- May 13, 2017
Please join us for the Toronto launch of A Culture’s Catalyst.
When: Saturday, May 13, 3:00 p.m.
Where: Trinity St. Paul’s Center, 427 Bloor St. West (Toronto).
Cost: FREE
Featured guests are Erika Dyck and Meldon Kahan, discussing peyote’s role as a historical flashpoint for the struggle for Indigenous legal, political and religious rights, and peyote’s current potential for healing.
About the 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.
About the Speakers
Erika Dyck is Canada Research Chair in History of Medicine and a professor in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan. She is also the author of Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD on the Canadian Prairies. She edited A Culture’s Catalyst and wrote the introduction to it.
Meldon Kahan is medical director of Women’s College Hospital’s Substance Use Service and Associate Professor, Department of Family Medicine, University of Toronto. He is a leading authority on addiction medicine.
