Native American Church

Um, you know, not only did he have the, the degre- the college degree and training for it, but he also, you know, David Hamblin is a self-proclaimed shaman and says that he, he knows that and has a connection to God, um, that, uh, that the rest of us don't have.

I've been working as a shaman for many years, and I studied with, uh, uh, the, uh, master shaman from, uh, Huichol people, H-U-I-C-H-O-L, uh, Mexico, a Native American shaman, and also with the Lakota, who gave us a Native American church altar and included us under the umbrella of the South Dakota Native American Church.

This was a wonderful teacher who's now passed over.

May his memory be blessed.

But there was an awful lot of, uh, illicit, um, drug use going on in Eldon's garage.

So it's something that I know that, um, they, they say is a, they used only as a sacrament and during ceremony, but I, I saw them use it many other times as well.

And during that time, um, when it felt like all was lost, I was, uh, invited to a Native American church peyote sacrament meeting.

And it was a revelation to me, and I'll tell you that peyote is a sacred herb and s- saved my life really, and it, it gave me the power to go on despite my mistakes, and they are mistakes and worse than mistakes.

You know, most indigenous ceremonial practices are not with medicine.

There are, you know, the peyote users with the Native American Church and a few other organizations.

And, you know, it's honestly a very... complicated and touchy, difficult subject as well in terms of access.

There's a lot of Native Americans that believe that they want to keep it for their tribal practices because peyote is so slow growing and access to the peyote gardens and where it naturally grows in Texas and Mexico, it's been overharvested and So some of those traditional communities are not welcome to non-natives.

He learns how to farm in the European manner and stuff like that.

Um, and becomes the founder of, of the first Native American church.

He's really big on peyote.

He's like, "Peyote ceremony has to be involved in, you know, i- in, in, in, in the worship of Jesus." And, and he has this kind of like, he has this really interesting quote where he says, you know, "The white man goes into church and they talk about Jesus, but, you know, the Comanche goes into church and we talk to Jesus [laughs] via peyote." [laughs]

Big peyote

...

the Native American Church, and he, um, he's able to, like, get peyote legalized for religious purposes.

Becomes like-

Yes, absolutely.

I love that you mentioned the Native American church and the connection to peyote.

And that's become such a pan-native offering also, which is, I think, a really exciting piece to research.

And it also produced some wonderful visual art.

Always.

Renee Fisher, an African Ancestry Ministry and Evangelization Network and Native American Church administrative assistant, encouraged those present to embrace the whole world that surrounds them.

Also treating traditions with reverence and remaining attuned, for example, to both the church and indigenous peoples.

The idea that one should treat a pagan native tradition with reverence is contrary to Catholic faith, since the honor and worship of false idols in pagan religions is an offense to God.

We have Quanah Parker: Between Two Worlds.

Yeah, and today we're gonna talk about Quanah Parker, but we're also gonna talk about how reservations came to be, and then assimilation and what that looked like, and why peyote played a role in having religious freedom for the Native American church.

Can't wait.

So what happens when an entire way of life is deliberately dismantled, and one man has to decide whether to fight the system from the outside or survive by working within it? Quanah Parker was born into the Comanche world, became a powerful world leader, and eventually surrendered to the reservation system after the Red River War, but his story didn't end there.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

Yeah, and he actually did not get to witness the formal incorporation of the Native American Church, which was formally incorporated on October 10th, 1918, which we talked about on Monday.

Mm-hmm.

So throughout this time and during colonization, the government often attempted to suppress indigenous religious practices in general, not just peyote use practices.

The Native American church started to emerge in the late 1800s and became a formal organization in 1918.

Now, the church incorporated peyote as a sacrament, and this allowed the existing tradition of using peyote ceremoniously to become institutionally organized.

So they've been using peyote forever.

But the ability to say, oh, I belong to the Native American church gives them the protection

that they need or some protection.

Not enough.

And we're talking about 1978 because that is when the American Indian Religious Freedom Act came to be.

Among the Huichol people specifically, ceremony centers on Tatarari, the sacred fire, around which participants gather to consume peyote buttons, while a marakame, a trained shaman singer, chants through the entire night, understood as opening nierikas, interdimensional portals connecting participants to ancestral and spirit presences.

This differs in real structure from ceremony within the Native American church itself, which developed its own distinct format, typically held inside a teepee through the night, led by a designated roadman guiding the ceremony's course, with a fireman tending a central sacred fire and a cedar woman or water woman bringing water at dawn to close the ceremony.

Drumming and prayer songs carry participants through until sunrise.

I find it interesting that this ceremony also includes water as we've explored water in the beginning of season two and the thresholds that people understand are being crossed in many cultures using water.

Peyote's legal history in the United States is worth knowing directly.

since it's genuinely unique among every substance in this episode.

The 1994 amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act specifically exempted peyote from federal prohibition when used in bona fide religious ceremonies by the Native American church, meaning its legal, protected use in the United States exists specifically and only within that religious and cultural context.

not as a broader legal allowance.

For centuries, indigenous people in what's now Mexico and the southwestern United States used peyote in their traditional medicine and ceremonies.

By the end of the 19th century, dozens of Great Plains tribes had adopted peyote into their own traditional practices, and a movement called the Native American Church formed around an ethic of kinship and taking peyote as a sacrament.

But federal and state governments, churches, and even some tribal groups didn't consider peyote ceremonies religious.

Decades of legal battles ensued, and it wasn't until 1994, with an amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, that previous laws were overruled, granting legal protection to native peoples' ceremonial use of peyote.