Native American Church

The characteristic service of the Native American Church is an all-night prayer meeting, usually held in a tipi erected for the purpose, from about sundown to about sunrise. It is led by a roadman, assisted by a drummer, a cedarman and a fireman, and it is normally called for a specific reason: an illness, a birthday, a funeral, a departure for military service, thanks for a recovery.

An altar of earth is built on the floor, crescent shaped in the Half Moon way, and a fire is kept burning through the night by the fireman, who tends its shape as carefully as anyone tends anything in the meeting. Peyote, taken dried, ground or as a tea, is passed and consumed through the night. A staff, gourd rattle, water drum and feather fan pass around the circle with it; each participant in turn sings four songs while the person beside them drums. Cedar is placed on the fire and prayers are made into the smoke. Water is brought in at midnight and again at dawn, and a ritual breakfast of corn, meat, fruit and water follows in the morning.

Peyote is addressed as a medicine and a sacrament, not as an intoxicant, and members are generally firm on the distinction. It is taken in a fixed ritual setting, under a leader, for a stated purpose, with prayer, and it is not taken outside meetings. The mescaline it contains produces effects that outsiders describe pharmacologically and participants describe as the medicine teaching, healing, or showing something. Members also report that it is intensely bitter, often causes vomiting, and is not a pleasant experience.

The moral teaching attached to it is conservative and is usually summarised as the Peyote Road: sobriety, particularly abstention from alcohol, care for family, honest work and truthfulness. The church has a long record of treating alcohol dependence, and this is one of the clearest reasons for its spread.

Peyote, Lophophora williamsii, is a small spineless cactus of south Texas and northern Mexico containing mescaline. Its ceremonial use in that region is ancient: specimens from the Shumla caves on the Rio Grande, tested and found to contain mescaline, have been radiocarbon dated to around 3700 BCE. Its use in the modern all-night meeting north of the Rio Grande is much younger, from the 1870s onward.

Opposition was immediate and continuous. Indian agents, missionaries and later temperance organisations sought prohibition from Congress repeatedly from the 1880s; bills failed, but states passed their own bans and agents suppressed meetings administratively. Incorporation was the defensive answer: the church was chartered in Oklahoma on 10 October 1918 to place peyote inside a recognised church, where the free exercise clause might reach it.

Federal drug law classified peyote in Schedule I in 1970, with a regulatory exemption for Native American Church use. The constitutional question reached the Supreme Court in Employment Division v. Smith in 1990, in a case about unemployment benefits denied to two drug counsellors, one a church member, dismissed for taking peyote at a ceremony. The Court held that a neutral, generally applicable criminal law does not violate free exercise merely by burdening a religious practice. The decision was a defeat for the church and, because it lowered the standard for everyone, alarmed religious groups across the country.

Congress responded twice. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 restored a stricter test generally. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994, Public Law 103-344, signed on 6 October, addressed peyote directly: the use, possession and transportation of peyote by an Indian for bona fide traditional ceremonial purposes in connection with the practice of a traditional Indian religion is lawful and may not be prohibited by the United States or by any state. Agencies may set limits for safety-sensitive posts only after consulting traditional religious representatives.

The protection is therefore statutory rather than constitutional, and is drawn in terms of Indian identity and bona fide ceremonial use. Groups outside that definition claiming peyote as a sacrament are on markedly weaker ground, and courts have generally said so.

The Native American Church is not a single body with a central authority. The Half Moon way, associated with Quanah Parker, uses a crescent altar, keeps Christian reference light, and does not use the Bible in the meeting. The Cross Fire way, developed by the Caddo roadman John Wilson from about 1880, is explicitly Christian, uses the Bible, and adds a cross to the altar. Both are Native American Church, and members move between them. Beyond those there are Native American Church of North America, Native American Church of Navajoland, and numerous independently incorporated bodies; a charter is not evidence of affiliation with any other.

The Christian element is real and is not decoration. Many members describe peyote as the means by which God, or the Creator, is approached directly, and some as the sacrament given to Indian people as communion was given to others. Others are less interested in the Christian framing. The church has never resolved this and does not appear to need to.

Adoption was not universal or uncontested. Traditionalists in several nations regarded peyotism as foreign, and some tribal governments banned it. The Navajo Tribal Council prohibited peyote in 1940, describing it as unconnected with traditional Dine practice, and a federal appeals court upheld the tribe as sovereign in the matter in 1959. The Council reversed itself in 1967, adopting a bill of rights guaranteeing freedom of religion and exempting ceremonial peyote from the criminal code. The Navajo Nation now holds one of the largest concentrations of members.

The current pressure is botanical. Peyote grows slowly, takes years to reach harvestable size, and is legally supplied in the United States only through a small number of licensed harvesters, peyoteros, in south Texas. Wild populations there have declined by roughly 30 percent in twenty years under land conversion, improper root-cutting, and demand, while the number of licensed distributors has fallen and prices have risen. Church organisations have responded by buying habitat in Texas and by opposing broad psychedelic decriminalisation campaigns that would include peyote, on the grounds that wider legal demand would finish off a supply already failing the people whose sacrament it is.