The Peyote Road: Uncovering the History of a Sacred Journey

Abstract: The history of peyote-based ceremonial practices in North America is often understood through the lens of the Native American Church (NAC), with its legal inception in Oklahoma in 1918 and its subsequent spread as a syncretic religious movement across the United States and later, into Canada. In 1954, a new branch of the NAC formed in Saskatchewan, far from the desert habitat of the peyote cactus, which had increasingly been described as a sacrament within the expanding membership of the NAC. In this paper, we ask how and why peyote ceremonies moved thousands of kilometers north into western Canada. We combine and compare archival documentation about peyote’s pilgrimage, testimonies largely collected by outsiders to the NAC, with oral histories from Canadian NAC communities in Saskatchewan, especially members from Red Pheasant and Sturgeon Lake First Nations. Piecing together archival evidence with oral traditions reveals sites of confluence and contestation over what constitutes tradition, history, and longevity concerning a practice whose very existence has been a site of controversy. We bring together archival-based historical methods with Indigenous methodologies, including subscribing to a Cree worldview, which fundamentally shapes how we come to know this history. In comparing oral traditions and written histories, we aim to rebalance and complicate the historical record by challenging the assumption that peyote has a relatively brief and insignificant historical legacy in Canada.

Peyote has a storied history. The slow-growing cactus, Lophophora williamsii, favors arid conditions and thrives in the region near the Rio Grande River basin, which also serves as the border between southwestern Texas and northeastern Mexico. The peyote fields or gardens are relatively small in North America, but peyote practices have spread widely across the continent. In fact, in 1954, a Canadian group, over 2,000 miles (3,500 kilometers) away from the peyote gardens, registered as a peyote Church under the umbrella of the Native American Church (NAC). The NAC was first formally established in 1918 in Oklahoma by Quanah Parker, whose half-moon fireplace created a peyote ceremony altar.¹ The fireplace is a ceremonial altar, which is inherited or passed down through generations to individuals chosen by Elders and community members to carry on these traditions. These decisions are relational and depend on the individuals and families involved.  

Despite this twentieth-century recognition, archived police records in western Canada suggest that First Nations people, including Cree, Lakota, and Dakota families, crossed the Canada-US border with sacks of peyote cacti since at least the 1890s, including at sites like Rocky Boy at the Montana/Alberta border, where a number of First Nations Reserves/Reservations straddled the Canada-US border.² The North West Mounted Police (NWMP), which predate the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), began patrolling this area in the 1870s, leading to an increase in arrests and reports of peyote appearing at Rocky Boy First Nation. The archival record is sparse, but the oral histories from current members of the Native American Church in Saskatchewan not only confirm this history but also suggest that police records tell only a fraction of it.  

The stories that have been passed down through generations confirm some of the players and locations of the peyote crossings and emphasize a longer and richer history of how peyote came to Canada than the story that emerges from written accounts. The oral tradition also draws from different sources of evidence to make claims about the persistence and longevity of practices that fall outside of the official historical record. Canada has now set a constitutional precedent, approved by the Supreme Court of Canada, known as the Delgamuukw precedent, that accepts oral history as legally equivalent to written history.³ The written record clearly indicates that members of Red Pheasant First Nation and Mosquito First Nation in Saskatchewan signed a record in 1954 granting permission to import peyote and establish a formal chapter of the Native American Church. However, when we look beyond these documents, when we listen to oral histories, and if we incorporate a Cree worldview, a different picture emerges that suggests a longer history and a network of people and ideas that combined to establish this ceremony on the Canadian Plains. By placing these histories side by side, the question of when peyote arrived, or who brought it, becomes less important than why these ceremonies persist and why they appeared in the first place. 

In this paper, we go beyond a literal or linguistic comparison of different versions of this history; we attempt to show how Western archival traditions and Indigenous knowledge systems are themselves in conflict over how to organize historical information and reveal it in narrative or story. A number of Indigenous scholars have theorized this complex relationship among different ways of knowing. For example, Marilyn Iwama and colleagues explain the concept of “two-eyed seeing” that allows the interpreter to utilize both First Nations and Western knowledge.⁴  An Indigenous perspective or epistemology is how Indigenous people, including co-authors Reanna and Kelly Daniels, see the world.  Indigenous scholar Margaret Kovach explained that European settlers brought with them “an attitude about the world…that was in sharp contrast with Indigenous people’s worldviews…[and] Western science has been instrumental in subjugating and discrediting Indigenous knowledge systems and peoples.”⁵  She further explained “(m)y ancestors were highly strategic peoples in both the practical aspects of life as well as within ceremonies and rituals contextualized in place and manifested in ways of knowing.”⁶  According to Kovach, Elders “were able to share teachings through stories and about their experiences, passed on using oral tradition, and this knowing was respected as legitimate.”⁷   

Without acknowledging and representing Indigenous epistemologies, First Nations’ knowledge ways are systemically undermined in traditional Western academic hierarchies. By sticking to traditional academic norms, First Nations knowledge is further marginalized within academic settings. Linda Goulet and Keith Goulet highlight this difference in worldviews as follows: “(c)olonization was and still is based on the ideologies of Eurocentrism…the two ideologies are intertwined:  Eurocentrism advocates and reinforces superiority by postulating that European language, knowledge systems, and culture are superior, scientific, and civilized.”⁸ Linda Smith adds to this conversation with a look at Maori knowledge ways in what is now New Zealand, suggesting that “colonization has been extremely painful:  not only has it caused loss and change of culture, but it has also brought about systemic cultural denigration and undermined the validity and legitimacy of Maori knowledge and culture…Maori culture, language, and values became regarded as not simply different, but inferior.”⁹ Without concerted effort to analyze and address these two differing worldviews and ways of knowing, we will continue, although naively, to perpetuate the idea that First Nations people and their epistemologies are inferior. Changing this view requires an ontological paradigm shift.¹⁰  

Our paper takes a “two-eyed seeing” approach and attempts to decolonize this history by valuing both the First Nations’ knowledge of the pilgrimage and the documentary trail produced by Western institutions. By piecing together these approaches, we not only see how the peyote pilgrimage was documented, but how it has been remembered, preserved, and maintained as part of a First Nations worldview.

While the Indigenous history with peyote has long roots and involves many different linguistic, familial, and political groups, the fascination with this cactus by Western observers appears in written form only from the nineteenth century onwards. Some of the differences are revealed in the language of “discovery” itself. Where Western accounts describe early peyote encounters or scientific feats of discovery or synthesis of the alkaloids, Indigenous views suggest that it is the peyote medicine itself that chooses who will attend a ceremony and who will interpret its meanings.  

In the Western tradition, an Austrian chemist isolated several of the peyote cactus’s psychoactive alkaloids, including mescaline, in 1896; in 1919, mescaline was synthesized artificially in a lab.¹¹ Half a century later, mescaline, alongside d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), became the subject of major clinical studies using these psychedelic substances to treat addiction and other mental disorders.¹² As part of those studies, in 1954, British writer Aldous Huxley took mescaline, which inspired him to write The Doors of Perception. Its publication did more to introduce the world to mescaline than many of the scientific papers that preceded it.¹³  

The psychoactive properties of mescaline and its plant host, the peyote cactus, attracted widespread attention. Beginning in the 1950s, clinical and biomedical psychedelic researchers began to study mescaline as the cause of perceptual disorders. By the end of that decade, mescaline was being used as a treatment for an expanding range of pathological conditions, from alcoholism to trauma-related disorders, depression, and anxiety. Despite being the substance that inspired the coining of the term “psychedelic,” it was soon eclipsed by other substances, like LSD and psilocybin mushrooms, whose properties appealed to researchers who believed that these other substances were slightly more powerful and easier to synthesize. Clinical researchers looked to anthropologists to better understand how the mescal cactus worked as a healing agent within Indigenous ceremonies, but this context did not readily align with a clinical one.¹⁴ 

By the 1970s, most jurisdictions prohibited medical research using psychedelics. These substances had earned a reputation as recreational drugs, inviting curious seekers to enjoy the kaleidoscopic hallucinations that sometimes accompanied a psychedelic experience. Allegations of mind control and abuse further mired clinical psychedelic research in controversy, and legal psychedelic research ground to a halt. Peyote ceremonies conducted by Indigenous groups remained separate but were nonetheless affected by the cultural reputation of psychedelics as recreational and possibly dangerous substances.  

Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, peyote ceremonies continued with legal protections and religious recognition under the auspices of the NAC, but Indigenous communities throughout North America faced new legal challenges with changes on Reserves (Canada)/Reservations (US) and increasing pressure to abandon First Nations practices, from traditional healing to ceremonies, in government-led efforts to assimilate Indigenous people. During this period, the American Indian Movement in the US challenged federal laws, and Canadian Indigenous activists created their own responses to federal threats to move past treaty obligations.¹⁵ Proposed changes to Canada’s Indian Act from 1951 onwards persistently tried to assimilate Indigenous people by removing status and banning distinctive cultural features, including several traditional ceremonies, from potlatches to dances, and the use of traditional medicine.¹⁶  

These legal actions and amendments to the Indian Act have further politicized the history of peyote ceremonies in the official records, with accounts that increasingly emphasized the imported nature of the cactus and associated ceremony in order to suggest that these were not part of local traditional knowledge. From the 1970s onwards, these ceremonies survived within some communities, but remained underground or secret, due to the fear that these too would draw attention from authorities who had already laid the legal groundwork for dismantling Indigenous traditions. The politicization of the peyote ceremonies not only affected how they have been historicized, but it has also affected how Indigenous people themselves view the peyote ceremony. 

Oral Histories and Methods¹⁷

Indigenous oral traditions expand the history of peyote with attention to stories, prayers, songs, experiences, and memories that shift the focus away from dating its origin to an appreciation for the relationships that the ceremony reveals. Scholars like Winona Stevenson explain that the Cree language itself provides insights into these conflicting ways of knowing and doing history. Stevenson recounts how missionaries attempted to anchor Plains Cree linguistics and syllabics in a colonial history, while a diminishing number of Cree language speakers insisted that the language itself was imbued with stories and meanings that consistently change the language, making the question of determining original dates or founding points a circular and even meaningless exercise.¹⁸ In order to fully appreciate how the language conveys meaning, one must adopt a Cree worldview that blends Creation stories with language, meaning, and continual interpretation, defying a beginning or end concept.  

Plains Cree people were buffalo hunters. They followed the herds long before the international border between Canada and the United States was established. They carried their history in their traditions, in the knowledge of Elders, in ceremonies, and in songs. The ceremonies linked the past, present, and future in a Cree cosmology that recognizes and honors the embodied wisdom of all things through the Almighty Creator.  

Songs and oral histories retain elements of peyote pilgrimages and are a vital part of this living history. Shrouded in song, ritual, faith, and community, the pilgrimage represents a link to ancestral traditions that continue to adapt to modern technologies and laws, while retaining active principles that balance a desire to maintain older traditions and manage current needs. The peyote pilgrimage symbolizes and reinforces the sacred teachings, recognizing that all life deserves respect and that balance is key to cultural safety. As such, it is an artifact of past practices and a testament to continuity and change.   

Cree oral traditions recalling peyote predate the western and northward expansion of settlement that brought with it Christianity, European-style state infrastructure, and eventually new forms of transportation that disrupted well-established patterns of movement and relationships throughout the continent.¹⁹ In an effort to preserve the spiritual traditions and safeguard ceremonial practices in the face of colonial policies of assimilation, these stories have not been widely shared outside the membership of the NAC.  

Cultural knowledge keeper and elder Kelly Daniels is a direct descendant in a long line of relations whose peyote ceremonies predate the legal recognition of the Native American Church. One of the fireplaces he maintains is a Comanche half-moon fireplace, which itself represents ties with the founding members of the Comanche First Nation in Oklahoma, where the NAC first gained legal recognition in 1918.²⁰ Kelly grew up in present-day Saskatchewan between Red Pheasant (maternal) and Sturgeon Lake (paternal) First Nations in Canada, with parents who raised him in a traditional way. He learned a way of life that centered around respect for Cree values and worldview, especially ceremonial teachings.   

As a cultural knowledge keeper, roadman, pow wow dancer, and ceremonial coordinator, Kelly learned the protocols, behaviors, and meanings behind ceremonial practices, including those involving peyote, that allow him to live by these principles and carry these stories for future generations.  

Reanna Daniels is a passionate educator from the Little Pine First Nation who is currently completing her PhD in Education at the University of Saskatchewan, where she focuses on Cree language vitalization and Indigenous research methodologies. She has held the women’s ceremonial seat for over two decades and has even served as the Treasurer for the Native American Church of Canada. Reanna brings a wealth of knowledge to her role and is committed to supporting the next generation of Indigenous learners.   

Erika Dyck is a fourth-generation settler of Mennonite and German ancestry with familial roots in Saskatchewan. Her European ancestors lived and worked as farmers in areas close to the First Nations reserves where both Kelly and Reanna were raised. She is a trained historian with a track record of doing community-engaged research and studies of psychedelic plants and synthetics. Since 2022, Kelly, Reanna, and Erika have shared stories, met relatives and friends, prayed together, presented together, and discussed strategies for respectfully preserving the history of peyote ceremonies in Saskatchewan by incorporating the perspectives of Kelly’s family and extended community. 

*What follows in this section is based on oral histories.

Historically, Cree people were nomadic. They regularly moved and traded, and they had extended family networks that connected the Cree people with other Indigenous groups, forging strong networks across North America before the settlement era. Prior to policies that restricted movement and placed people on Reserves/Reservations, the pilgrimage might follow seasonal hunting flows or evolve more organically as needed. As communities were relocated and registered on particular plots of land, the pilgrimage had to find new rhythms.  

According to modern estimates, a peyote pilgrimage from Saskatchewan to southern Texas could take months. The long journey was originally conducted on foot and later on horseback, before the route was altered by the opening of rail lines, vehicles, and eventually, air travel. Regardless of the mode of transportation, protocols remained the same: pilgrims met relatives and other tribes along the route and honored them with tobacco, visits, a sharing of stories and songs, and, of course, ceremonies. Rather than refer to one another as separate tribes, pilgrims recognized their interconnections through marriage, trade, and acceptance of the one Creator.  

Alterations to the journey, including new modes of travel, meant that pilgrims developed relationships with different peoples along the route and, over time, required different paperwork—from passports to import permits—to ensure legal passage. The changing transportation landscape aided in spreading the practice but also connected different groups with one another across larger expanses of territory and introduced new kinship connections. Rail lines, for example, took travelers through different territories on their route to the peyote gardens. Pilgrims relied on these relationships in order to set up camps along the route, pray together, and share stories and songs. In these meetings, oral histories and exchanges of news and stories expanded, and songs from one group or tribe might become incorporated into another, representing a shared and reverent connection.  

Oral histories to this day emphasize the physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental requirements for going on a peyote pilgrimage. The time, effort, and resources required for pilgrimage are significant historically as much as they are today. Time away from one’s family or employment requires sacrifice, courage, and above all, faith. Despite the relative ease of rail travel as compared with travelling on foot, the central protocols for the journey have remained consistent. Prior to leaving, the party must have a good reason. Some of the more common reasons include seeking healing, guidance, or insight. The physical demands of the journey mean that the travelling group must be strong, both in body and mind, but also in terms of resources. Crossing into different territories requires the pilgrim or pilgrims to bring gifts—tobacco, drums, and cloth—for the families and communities who host pilgrims along the way. While the specifics have changed over time, the elements of strength, sacrifice, and courage remain in place to this day. 

Prior to departure, the community gathers to set prayers for the journey, the pilgrims (typically a small group of individuals, but could also be a solo mission), and the homes and families they leave behind. Lodges might come together in a sweat, followed by a feast, a meeting of Elders, and an exchange of gifts and prayers. Logistically, the task of crossing borders has changed over time, and in some ways has become more complex despite the ability to drive or fly. Importation permits, paperwork for crossing the border, and passes to leave the Reserve complicated the matter of crossing borders, but travelers relied on familiar routes that were plotted before the border was in place. These routes used natural features of the landscape as guideposts, and tribal territories, including those of the Dakota, Navajo, Comanche, and others, as places to set up camps, cross waterways, and renew community ties.²¹ These exchanges were also a vital part of the pilgrimage, bringing new stories and songs home, and keeping communities connected through these encounters.  

Songs and oral histories retain elements of these journeys, and the pilgrimage itself is an artifact of this living history. Shrouded in song, ritual, faith, and community, the pilgrimage represents a link to ancestral traditions that continue to adapt to modern technologies and laws, while retaining active principles that balance a desire to maintain older traditions and manage current needs. The pilgrimage symbolizes and reinforces the sacred teachings, recognizing that all life deserves respect and that balance is key to cultural safety.

While the protocols surrounding the pilgrimage in the oral record have been constant across multiple centuries, the archival record of peyote use in Canada is inconsistent, suggesting a more episodic history in Canada that reinforces an interpretation of a borrowed ceremony. Yet, interpreted alongside oral histories, the reports of people moving across borders with a “foreign cactus” may indeed be evidence of this longer history of pilgrimages and kinship connections with other First Nations.  

Police reports in Saskatchewan identified peyote crossing its borders since the early 1920s. Of course, the police records were incomplete, but nonetheless produced a scattered documentary trail.²² By the late 1920s, police reports tracked these importations to the Piapot First Nation (north of the provincial capital Regina and north of the Dakota/Montana border), suggesting they were brought into Canada by Cree, Dakota/Lakota, Nakoda, and Siksika who had visited relatives in Montana or Dakota.²³ Canadian officials seemed confused about why Indigenous people were interested in crossing the border to obtain cactus supplies, particularly after learning that the peyote cactus grew much further south in Texas. Their confusion led them to reach out to other border agents to determine whether the cactus was showing up along the border in Alberta or British Columbia. 

Indian Agents, then responsible for monitoring the movement of First Nations people on and off reserves, reported that peyote was not being used in British Columbia or Alberta. Their correspondence indicates that they had limited knowledge of the practices, but their curiosity convinced them to keep a closer watch on First Nations men seeking permission to leave Reserves to travel south across the US border, perhaps even to Mexico.²⁴  

Canadian officials began looking south, too, contacting American border authorities in Montana and asking about the “strange cactus” carried in sacks by “Indians” claiming to be visiting relatives and using traditional medicine. In 1942, Charles Tranter, an American physician from Reno, Nevada, took it upon himself to warn the Canadian authorities that peyote use south of the border was on the rise, with serious consequences for the medical and social health of communities.²⁵ Writing to the Canadian superintendent of medical services for Indian Affairs, he described peyote use as linked to inefficiency, intoxication, and cult-like behavior. He wrote that “Indian peddlers bring the narcotic from Mexico, and it is used in all-night meetings. It has cut down the efficiency of our Indians approximately fifty percent in this region, and several deaths have occurred in the all-night meetings.”²⁶  

The cross-border conversations amongst non-Indigenous officials, whether doctors, police, or Indian Agents, contributed to the idea that the importation of peyote was new and increasing. Moreover, this correspondence reinforced the idea that these meetings or ceremonies stimulated violence or danger that required police intervention and prohibition. One RCMP officer monitored a group of Sioux men who travelled back and forth to the Indian Reservations in the Dakotas, speculating that these men were displaced from their homes and may be violent.²⁷  

At first, it seems evident that border officials were unaware of the psychoactive properties, let alone the spiritual significance of the peyote cactus, which was reportedly being brought into Canada by men claiming to be “medicine men” who at times struggled to express themselves in English. The archived police reports are brief, but note that cactus-carrying men explained that their travel was motivated by visiting relatives, and the cacti they brought home were medicine. Indeed, one such man, Louis Sunchild, was apprehended at the Alberta/Montana border, where RCMP officers described him as a medicine man bringing a sack of cacti into the country without paperwork. According to this archival record, Sunchild was held for a few days, when the RCMP determined that they could not really charge him with anything but confiscated his sack of peyote anyway.  

In January 1952, Louis Sunchild was again stopped at the Montana-Alberta border, and customs officers seized five pounds of peyote. In Sunchild’s statement to the RCMP, which he relayed through a translator, he explained that the use of peyote with the NAC was a mechanism for bridging the cultural divide. Sunchild explained:   

I am like a missionary of the Native American Church on the Sunchild Reserve. For the past four or five years I have been studying about the Native American Church at Rocky Boy, Montana, and for the past two years I have understood the religion sufficiently to act as a missionary and teach it to others on the Sunchild Reserve. I have been teaching this religion on the Sunchild Reserve for the last four months. The Native American Church is based on the use of “peyote” and “peyote” is used solely for religious purposes to worship Almighty God, the son and the Virgin Mary through peyote. The peyote is used in the meetings by chewing two pieces of it at each ceremony.… Sometimes when I don’t feel just right I take one piece of peyote, but I don’t use medicines of any kind, nor any alcohol. I believe in the use of hospitals and [medicine] for my people and I don’t try to stop them from going to hospital or seeking a doctor. I have no intention of doing anything wrong and did not try to hide the peyote when I came across the border into Canada. Before using peyote I drank and gambled, but since using it I have stopped all this and worship God.²⁸ 

Oral histories and First Nations elders today know Sunchild as an important peyote “roadman,” a leader or frontrunner of the peyote community, whose pilgrimage efforts had been critical for linking communities together and for bringing news, stories, songs, and medicine to the families living in Saskatchewan and parts of Alberta. His detention prevented a series of ceremonies and drew additional police surveillance over the communities assumed to be connected to Sunchild. The police records on Sunchild end there, but the memories and oral histories about his bravery and sacrifice continue to survive today within NAC communities.

The case of Louis Sunchild is an example of rebalancing the historical record by paying attention to local oral histories that help to flesh out this history, and at times contradict the archival record by providing new perspectives and stories that add new layers of meaning to the question of how peyote came to Canada. Despite the paucity of evidence in the archived police records, the Saskatchewan NAC community shared oral histories about this period during the 1940s and 1950s, which coincided with increased police presence, enhanced surveillance of movements on and off reserves, and the unkind treatment of First Nations authorities and surrounding community members. 

Perhaps as a result of this pressure and Sunchild’s arrest in 1952, a number of Elders familiar with the ceremonies in Saskatchewan gathered to seek legal advice and to formally register their ceremonial practices with the government. In 1954, the Red Pheasant First Nation, along with the Mosquito First Nation in Saskatchewan, became the group to successfully register a chapter of the Native American Church in Canada under the Provincial Charities Act—a move that enshrined the NAC and its chapters as legal entities throughout the province. While this legal maneuver did not end police surveillance, political harassment, or cultural misunderstandings, it set the stage for a new generation of ceremonial practices with a foothold in the legal system. It is also important to recognize that this 1954 Registration was not the point of origin for ceremonial practice with peyote in the region, but another development in a more fluid understanding of what was required to safeguard a worldview that included an appreciation for peyote ceremonies and all of the relationships that those ceremonies represented for generations.  

Thirty-six years after Quanah Parker established the Native American Church in Oklahoma, that same Comanche half-moon fireplace had legal recognition on the Canadian prairies. This mid-century achievement was a legal gesture that laid down another set of archival documents, but in reality, it represented a much longer set of practices that had already found a spiritual home in that region through decades, even centuries, of exchanges, songs, prayers, and faith. 

¹ Parker has been the subject of several books, for example see: William T. Hagan, Quanah Parker, Comanche Chief Vol. 6. (University of Oklahoma Press, 1995); Samuel C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (Simon and Schuster, 2010); Bill Neeley, The Last Comanche chief: The Life and Times of Quanah Parker (Turner Publishing Company, 2007). [Return to Section]

² For an in-depth look at this community and the border trade, excluding peyote, see: Tyla Betke, “Cree (Nêhiyawak) Mobility, Diplomacy, and Resistance in the Canada-US Borderlands, 1885–1917.” MA thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 2019. [Return to Section]

³ See the judgement: https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1569/index.do [Return to Section]

⁴ Marilyn Iwama et al., “Two-Eyed Seeing and the Language of Healing in Community-Based Research,” Canadian Journal of Native Education 32, no. 2 (2009): 3-23. [Return to Section]

⁵ Margaret Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts (University of Toronto Press, 2021), 64.  [Return to Section]

⁶ Kovach 2021, 81. [Return to Section]

⁷ Kovach 2021, 81. [Return to Section]

⁸ Linda M. Goulet and Keith N. Goulet, Teaching Each Other, Enhanced Edition: Nehinuw Concepts and Indigenous Pedagogies (UBC Press, 2014), 37. [Return to Section]

⁹ Graham Hingangaroa Smith, "Maori education: Revolution and transformative action," Canadian Journal of Native Education 24, no. 1 (2000): 59. [Return to Section]

¹⁰ Recent efforts to address this gulf in understanding has revealed a number of examples where ideas originated from First Nation people, i.e. U.S. government system. Jim Thorpe presented this in the documentary Red Fever (2024), and the documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World (2017) illustrates Native American influence on contemporary music history. [Return to Section]

¹¹ For a comprehensive and detailed account of mescaline, see: Mike Jay, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic (Yale University Press, 2019).  [Return to Section]

¹² Erika Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). [Return to Section]

¹³ First edition, Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (Chatto and Windus, 1956). [Return to Section]

¹⁴ There are several examples, and the one most pertinent here was summarised and recorded by Fannie Kahan, whose account was produced approximately 1956–1962, but was not published until 2016. Fannie Kahan, A Culture's Catalyst: Historical Encounters with Peyote and the Native American Church in Canada (University of Manitoba Press, 2016). [Return to Section]

¹⁵ For more on this history see Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (The New Press, 1996). For a Canadian example, see Harold Cardinal, The Unjust Society: The Tragedy of Canada's Indians (M. G. Hurting LTD., Publishers, 1969). In this document, law student and First Nations activist Harold Cardinal challenges the Canadian government to reinstate and indeed extend First Nations rights, while upholding Treaty obligations in the face of Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s “White Paper.” [Return to Section]

¹⁶ Douglas Cole and Ira Chaikin, "A Worse Than Useless Custom: The Potlatch Law and Indian Resistance," Western Legal History 5, no. 2 (1992): 187–216. [Return to Section]

¹⁷ Canada now has set a constitutional precedent approved by the Supreme Court of Canada, referred to as the Delgamuukw precedent, that accepts oral history as legally equivalent to written history. See the judgement: https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1569/index.do  [Return to Section]

¹⁸ Winona Stevenson, “Calling Badger and the Symbols of the Spirit Languages: The Cree Origins of the Syllabic System,” Oral History Forum/Forum d'histoire orale 19-20 (1999-2000): 19-24. [Return to Section]

¹⁹ For more detailed histories of this process, see: Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America (Liveright Publishing, 2022); and for more on the introduction of the horse and the settlement era, see: Daniel K Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Harvard University Press, 2009); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press, 2008); Theodore Binnema, Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains (University of Toronto Press, 2004). [Return to Section]

²⁰ For examples of historical accounts of the NAC, see: Thomas C. Maroukis, The Peyote Road: Religious Freedom and the Native American Church (University of Oklahoma Press, 2012); Jay, Mescaline; Omer Stewart, Peyote Religion: A History (University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); Kahan, A Culture's Catalyst. Canada now has set a constitutional precedent approved by the Supreme Court of Canada, referred to as the Delgamuukw precedent, that accepts oral history as legally equivalent to written history. See the judgement: https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1569/index.do  [Return to Section]

²¹ For more on this history see: Benjamin Hoy, A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands (Oxford University Press, 2021); Craig Robertson, The Passport in America: The History of a Document (Oxford University Press, 2010). [Return to Section]

²² Historian Ben Hoy has produced a board game called “Policing the Sound” to illustrate the ineffective efforts of police and customs agents to patrol movement and importation; see Hoy, “Teaching History with Custom-Built Board Games,” Simulation & Gaming 49, no. 2 (2018): 115-133. Comparing police budgets with staffing needs, Hoy demonstrates how limited police surveillance was in patrolling a vast border. We recognize that these police reports are not therefore accurate accounts of the amount or frequency of crossings. [Return to Section]

²³ Indian Affairs. 1926-55. File Ottawa—Correspondence, Reports and Investigations into the use of Peyote and other Drugs on Indian Reserves, Federal and Provincial Legislation, Food and Drug Act, Opium and Narcotics Act (Clippings, Publications, Photos). File 1/1-16-2, vol. 10243, T-7545, RG 10. Indian Affairs Fonds. LAC. [Return to Section]

²⁴ Royal Canadian Mounted Police. 1941. Report on Use of Peyote by Indians in Western Canada. 8 September. 1/1-16-2, 10243, T-7545, RG 10. Indian Affairs fonds. LAC, cited in Erika Dyck and Tolly Bradford, “Peyote on the Prairies: Religion, Scientists, and Native-newcomer Relations in Western Canada,” Journal of Canadian Studies 46, no. 1 (2012): 33. [Return to Section]

²⁵ Indigenous communities had good reason to worry about the health of their families, but as historians like Maureen Lux, Mary Ellen Kelm, Mary Jane McCallum, Jim Daschuk, and Ian Mosby have documented, the declining health outcomes had more to do with the extinction of the buffalo herds and colonial policies that enforced restrictions on movement. These policies produced changes in diets, and colonial governments were slow or even resistant to providing healthcare in the form of modern hospital treatments. See: Mauree K. Lux, Medicine That Walks: Disease, Medicine and Canadian Plains Native people, 1880–1940 (University of Toronto Press, 2001); Maureen K. Lux, Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada, 1920s–1980s (University of Toronto Press, 2016); Mary-Ellen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900–50 (UBC press, 1998); Mary Jane McCallum, "This Last Frontier: Isolation and Aboriginal Health,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 22, no. 1 (2005): 103–120; James W. Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (University of Regina Press, 2013); Ian Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952,” Histoire sociale/Social history 46, no. 1 (2013): 145–172. [Return to Section]

²⁶ Tranter, Charles. 1942. Letter to P.E. Moore. 29 June. 1/1-16-2, 10243, T-7545, RG 10. Indian ²⁷ Moore, P.E. 1942. Letter to Doctor Tranter. 10 July. 1/1-16-2, 10243, T-7545, RG 10. Indian Affairs fonds. LAC. Affairs fonds. LAC.  [Return to Section]

²⁸ RCMP Report, 1952b. Statement by arresting officer [of Louis Sunchild]. 17 March. 1/1-16-2, 10243, T-7545, RG 10. Indian Affairs fonds. LAC; quoted from Dyck and Bradford, “Peyote on the Prairies,” 36. See Tyla Betke’s thesis, where she argues that after 1885 Little Bear’s people fled to the US and were then deported back to Canada. Some eventually stayed in Canda but most returned and chose to live in Rocky Boy and maintain connections to both sides of the border. Resultantly, it became a strategic trading site with strong family connections on either side of the US-Canada border. [Return to Section]

Daniels, Kelly, Reanna Daniels, and Erika Dyck. “The Peyote Road: Uncovering the History of a Sacred Journey .” In Psychedelic Intersections: 2025 Conference Anthology, edited by Jeffrey Breau and Paul Gillis-Smith. Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2026. © License: CC BY-NC. https://doi.org/10.70423/0004.05