“So, we fought back and won,” recalled Benally. To the subsistence farmers and sheep ranchers of the Four Corners region, it was an assault on their culture and the very survival of their community. In the early 1960s - a time bitterly remembered in this remote Navajo Nation ranching community - law enforcement officers rode in on horseback across roadless prairie at night to break up peyote rituals led by Native Americans. The quarantine is not the first time this spiritual tradition has been thwarted, however. “This is a very complicated issue,” said Miriam Volat, a soil scientist and co-director of the RiverStyx Foundation, a philanthropic group that has helped fund the preservation of land in Texas and Mexico, where peyote is threatened by poaching, mining, the petroleum industry, urban encroachment and cattle ranches operated by unsympathetic landowners. Their legal right to have access to it and use it is the result of costly court battles and painful cultural struggles with the United States government, they say. The therapeutic benefits of peyote and other natural mind-bending plants should be available to everyone, they say.īut this argument has been less than persuasive for those Native Americans who view peyote as a divine gift - a sacrament consumed to focus worshippers’ prayers to the Creator. ![]() ![]() In addition to inducing feelings that are hard to distinguish from the sensations that mystics have interpreted as divine dialogue, some scientific research suggests that the psychedelics may prove useful in treating mental health issues such as depression, PTSD, anxiety and addiction.
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