1917

This chapter explores the first sustained efforts to enact a federal ban on peyote in the United States. Missionaries and Indian Agents began pressing for a ban in the late nineteenth century, only to be thwarted by Native American peyotists and their allies in the Bureau of American Ethnology, who argued both that peyote worship should be protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and that it was not deleterious to the health of individual peyotists. By 1917, however, state governments were beginning to pass local bans, with the first prohibitions passed in Colorado and Utah. In early 1918, the U.S. House of Representatives took up the cause, holding hearings on a proposed ban. The record of those hearings offers a fascinating glimpse into the ways that racial anxieties were articulated through anxieties over peyotism in the early twentieth century. The ban passed the House but failed in the Senate.

Race, Space, Time

We begin the book’s conclusion with the juxtaposition of two different stories of peyotism: the creation of an ecotourism business featuring Wixárika peyotism in Potrero de la Palmita, Nayarit, in 2010 and the short history of an African American peyotist church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1920s. The former is licit, enjoying support by a state committed to economic development, while the latter faced constant threats from the police before collapsing, in part due to its members’ fear of arrest. These two stories remind us of the central roles that place and time play in the history of peyotism across the U.S.-Mexican border, but they also force us to consider the ways that ideas about race have informed the battles over peyote in Mexico and the United States. Particularly striking is the fact that the racial prohibitions enacted by the Spanish Inquisition resonate with current law. Also notable is the fact that Mexicans and Americans have deployed similar ideas about race over time in their battles over peyote. This speaks to the underlying anxieties that indigeneity evokes in both societies, as well as the role that indigenous subjects have played in the creation of whiteness in both the United States and Mexico.

2011

This chapter turns to the white shamans. This is not a term of endearment, as it is often linked to notions of charlatanism, foolishness, and more lately, cultural appropriation. Beginning with Carlos Castaneda, several generations of white shamans have deployed images tied to Wixárika peyotism in order to authorize their special wisdom. Resisting the temptation to dismiss them in a wholesale fashion, the chapter explores these figures in the context of the long history of non-indigenous interest in peyote and endeavors to reconsider their practices in that light. If viewed as part of long-standing historical phenomena, the white shamans can represent something more than what is allowed by contemporary binaries (i.e., authentic indigenous mysticism versus an inauthentic white shamanism). While some are, indeed, quite clearly hucksters, as a whole, the white shamans can be read as figures whose attractions to indigeneity speak to a long history in which Western notions of rationality and observable reality have not always been broadly embraced, even within the West. They become fascinating figures who at once reinforce the distinction between the West and the Other (through their embrace of the romance of indigeneity) and destabilize that distinction (by seeking to transcend its categories).

1971

We return to Mexico in this chapter, exploring the particular fallout for the psychiatrist Salvador Roquet after peyote was outlawed in Mexico in 1971. This ban grew out of circumstances that mirrored those in the United States: a growing fear among conservatives that non-indigenous youths were increasingly consuming drugs, as well as a sense that this marked a civilizational crisis. Hippy sensibilities offended older, middle-class Mexicans, who often rendered their disgust by lamenting that Mexican youths were, in effect, becoming Indian through their embrace of psychedelics. Dr. Roquet, who was himself no fan of the hippies and who insisted that many of his patients were former drug abusers, became a victim of this anxiety. Continuing to work with these drugs after they were banned, he relied on the goodwill of friends in the government to keep his practice viable. This arrangement collapsed in 1974, after an article in the magazine Tiempo accused Roquet of being a drug-pedaling degenerate (Roquet insisted that the article was a hit-piece, placed by enemies in the psychiatric profession who were jealous of his success). Roquet would spend several months in jail after being arrested in November 1974, but he was ultimately released without charge.

1899

While research on peyote accelerated in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany during the last decade of the nineteenth century, Mexican scientists remained largely ignorant of the properties of the cactus. This changed when Mexico’s Instituto Médico Nacional (IMN) sponsored a series of peyote studies at the turn of the century. In part, those studies relied on historical accounts and reports from government agents working in regions where indigenous peyotists lived. In part, they entailed experiments, first with a variety of animals and then with patients in the Hospital General de San Andrés in Mexico City. In contrast to their counterparts elsewhere, Mexican researchers lacked the capacity to extract mescaline from peyote, and they depended on solutions made from whole peyote buttons for their research. They were also much less inclined to experiment on themselves than researchers elsewhere, and they were more interested in the corporeal effects of peyote than its capacity to affect states of consciousness. In particular, they attempted to demonstrate peyote’s potential to be used as a heart tonic. Their work was ultimately undone by Mexico’s 1910 Revolution, which resulted in the closing of the IMN in 1915.

1887

In this chapter, we consider the moment when European and American scientists “discovered” peyote. John Briggs was one of the first Americans to write about peyote (in 1887), followed shortly by James Mooney, who recounted his experiences among the Kiowa of Oklahoma at the Anthropological Association in Washington DC in 1891. Around this time, the German scientist Louis Lewin encountered peyote while on a trip to the United States. Americans proved less adept at unlocking the chemistry of the cactus than their German counterparts, who identified four different alkaloids in the cactus by the mid-1890s. This period also saw notable studies of peyote by investigators in the United Kingdom, including some fairly dramatic self-experimentation among English intellectuals overseen by Havelock Ellis. Though their work did not yield widely accepted breakthroughs, these researchers were early pioneers in the exploration of the use of peyote and then mescaline as a tool for mental health professionals.

1964

As the United States moved toward a ban on peyote during the 1960s, the courts were forced to confront the First Amendment claims of Native American peyotists. This chapter explores the deployment of the concept of “bona fide” religious belief, which became the means through which an exemption for Native American peyotists was enshrined in U.S. law. The courts attempted to measure this through a series of metrics: whether or not other drugs were used, whether or not ceremonies took place within a formally organized church, and the extent to which these practices could be said to be traditional. More troubling was the fact that the courts and later the U.S. government relied on race as a basis for evaluating these claims, particularly after the Native American Church exemption was enshrined in federal laws that made peyote a schedule-one drug. Federal law made exceptions for the Native American Church only so long as those enjoying the exemption were also at least one-quarter Indian by blood. We see here, then, the role that the state’s obsession with race played in ensuring that Native American Church chapters became exclusively indigenous churches, reshaping the Native American Church in the process.

1958

Around the same time that Salvador Roquet was investigating the use of hallucinogenic drugs in the sierra mazateca, the Mexican government undertook its first sustained efforts to implement a development agenda in the region where Mexico’s most important peyotists (the Huichols) lived. The Huichols had existed largely beyond the authority of the Mexican state for most of its existence. This chapter explores the shape of that development project, focusing on the ways that federal officials made sense of the traditions they encountered in the sierra. They showed an almost complete lack of interest in Huichol peyotism, in spite of the fact that Mexican and foreign researchers were increasingly fascinated by the customs they found in this region. We also see the top down, authoritarian state at its peak. Government officials simply sought to impose development on an unruly countryside and made almost no effort to develop programs or priorities through a cooperative relationship with the erstwhile clients of the developmentalist state.

1937

Histories of peyotism in the United States tend to treat it as deeply rooted and universally embraced in indigenous communities. This chapter reminds us that this was not always the case. During its period of rapid growth, from around 1910 to 1940, peyotism was an evangelical religion in most Native American communities and was met with a great deal of resistance. The peyotists were often young men with ties outside of the community, and their practices challenged traditional hierarchies, traditional practices, and older power-brokers in their communities. In some cases, those who opposed peyotism in Native American communities adopted the same language as the missionaries and the Indian Agents in decrying the spread of peyotism, and in at least one case, (on the Navajo reservation in 1940), this prompted the tribal government to ban peyote on the reservation. The ban passed even with the opposition of the U.S. government, which by 1940 supported the rights of peyotists to practice their religion.

1833

In introducing the history of peyote in Mexico, this chapter begins with an incident in 1833, when the Mexican doctor Ignacio Sendejas attempted to cure cholera with a concoction made from peyote. The incident reminds us that in the aftermath of Mexican independence and the retreat of the Spanish Inquisition, long-standing prohibitions against peyote were abandoned by a state that was deeply concerned with making a modern nation. We are then introduced to the core concerns of the book, which center on an attempt to understand the ways that peyote is intertwined in the histories of race, science, religion, and the law in both Mexico and the United States. This chapter also considers peyote as a thing unto itself, with specific effects on the human body. In taking an approach that is informed by affect theory, the study proposes a novel approach to thinking through the history of indigeneity and race in North America.