PEYOTE: WHEN THE ANCIENT INDIAN WAY COLLIDES WITH A NEW AGE CRAZE

To Clifford Duncan, the buttons of the hallucinogenic peyote cactus he and
other American Indians eat and brew as tea are sacraments every bit as holy
as the bread and wine of the Christian Eucharist.

Indeed, tribal use of peyote as both a spiritual and medicinal aid predates
Jesus by millennia, with Indians from northern Mexico and southern Texas
believed to have ingested the cactus for the past 6,000 to 10,000 years.

That is why Duncan, the 67-year-old Northern Ute "head man" of the Native
American Church on eastern Utah's Uintah and Ouray Reservation, bristles
when he hears about non-Indians appropriating peyote as part of the latest
New Age craze. Duncan's group is one of several chapters of the church
operating independently in Utah.

"They are actually killing our ceremonial ways by doing that," said Duncan,
who proudly notes it was his great-great grandfather, Wich'cis, who first
introduced peyote to the Utes 100 years ago. "We as Indian people need to
recognize that this is a sort of cultural genocide."

Duncan points to one recent example: An Ogden man, Nick Stark, allegedly
charged $200 per person for peyote ceremonies attended mostly by
non-Indians. He was arrested July 8, with police confiscating 3,500 peyote
buttons and $11,000 in cash. Stark, who claims to be one-quarter Iroquois
and a medicine man, was charged with felony possession of peyote with
intent to distribute.

"It is easy to get a title, or to say, 'I am a medicine man,'" Duncan
countered. "But you have to walk the Peyote Way, and that walk began with
its earliest existence in an Indian tribe. . . . Peyote is our culture,
that of Indian people."

It is an ancient culture where humanity is seen as part of, but not master
of, a world that thrives only when its spiritual and material realms are in
balance. For thousands of years, Indians have pursued similar equilibrium
individually, using peyote and other naturally occurring hallucinogens as
gateways to enlightenment.

"I've always look at peyote as a way of life, tied in with the culture of
each tribe for generations and generations," Duncan said. "If people do not
have any background in a tribal culture, they are not really able to [use
peyote] with the same beliefs an Indian person has.

"The problem is with those who come aboard with the purpose of just taking
a drug. Peyote doesn't belong there," he added. "We understand that in a
way that goes back thousands of years."

Under federal law, peyote use is restricted to the Native American Church's
250,000 adherents, including approximately 2,000 in Utah. There also is a
requirement that participants prove, to the satisfaction of their
congregational leaders, that they have at least 25 percent American Indian
heritage. There is no procedure in place for federal monitoring of the
bloodline requirement.

But the issue of who can legally use peyote is clouded by state laws that
conflict with federal statutes. Some state laws are less restrictive;
others, including Utah's, ban use of peyote -- which statute equates with
heroin or LSD -- entirely and without exception.

In practice, however, prosecutors see state drug enforcement authority as
halting at the boundaries of Utah's Indian reservations, said Tracey Tabet,
deputy chief of staff for Utah Atty. Gen. Jan Graham.

"It could be argued that it is a matter of jurisdiction. Were the activity
to occur on a reservation [prosecutors] would have no jurisdiction," Tabet
said. "If it were to occur in a public park, the county attorney would have
the discretion to enforce state law."

Further complicating the picture: While the majority of the church's
members are from federally recognized tribes, some peyotists have broken
away, forming new groups that allow non-Indians into the fold.

That is the case with Stark, whose medicine-man credentials stem from his
membership in the Benjamin, Utah-based Oklevueha Earth Walks chapter of the
Native American Church, led by James Mooney.

Two years ago, Mooney, who claims Seminole ancestry, resigned from the
traditionalist A-Shii-Be-To chapter of the Native American Church in Salt
Lake City after a dispute over his Oklevueha Earth Walk church's inclusion
of non-Indians in peyote ceremonies. Mooney is not the only one advocating
wider use of peyote.

Matthew Kent of the Peyote Way Church of God near Klondyke, Ariz., is one
of those whites who claims to have found enlightenment in the cactus Duncan
and other American Indians hold so dear.

"I understand where they are coming from -- 400 years of racial
discrimination. Peyote is one of the few things left that connects them to
their past," Kent said. "But that's not my relationship to peyote. . . . We
are open to all races here."

Indeed, the church located on 160 acres in remote southeastern Arizona owes
its existence to an unlikely trio: Kent, a former Philadelphia rock 'n roll
musician; his wife, Anne Zapf, a zoologist and ex-Mormon; and Immanuel
Pardeahtan Trujillo, a half-Apache medicine man and Native American Church
dissident.

If the origins of the church's co-founders are eclectic, then so are the
sect's tenets. Peyote Way's Articles of Faith are an amalgam of The Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' "Word of Wisdom" restrictions (no
coffee, tea, alcohol or tobacco), tribal beliefs in peyote's spiritual and
healing properties, and insistence that the plant "is given by Mother Earth
for all people."

Kent and Zapf met at a band audition in Philadelphia and were married in
1976, meandering through the Southwest for their honeymoon. It was while
driving down a dirt track one day outside of Tucson that the couple found
their destiny.

"We came down this road and it dead-ended in Aravaipa Valley. It is a
pristine wilderness and we just fell in love with the area. A year later,
we came back here to live," Kent said. "That's when we were introduced to
peyote through the Rev. Trujillo."

Peyotists consider their experiences sacred and are reluctant to detail
them. Typically, though, nausea and vomiting follows ingestion of the
plant, then come what can be kaleidoscopic hallucinations, synesthesia
(sounds perceived as colors, visual data being "tasted", etc.), and an
overall sense of well-being and insight.

Kent and Zapf's first peyote-laced Spirit Walk convinced them to join
Trujillo in December 1977 in founding Peyote Way Church of God. Today, the
sect has 250 members who visit from across the United States and Europe for
their own three-to five-day Spirit Walks. Peyote is supplied from the
church's onsite 4,000-plant Peyote House.

While donations are accepted, it is from the sale of the church's trademark
Mana pottery and paintings that Kent, Zapf and their three children, along
with Trujillo, make a living.

Whether peyote or other sacred concoctions, use of mood- and mind-altering
plants and brews have gone hand-in-hand since the dawn of humankind, said
Robert Fuller, professor of Religious Studies at Bradley University in
Peoria, Ill., and author of Stairways to Heaven: Drugs in American
Religious History.

"Ancient Egyptian and other Mediterranean cultures used many intoxicating
substances for religious purposes," he said. "Wine for honoring gods,
including drinking to the point of ecstacy, probably is the root basis for
Judaism's and Christianity's use of wine as a sacred substance for worship,
communion.

"Almost all cultures have had tribal medicine men or women . . . who used
intoxicating substances to trigger their flights into the spirit world."

Ancient Greek mystery cults are thought to have used Kykeon, a psychedelic
drink of unknown composition. Cultic use of the Amanita muscaria mushroom
in Siberia is thought to go back more than 6,000 years, and historians have
found evidence of opiate use among Greeks and Sumerians as far back as
3,000 B.C.

Modern examples include not only peyote, but sacramental use of marijuana
in such faiths as the Rastafarian sect of Jamaica and the Ethiopian Zion
Coptic Church. In Central and South America, Ayahuasca -- a tea brewed from
the capi vine and other plants -- is favored by a number of shamanistic cults.

Fuller maintains that while peyotism has existed for thousands of years,
dating back to ancient Mexico's Aztecs (who called it "peyotl"), its
popularity with North American Indians is little more than a century old.

In the late 1800s, as tribes were forced onto reservations and endured
cultural dislocation, new religious movements arose to offer hope. A major
one was the Ghost Dance, a pan-Indian religion promising a miraculous end
to white domination.

The Ghost Dance movement grew especially strong among the Sioux before the
U.S. Army finally suppressed the movement with the Dec. 29, 1890, massacre
of 146 Sioux men, women and children at Wounded Knee, S.D.

But the Ghost Dance had prepared the way; peyote rites, spreading rapidly
north from the Mexican border, soon followed.

"The peyote cult flowed easily along the new channels of [intertribal]
friendship the Ghost Dance religion had opened up," Fuller said. "It was
Indian in origin, fitted to the Indian mode of thought."

More importantly, the sect did not threaten uneasy Indian agency officials.
Indeed, some peyotists even included Christian elements -- Bibles, prayers
to Jesus, etc. -- to further put white government inquirers at ease.

In 1918, the Native American Church was formally incorporated. Today, with
more than 80 chapters, it has members belonging to more than 70 tribes --
including Utah's Utes, Paiutes, Shoshone, Goshutes and Navajos.

According to Richard Crapo, a Utah State University anthropology professor,
non-Indians face a difficult, if not impossible, task trying to understand
Native Americans' reverence for their sacred hallucinogens.

At one extreme, he says, is a pervasive American penchant for substance
abuse, whether legal alcohol, tobacco and prescription drugs or illicit
narcotics. On the other end of the spectrum is the traditional peyotist,
who see the plant's purpose as sacramental, not recreational.

"By incorporating drugs into sacred rituals, religion essentially acts to
control drug abuse," Crapo said. "It is a controlled, ritual setting [with]
the elders, the older, more experienced and conservative members of a
society as leaders."

Duncan agrees it is the sense of the divine in a lowly, desert cactus that
keeps him walking the Peyote Way of his fathers, and teaching other Utes to
follow.

"The hallucinogenic properties are part of the plant and that is how it was
created," he said. "When an Indian person uses it ceremonially, it always
is the spirit that leads.

"Peyote is a gift given to the Indians, but its ways cannot be obtained
overnight. It has to be done with sincerity. It becomes part of your way of
life. One has to walk that walk."

For Duncan, the walk has taught him the ways of peace. You don't rob, steal
or murder; you revere life in all its forms. And if you are respectful of
peyote, it can be the gateway to the realm of the spirit, visions and guidance.

"Some call it Father. Some call it Brother, others Mother. To me, we cannot
give it a name. . . . God is neither man or woman, it is a supreme
intelligence," he said. "In my way, it is like an older person, one that leads.

Duncan sighed: "You have to know where you came from and where you are
going in life."