am going to set aside peyote and focus on ayahuasca here, because the issues around these are not the same.
The questions around “cultural appropriation” are important and central in North American Indian culture — I speak as a person of Native North American heritage myself, who has often been outraged — but the reasons for it are misunderstood.
The definition of cultural appropriation given in the article, “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission,” is a very Western definition and misses the point. (And permission from whom? There is no central body that can give such permission, so if you can find one indigenous person who gives you permission, is that enough?)
The real issue for traditional tribal peoples is that certain symbols and practices are crucial to their own cultural identity and cultural cohesion, and linked to deep meanings, which are not understood by those who take those symbols out of their context and put them onto T-shirts and cash in on them because they are cool. Taking these cultural elements out of their meaning, and, worse, selling them, cheapens and weakens these elements and weakens cultural identity and the culture itself. (Suppose the Star of David became a popular fashion statement for non-Jews? Suppose there were a fad for trendy restaurants to parody the Eucharist and say pretend prayers when they served you your wine and breadsticks?) Sacred things by definition are meant to be protected and treated with deep respect, and certainly not sold; the monetization of the sacred is deep blasphemy to North American Indians.
But what we know as “ayahuasca shamanism” today is not a culturally specific practice that maintains the cohesion or spiritual identity of a tribal community. There were culturally ayahuasca specific practices in the past, and some of these may survive even today in areas remote from the Rubber Boom and from the ayahuasca tourist zones. But most of these practices were lost during the Rubber Boom era, when indigenous communities and cultures in the western Amazon were shattered by enslavement and other tragedies. What survived was a detribalized practice that was carried by individuals and transmitted individual to individual — freely across ethnic lines, and even to mestizos (and, today, white people). Ayahuasca ceremonies and indigenous herbal practices were the only health care available, not only for the indigenous people but the mestizo rubber workers who replaced the Indian slaves in areas where they had died out. Ayahuasca shamanism, in the form we know it today, is an individual profession practiced by individuals as a business — even among indigenous people.
Articles like this that bring up the question of whether white people’s use of ayahuasca is cultural appropriation never quote indigenous Amazonian peoples as expressing this opinion. In fact, when it comes up, it is always in terms of “theft of intellectual property,” a very Western concept that sbegan to be adopted by indigenous people when their Western allies made them aware that foreigners were benefiting economically from their knowledge and that the indigenous people were receiving no benefit from it. The notion is rather abstract, though, because if indigenous people are supposed to receive royalties for their ancestral knowledge, just exactly who gets paid?
I have never heard an Amazonian indigenous person express the opinion that people of a different skin color should not be allowed to take ayahuasca or participate in ceremonies. These are not ceremonies of tribal identity, after all, but a health care profession practiced by individual practitioners for any client willing to pay them. In fact, once I was acting as a translator for a delegation of North American Indians, including some medicine elders, who were visiting indigenous communities in the Amazon. They asked the Amazonian yachaks if they were ever criticized for opening their ceremonies to white people, or if they thought white people should not be allowed to participate in their ceremonies. I was unable to translate this question in a way that made sense to the Amazonians. The assumptions behind the question were completely foreign to them.
What they do object to is the fact that so many people today are running ceremonies without the years of training that a proper shaman is supposed to have, which both cheapens their expertise and creates economic competition from practitioners they consider illegitimate. But that has nothing to do with skin color. Indians do it, mestizos do it, and white people do it, and it is equally objectionable regardless of skin color.
And consider. The “cultural appropriation” was done by mestizos long before white people became interested in ayahuasca. Until the Shipibos decided to cash in on ayahuasca tourism, nearly all foreigners were drinking with mestizos, not indigenous people. Mestizos have “appropriated” indigenous cultures since the turn of the twentieth century, as can be seen in the mestizo icaros that contain a mishmash of indigenous languages they don’t even speak. And, in fact, the Shipibos, the indigenous group that has become most identified with ayahuasca tourism, and other peoples of the Ucayali River basin took up the contemporary practice of ayahuasca shamanism only within the last hundred years.
And if you have enough money in your hand, you can go find almost any modern indigenous ayahuasca shaman and tell him, “Here’s the money, I want to apprentice.” He may question whether you are a suitable student, or he may figure that the money is qualification enough, but he won’t turn you down on the basis of your skin color. They took mestizo apprentices freely during the Rubber Boom, and they take white apprentices freely today.
Many indigenous practitioners do feel that non-indigenous practitioners are inferior to indigenous — at least in the northern parts of the ayahuasca shamanism region, where the practice we know as ayahuasca shamanism is ancient and precedes the Rubber Boom. But, on the other hand, having spent several years among indigenous shamans, I don’t think that they have any real idea of the kinds of psychic problems that people from modern industrialized culture have. So there’s a trade-off.
So the question of whether people with the wrong skin color should or should not drink ayahuasca is an absurd question that has nothing to do with the reality of Amazonian peoples. Their concern is more about the loss of traditional knowledge than the copying of traditional knowledge — that some people (of any skin color) don’t take traditional qualifications seriously and discard what they consider important.