Psychedelics & Native American Heritage Month

Featuring Sutton King in conversation with Bia Labate

Wednesday, November 25th from 12-1:30pm PST

Demonization of psychedelics is connected to a long history of the colonization and oppression of Native cultures. Powerful tactics used by systemic structures of colonization is to strip away the cultural influences from the medical benefits of psychedelics, which has influenced our misunderstanding of them today. After hundreds of years, modern society is just beginning to reevaluate the stigmas taught about psychedelics, where, and who they come from. Join Sutton King, MPH Indigenous health advocate, researcher, and social entrepreneur on a dialogue with Dr. Bia Labate, Chacruna’s Executive Director, for an enlightened dialogue on psychedelics and Native American Heritage Month. Co-Founder of both the Urban Indigenous Collective and Shocktalk, she will share what “Native American Heritage Month” means, and discuss the reeducation that is needed to decolonize our societal thinking, the healthcare system, its data, and why Native voices have been silenced in the healthcare and science industry. Stewarding plant medicine in a good way is reliant on Indigenous communities and we should seek to consult, co-create with Indigenous peoples and dismantle the current colonial structures.

Sutton King, MPH, Afro-Indigenous of the Menominee and Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. She is an Indigenous Health Advocate, Researcher and Social Entrepreneur dedicated to developing and scaling innovative solutions to improve Indigenous health equity across sectors. Her focuses center decolonial approaches and culturally appropriate methodologies within technology, healthcare and business. She supports research to increase the visibility surrounding Indigenous health outcomes and access to mental health care for Urban Natives through her roles as President and Executive Director of the Urban Indigenous Collective a grassroots organization dedicated the health and wellbeing of Urban Natives and Co-Founder of ShockTalk a telebehavioral application connecting Native users to Native therapists. She is the Chief Impact Officer for Journey Colab, a biotech company decolonizing their approach to drug development. In her role as Chief Impact Officer for Journey Colab she supports the design and implementation of a stakeholder model and ensures social impact through company accountability.

Dr. Beatriz Caiuby Labate (Bia Labate) is a queer Brazilian anthropologist. She has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. Her main areas of interest are the study of plant medicines, drug policy, shamanism, ritual, and religion. She is Executive Director of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines (https://chacruna.net). She is Adjunct Faculty at the East-West Psychology Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco. She is also Public Education and Culture Specialist at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). She is co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Group for Psychoactive Studies (NEIP) in Brazil, and editor of NEIP’s website (http://www.neip.info), as well as editor of the Mexican blog Chacruna Latinoamérica (http://drogaspoliticacultura.net). She is author, co-author, and co-editor of twenty-one books, two special-edition journals, and several peer-reviewed articles (http://bialabate.net).

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