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 authors
Fannie Kahan (1922–1978) was born in southern Saskatchewan. She was a journalist and the author of a number of books, including Brains and Bricks: The History of the Yorkton Psychiatric Centre (1965) and A Different Drummer: The History of the Saskatchewan Psychiatric Nurses’ Association (1973).
Erika Dyck is a historian of health, medicine, and Canadian society at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research has concentrated on the history of mental health, institutionalization, and experimentation.
“An extraordinary and unreservedly recommended study.”
Midwest Book Review
Other titles by Fannie Kahan
Other titles by Erika Dyck
The Acid Room
The Psychedelic Trials and Tribulations of Hollywood Hospital
LSD in the Land of Living Skies
Canada's Population Control in the 1970s
The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond
Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada
Reproduction, Sterilization, and the Politics of Choice
LSD on the Canadian Prairies