EAlthough the therapy helped Marlena Robbins better understand her intergenerational trauma, she wanted to delve deeper into her healing practice. In 2019, Robbins sat at her home altar with a dose of psychedelic mushrooms at the suggestion of her partner. Drawing from her Diné or Navajo heritage, she said a prayer and asked the mushrooms for guidance. The experience changed the trajectory of her life.
“When I sit with (mushrooms), it’s like I’m talking to the holy people. I see them as doctors,” Robbins said. ‘They’re already writing out the prescription. They are already writing the treatment plan.”
The 35-year-old left a career as a multidisciplinary artist to study indigenous perceptions of psilocybin, a hallucinogenic compound in some mushrooms. Her ultimate goal is to make psychoactive fungi, also known as magic mushrooms, accessible to indigenous communities across the country. Although magic mushrooms are federally illegal, some states are creating their own policies to regulate the substance. Within a culturally sensitive framework, Robbins believes psilocybin could help treat mental health and addiction issues among Native Americans.
“It could have a ripple effect on the community, on the tribe, on the clan systems, on their family systems,” said Robbins, who is in her second year as a doctoral student in public health at the University of California at Berkeley. “Trauma and addiction, all these things tend to throw us off our path. And these medications… have the ability to realign us with who we were meant to be.”
As a psychedelic movement spreads across the country (Oregon And Colorado have legalized psilocybin and some other states are taking steps to do the same), Robbins is trying to make sure Native Americans aren’t left behind in the conversation. “Many of these psychedelic companies and industries all talk about Native people as the original caretakers of these drugs, and yet tribal reservations have high rates of addiction, trauma, depression and anxiety,” Robbins said. “There’s no real debate about what these medications look like on the Navajo reservation.”
While Oregon And ColoradoThe company’s policy includes some input from Native Americans or looks at traditional indigenous uses of psychedelics, Utah And New MexicoFor example, the country’s legislation does not take their perspectives into account.
To date, Robbins’ research has focused on the perception of psilocybin among urban residents living in cities in California, Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Alaska. Next year, she plans to expand her work to the Navajo Nation, where she lived until moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, at age 10.
She hopes her analysis will bridge these perspectives and inform state and tribal policies around psilocybin-assisted therapies that impact Native American communities.
Creating a microcosm
Research on the historical use of psilocybin by indigenous people is inconclusive. While the Mazatecs and Huichol of Mexico used psilocybin in their spiritual practices, there is little evidence of “true indigenous traditions involving psilocybin outside of these two tribes,” says Christine Diindiisi McCleave, a resident of the Turtle Mountain Anishinaabe Nation. Diindiisi McCleave, who researches indigenous uses of traditional medicines at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, is also working with the state of Colorado to tribal working group. The group, which Robbins also recently joined, will discuss issues surrounding the commercialization of natural medicines.
In Robbins’ view, her work combines historical and contemporary uses of psilocybin by looking at “the new and innovative ways that indigenous people can use this medicine, but also how they integrate ceremonies from their own culture, information from the way Mazatec them and create this microcosm.” Currently, peyote — a cactus with hallucinogenic effects — is the only psychedelic substance protected under a 1994 amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, which allows members of the Native American Church, who are citizens of tribes, to practice peyote ceremonies.
A concern about the psychedelic movement among some indigenous communities is that the commercialization of traditional plant medicines could lead to unwanted tourism in their areas and the theft of indigenous ceremonies. For example, María Sabina was a Mazatec healer in southern Mexico who was exiled from her community and died in poverty after introducing the healing properties of psilocybin to non-indigenous people in the 1960s. Non-natives using the drug can also lead to conservation problems, such as overharvesting of peyote. “The clinical side, the scientific side and even the economic side of the psychedelic movement in a Western context doesn’t really take into account the implications and holistic nature of what these drugs mean for indigenous peoples,” Diindiisi McCleave said.
‘Adapt, adopt and evolve’
Have studies shown that psilocybin can alleviate end-of-life anxiety in cancer patients treat clinical depression. Robbins believes psilocybin could help address these issues within her own community, as some Diné who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s were exposed to uranium mining, which eventually led to cancer.
But most clinical trials did not take Indigenous perspectives into account. “Marlena’s research and her work are very important because tribes need to be informed at this point in order to form their own policies,” said Diindiisi McCleave, “and be prepared to engage with psychedelic legislation, either at the state or federal level level. ”
So far, Robbins has interviewed people in Los Angeles, Seattle, Oregon and the San Francisco Bay Area. She has seen geographic and generational differences, with indigenous communities in the Northwest using mushrooms recreationally at parties and on nature walks. And in the Southwest, closer to the border with Mexico, participants use psilocybin for spiritual purposes, to connect with ancestral wisdom and to heal intergenerational trauma.
Meanwhile, the older generation of participants has negative views of psilocybin use, fueled by campaigns such as the war on drugs that began in the 1970s.
After completing her doctorate, Robbins hopes to continue her research in Mexico to bridge the cultural divide between indigenous communities there and in the U.S., which are separated by a border, she said.
“Does this drug have the ability to revive those (ancestral) trade routes,” Robbins asked, “to learn from each other, adapt, adopt and evolve?