The Peyote Cult And The Native American Church

Despite challenges by the federal government to restrict the use of peyote, the Native American Church, which uses the hallucinogenic cactus as a religious sacrament, has become the largest indigenous denomination among American Indians today. The Peyote Road examines the history of the NAC, including its legal struggles to defend the controversial use of peyote. Thomas C. Maroukis has conducted extensive interviews with NAC members and leaders to craft an authoritative account of the church’s history, diverse religious practices, and significant people. His book integrates a narrative history of the Peyote faith with analysis of its religious beliefs and practices—as well as its art and music—and an emphasis on the views of NAC members. Deftly blending oral histories and legal research, Maroukis traces the religion’s history from its Mesoamerican roots to the legal incorporation of the NAC; its expansion to the northern plains, Great Basin, and Southwest; and challenges to Peyotism by state and federal governments, including the Supreme Court decision in Oregon v. Smith. He also introduces readers to the inner workings of the NAC with descriptions of its organizational structure and the Cross Fire and Half Moon services. The Peyote Road updates Omer Stewart’s classic 1987 study of the Peyote religion by taking into consideration recent events and scholarship. In particular, Maroukis discusses not only the church’s current legal issues but also the diminishing Peyote supply and controversies surrounding the definition of membership. Today approximately 300,000 American Indians are members of the Native American Church. The Peyote Road marks a significant case study of First Amendment rights and deepens our understanding of the struggles of NAC members to practice their faith.

The largest religion begun, organized, and directed by and for Native Americans, Peyotism includes the use of peyote in its ceremonies. As a sacred plant of divine origin, peyote use was well established in religious rituals in pre-Columbian Mexico. Toward the end of the 19th century Peyotism spread to the Indians of Texas and the Southwest, and it spread rapidly in the United States after the subsidence of the Ghost Dance. It persists today among Native Americans in Northern Mexico, the United States, and Southern Canada. Possibly because of the controversy over peyote use, a lot has been written about the Native American Church. This bibliography provides a useful guide for scholars, students, and Native Americans who want to research Peyotism. The bibliography includes books and book chapters, master's theses, Ph.D. dissertations, magazine and journal articles, conference papers, museum publications, U.S. government publications, audiovisual materials, and World Wide Web sites. In addition, it includes selected articles from newspapers, law reviews, medical and psychiatric journals, and scientific journals that provide information on Peyotism. A valuable research guide, the bibliography will help to provide a greater understanding of the history, ceremonies, and significance of the pan-Indian religion.

Describes the peyote plant, the birth of peyotism in western Oklahoma, its spread from Indian Territory to Mexico, the High Plains, and the Far West, its role among such tribes as the Comanche, Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache, Caddo, Wichita, Delaware, and Navajo Indians, its conflicts with the law, and the history of the Native American Church.

For half a century, readers on peyotism have devoured La Barre's fascinating original study, which began when the author, at age twenty-four, studied the rites of fifteen American Indian tribes using Lophophora williamsii, the small, spineless, carrot-shaped peyote cactus growing in the Rio Grande Valley and southward. Continuing his research from the 1930s through the 1980s, Weston La Barre reviews topics such as the Timothy Leary-Richard Alpert “experiments” with peyote and other psychotropic substances, the Carlos Castaneda phenomenon, the progress of the Native American Church toward acceptance as a religious denomination, the presumptions of the Neo-American Church, the legal ramifications of ritual drug use, and the spread of peyotism from the Southwest to other North American tribes. This new edition of La Barre's classic study includes 334 new entries in the latest of his highly valued bibliographical essays on works relating to peyote, not just in anthropology but in a variety of fields including archeology, economics, botany, chemistry, and pharmacology. The bibliography lists important contributions in popular media such as newspapers, audiotapes, and films, as well as in scholarly journals.

In 1956, pioneering psychedelic researchers Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond were invited to join members of the Red Pheasant First Nation near North Battleford, Saskatchewan, to participate in a peyote ceremony hosted by the Native American Church of Canada. Inspired by their experience, they wrote a series of essays explaining and defending the consumption of peyote and the practice of peyotism. They enlisted the help of Hoffer’s sister, journalist Fannie Kahan, and worked closely with her to document the religious ceremony and write a history of peyote, culminating in a defense of its use as a healing and spiritual agent. Although the text shows its mid-century origins, with dated language and at times uncritical analysis, it advocates for Indigenous legal, political, and religious rights and offers important insights into how psychedelic researchers, who were themselves embattled in debates over the value of spirituality in medicine, interpreted the peyote ceremony. Ultimately, they championed peyotism as a spiritual practice that they believed held distinct cultural benefits. A Culture’s Catalyst revives a historical debate. Revisiting it now encourages us to reconsider how peyote has been understood and how its appearance in the 1950s tested Native-newcomer relations and the Canadian government’s attitudes toward Indigenous religious and cultural practices.

In 'A Different Medicine', Joseph Calabrese presents a case study that challenges many deeply ingrained cultural assumptions and attempts to mediate a centuries-old clash of cultural paradigms. The book explores a controversial Native American ritual and healthcare practice: ceremonial consumption of the psychedelic Peyote cactus in the context of a postcolonial healing movement called the Native American Church. Calabrese argues against the War on Drugs and the Supreme Court decision that jeopardized the right of Native Americans to use this medicine. He urges us to recognize the multiplicity of the normal and the therapeutic.

"An account of the origins and growth of the peyote religion".