat to maintain [our] own existence,” said López.
“What is being done now is that one enters, is introduced, absorbs as much as one can, and then appropriates it,” says López “Or as some people say, ‘extracts everything that is possible and then appropriate it.'”
Because of this cultural extraction there is a lot of confusion, says López. “We are not understanding what is true interculturality, because if we were practicing true interculturality, we would not be threatening and reducing other cultures. What we are doing, actually, is transculturality.”
López asserted that this is a time to “engage in reciprocity and stop harming one another.” He said that traditional Shipibo people are not interested in making ayahuasca suddenly legal because they want to maintain their ancestral ways and preserve the knowledge of “when, where, how, to be taking ayahuasca.”
López notes that there are many other plants in his community’s jungle, in addition to ayahuasca, that can support life. López emphasized that he doesn’t just represent a cultural community, but an ancestral medical community that does not use the word “shaman” to describe their practices. “We come from an ancient science, an ancient technology, and we want to articulate all those knowledge systems with contemporary medicine,” said López, so we can practice that amongst ourselves and with other cultures.
Another presenter on the panel who works as an Indigenous Shipibo healer, Lila Lopez Sanchez, also addressed concerns about the misuse of ayahuasca by people who have not done the years of required training needed to use it safely and carry the medicine in an honorable way. While she thanked the women who are carrying this traditional practice forward and her family who gave her this knowledge to share, Sanchez says she has also witnessed many sad things.
“Now in the world a lot of people have worked with ayahuasca and a lot of people now are coming to know how to work with this plant in the world and also open a lot of centers. And it’s a very big responsibility to hold this medicine. A lot of people now that are sharing this medicine don’t know what they’re doing, and a lot of people are losing their lives because of it. A lot of people are at fault for the way they are sharing this medicine that is very deeply affecting the curanderos and in this way we all get wet.”
“Ayahuasca is not about sharing with a lot of people, it is not like that,” warned Sanchez. She says healers from her lineage were trained through different diets and are carrying forward this knowledge, but noted that “a lot of the medicines are transforming and being modernized.” According to Sanchez, the most important thing is to find a good teacher. She says there are people who do the diet a few times for one or two years and then start to serve the medicine. “Now because this has become a business a lot of people are saying they are healers and because of this a lot of people are losing their lives.”
Sanchez added that some people consider the medicine as a “drug.” It is not a drug, she says, but a healer that cures traumas, emotions, and physical conditions. “So for me it is all about experience. It takes a lot of time, it’s not about just a few years. It could be seven years, ten years and you still continue. This is how it was for me, it is still continuing.”
During her solo presentation, “A Shipibo Perspective on the Globalization of Ayahuasca” later in the conference, Sanchez expanded these ideas further. “It is due to the people that aren’t carrying the medicine in a responsible, safe way that now there is a problem. It’s really important to find a good teacher that knows how to handle the medicine, how to manage the medicine. There are many false maestros, there are many false teachers out there that are just offering this work because of money. And now everyone wants to serve medicine, everyone wants to help. And back in ancient times, it wasn’t like this. Not everyone wanted to serve medicine. It was a massive responsibility and it still is.”
Sanchez added, “A true teacher will be with you throughout your whole process, especially in diet. They will not abandon you. They will be there visiting you in your tambo, in your hut, and checking in with you. The maestros that don’t share or ask how we are doing is not a good maestro. If the maestro doesn’t teach you, then what are we doing? How are we being connected?”
Sanchez also addressed sexism within Indigenous healing communities and advocated for the work of medicine women like herself. Sanchez’s translator, Mariana Mae, prefaced her translation of Sanchez’s remarks stating, “She’s excusing herself as she shares about all of the men that have abused women through the medicine.” She then relayed Sanchez’s statement:
“This is now a time to protect, as women. To be able to hold ourselves and hold this voice so that the men can also learn how to respect the medicine and learn how to respect women. In the last conference, there were some medicine men that were discriminating and sharing that women were not supposed to be serving medicine.” Mae said Sanchez and her sister defended themselves and advocated for women “to be able to serve humanity through the medicine.”
“This work is not a game,” Sanchez said. “Humanity needs to heal. All of the fear, all of the weight that we’re carrying, this is why we need to be mirrors. This is why we need to be as clean as possible, to be able to work with other people and reflect to each other how to be good people, how to walk. As women, this is the work of being a woman.”
Political and Ecological Concerns
While the immediate impact of changes in U.S. border policies curtailed the ability of some women – and other participants – to attend the conference, broader attention was also paid to the impact of recent geopolitical shifts on medicine communities in the Global South.
“We cannot count on the United States,” said Leila Salazar-López, executive director of the advocacy group Amazon Watch during the panel “Relationships Between Land and Peoples.” “We can’t even say climate in the United States. It’s not in the government anymore. We’re not a part of intellectual property rights. We’re not a part of biodiversity, and we are not a part of the climate agreement anymore. We’ve gone way back. And our rights as women are being rolled back. That doesn’t mean we should stop. It means we need to stand stronger. This is the most important time for us to organize in community and with communities on the front lines in the Amazon.”
Fernanda Kaingang, a Brazilian lawyer and cultural advocate, said that her attendance at the conference was in part to urge the United States to become a signatory of the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing, an international treaty that would vest indigenous communities with intellectual property rights for their traditional knowledge.
“The monetization, the commodification of the indigenous knowledge is spread all over, but the indigenous people are not getting anything back from that, from those commodities, from all the knowledge that’s been spread by them,” Kaingang said. “We do want to share, we do want to have this knowledge in our medicine spread, but we also do not want to just be exploited. We want to have those benefits and the fair sharing return to us.”
René Alvarado Martínez, a visionary artist from the Mazatec culture who traveled to the conference from Oaxaca, Mexico, expressed similar sentiments about how his tradition is experiencing exploitation. During the panel “Latin American Indigenous Perspectives on the Psychedelic Renaissance,” Martinez recounted briefing a meeting of Mazatec elders about what had occurred at 2023’s Psychedelic Science conference in Denver. He recalled, “They said, ‘well, they can take the mushrooms, but they can never take our knowledge.’ Yes, of course we wish there was more reciprocity.”
“Unfortunately, we’re under the capitalist system and the capitalist system is filling our world with garbage,” said Martínez. “There’s garbage everywhere. The rivers. The forest where we collect the mushrooms is now contaminated. We have to take care of nature. That’s the source of the medicine.” Martínez called for more conscientious education to help encourage knowledge about nature and climate change. He also called for the creation of cultural spaces to help promote the preservation of traditional cultures.
On multiple panels, Kaingang articulated that such efforts could include universities in Brazil and other countries that are home to Indigenous cultures acknowledging traditional wisdom holders with academic credentials. “Why are universities back in our lands and in our territories still investigating if they’re the ones that own the knowledge,” said Kaingang. “You can give a shaman a master’s degree, for example. That is a way of acknowledging their power. It’s a practical issue.”
Salazar-López acknowledged that many existential challenges are facing the communities that were discussed at Psychedelic Culture, but also called for practical, hopeful action. “It is very important that we have mutual support and mutual aid because no one’s going to come and save us. No one’s going to come and help us. We have to help each other,” she said.
“If you look at the science, the Amazon is at a tipping point,” Salazar-López continued. “It’s at that point of possible ecological collapse. It’s already happened in some parts. But there’s still 80% left. 80% means that of all the destruction, all the fires, all the land grabbing, all the illegal logging, the illegal mining, the extraction that we’ve seen, 80% is still left. And that’s just the Amazon, right?”
“We think of all the indigenous lands across Brazil, all the different biomes and across South America. And then you think of Central America and North America. We still have a lot left,” Salazar-López said. “We still have a lot to protect. So we must stand together to protect life. And really, if we love life, then we’ll be in solidarity.”