A Culture's Catalyst
eBook - ePub

A Culture's Catalyst

Historical Encounters with Peyote and the Native American Church in Canada

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

A Culture's Catalyst

Historical Encounters with Peyote and the Native American Church in Canada

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access A Culture's Catalyst by Fannie Kahan,Abram Hoffer,Duncan Blewett,Humphry Osmond,Teodoro Weckowicz in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Medicine & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. List of Illustrations
  2. Acknowledgements
  3. Introduction by Erika Dyck
  4. Photographs
  5. Editorā€™s Note
  6. Chapter 1: Peyoteā€”A Cultureā€™s Catalyst: The Eternal Search (Fannie Kahan)
  7. Chapter 2: The Great Bastion (Fannie Kahan)
  8. Chapter 3: The Struggle for Peyote (Fannie Kahan)
  9. Chapter 4: The Spiritual Herb (Fannie Kahan)
  10. Chapter 5: Night in the Tipi (Humphry Osmond)
  11. Chapter 6: The Psychedelic Experience in the Native American Church (Duncan Blewett)
  12. Chapter 7: Peyote Ceremony and Jungian Archetypes (Teodoro Weckowicz)
  13. Chapter 8: Peyote: A Sacrament by Medical Prescription (Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond)
  14. Notes
  15. Bibliography