Ayahuasca has long departed its native home in the Amazon, making its way to corners far and wide. From candlelit lofts in big cities to boutique retreats in travel destinations and research labs at institutions across the globe, the sacred medicine continues to stir the global imagination for its capacity to catalyze healing and transformation. However, unleashing this ancestral brew onto the world has subjected  it — and the cultures that steward it —  to countless extractive practices including commercialization, ecological destruction, cultural appropriation, and biopiracy.

The upcoming World Ayahuasca Forum, taking place in Girona, Spain, from September 11-13, plans to address some of these issues. The event grew out of an unprecedented alliance between three groups: the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute, chaired by Ashaninka leader Benki Piyãko; the Nixiwaka Institute, chaired by Yawanawa leader Biraci Nixiwaka Brasil Yawanawa; and the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service (ICEERS). Together, they aim to foster dialogue and action between Indigenous knowledge holders, Western scientists, and civil society to defend ancestral knowledge and forge a new chapter for the ayahuasca community. Critically, it is the first event of its kind to be organized in partnership with Indigenous peoples from the very beginning, with over 100 Indigenous leaders from more than 30 different cultures planning to attend.

DoubleBlind speaks with Aili Pyhälä, co-organizer of the World Ayahuasca Forum and representative from ICEERS, and Jairo Lima of the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute (IYT), about the event’s history, the decade-long dialogue between Indigenous communities that preceded it, the ethics of ayahuasca's globalization, and what a genuine “alliance” between Western and Indigenous worldviews requires.

*This conversation was edited for clarity and brevity.

Aili Pyhälä: The Forum is a convergence of two parallel movements: the World Ayahuasca Conferences previously held by ICEERS, and the Indigenous Ayahuasca Conferences held in the Amazon.

The first AyaConference was held in 2014 in Ibiza (from where ayahuasca made its way into Europe decades ago) to address the harms of ayahuasca’s rapidly growing globalization, from detentions and arrests to misuse and malpractice, but it had very little Indigenous representation. ICEERS received requests to bring this international debate to Rio Branco, Acre, Brazil in 2016, Rio Branco being the birthplace of the ayahuasca religions and the closest city to many Indigenous nations. This second conference prompted Indigenous leaders to come together and start organizing amongst themselves, setting in motion what would become the Indigenous Ayahuasca Conferences, organized by and for Indigenous people, with a handful of invited allies.

ICEERS held one final AyaConference in Girona in 2019, and thereafter chose to pause, so as not to draw momentum away from the Indigenous conferences. In that time, they focused on building trust and stronger relationships with Indigenous leaders, a process that eventually ripened into readiness to join forces. At the last Indigenous Ayahuasca Conference in January 2025, Indigenous leadership announced the call to enter dialogue with the Western world, inviting ICEERS to co-organize an event together. The forum in Girona is a historic, first gathering of its kind — not a conference, but a convergence of ways of knowing.

Jairo Lima: This Indigenous movement emerged and took shape as part of a process that was already underway, and which found in that space a way to strengthen and express itself. Over 10 years and five editions, we practiced speaking among ourselves, listening to one another, and building — from the voices of the elders in the communities — the paths we wanted to follow. Indigenous peoples understood that before expanding outward, it was important to first strengthen that internal dialogue.

Over the years, there were also attempts by ICEERS to reach out, but as the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute, we understood that the moment had not yet come. At the fifth Indigenous Ayahuasca Conference, we received a letter from ICEERS acknowledging that the first conference had not placed Indigenous peoples in the position of leadership that rightfully belonged to them, and expressing a desire to do things differently.

We received that acknowledgment and opened space for a new dialogue. What we're building now, we don't want to simply define as a partnership. It's a process of coming closer, of listening, and of weaving intercultural dialogues, in which different forms of knowledge and organization can meet with respect and responsibility. This Forum is a step along that path. And from this dialogue, we hope that new forms of collaboration may emerge in the future — ones that respect the autonomy, voice, and leadership of Indigenous peoples.

JL: This is a difficult question to answer, because we have no way of controlling how people receive the information. What we do know is that, generally, when Indigenous people share information about their medicines, non-Indigenous people aren't always prepared or open to receiving it. This requires them to observe and reflect on the relationship they themselves have built with these medicines — often on foundations that aren't traditional which can create discomfort.

The words spoken at the Forum won’t always be the most welcoming, but they can be transformative for those who are open to receiving what we have that is most precious to share: our spirituality and our traditions.

If there's one expectation, it’s that people first open themselves to attentive listening, and that they be prepared not only to do new things, but also to stop doing some of the things they’ve been doing — and to act with awareness. We often see actions carried out with good intentions but extremely disconnected from reality, which can make them harmful, create more division, and widen the gaps between us, when the whole idea here is to build bridges.

We hope people are ready to learn many things, but also to unlearn what they've learned — often far from the territories — about these medicines, and to understand the way Indigenous peoples relate to them. This doesn't legitimize non-Indigenous people inventing their own ways of relating to traditional Indigenous medicines. These medicines belong to Indigenous peoples — not in the sense of private property, but by ancestral right — and they demand respect.

AP: What we really hope for is for people to come away with a sense of humility as well as coming to take ayahuasca use much more seriously. We encourage people to question their use, practices, and choices around working with the medicine, acknowledging that who and where they sit with ayahuasca is a matter of responsibility, ethics, and safety. Ayahuasca is not necessarily healing in and of itself, and the qualifications and integrity of the person serving it, the intentions they hold, and the wider biocultural context in which use is situated are of just as much — if not more — importance.

People must realize how important it is, if we're going to work with ayahuasca or other Indigenous medicine, to respect the mastery required to work with them — knowledge that's extremely hard to obtain, that takes decades of discipline and deep study to acquire. We hope people come away more respectful, open-minded and curious, and above all, understanding that we cannot continue using ayahuasca in the extractive way it's currently being used — as if we have the right to simply take and keep using it without giving back, without helping secure Indigenous territories, peoples, communities, knowledge systems, and rights. We have to start making this process reciprocal, not just another form of extraction.

JL: We are entering a new time, born of humanity’s need for unity, so that together we can move out of the chaotic situation we find ourselves in — socially, economically, and above all environmentally. It is a time for an alliance to build a new world, a new way of being in life, one that values the spirit that governs everything that exists: the tasorentsi spirit — the spirit of the earth itself.

Indigenous peoples have much to contribute to this process because, even having lived through colonialism, they still carry their ancestry, their traditional knowledge, and their intimate connection to that spirit of the earth. It is this ancestry that gives strength and brings forth material and spiritual worldviews different from those of the West. And we believe that today, it's not enough just to preserve; we also need to regenerate what has already been lost. Indigenous initiatives caring for the forest show that this is possible.

We see this alliance as necessary for our own survival and for buen vivir — living well — on this planet, but all of this must be done with calm, respect, and ethics. Alliances aren't built overnight. Relations among Indigenous peoples themselves are also marked by different kinds of violence, and no amount of care is too much given the fragility that still exists in this kind of process. That's why it's so important that this be a process the Forum proposes to begin. That doesn't mean the alliance is already established, nor that it will necessarily continue. What will determine our own attitudes toward everything that is seen and heard at the Forum — and above all, what is done thereafter.

AP: Rather than seeing Indigenous peoples as subjects of development aid, or as objects of charity for well-meaning philanthropists, we need to start forming right relationship with Indigenous peoples — working with them as equal partners. And the question is: what does genuine partnership actually look like? We don't have many examples of that in the world. Even when well-intentioned, it often continues to manifest the same patterns we’ve seen in colonial systems.

Rather than trying to homogenize others — bringing them into our knowledge systems — how can we come together genuinely valuing our differences, and seeing those differences as the gifts we each bring to the table?  In a time when we are racing to build artificial intelligence, can we also learn to recognize the vital importance of Ancestral Intelligence? In many ways, Indigenous  technologies are far more sophisticated than our own. The question is how we can work together to address the pressing, critical questions of our time — questions that concern our shared humanity, Indigenous or not. And this does not come without complex relational, cultural, structural, and ontological challenges.

JL: There have been many challenges, but that doesn’t mean something is going wrong. Any tension we experienced during this year of planning is, in truth, part of the attempt to weave these intercultural dialogues. The Forum’s very premise was set from the first moment we decided to hold the gathering together with a Western organization. We always knew the challenges would be significant, and we encountered many of them along the way — but we recognize them as part of the process.

For a long time, Indigenous peoples have left the forest to speak at events, but today they are no longer merely the guests at these gatherings. At the WAF, they are protagonists and take part in the governance and decision-making. And that changes everything, because these are meetings of worlds, cosmologies, and cosmogonies.

JL: These themes will be discussed together, because the very idea of the Forum is precisely to collectively create the next steps for protecting sacred plants, territories, and Indigenous cultures. At the same time, we will keep having our internal conversations. Next year we'll have the next Indigenous Ayahuasca Conference. Those internal dialogues won't stop happening, because they concern what belongs to these peoples, and they understand what runs through them ancestrally.

A good future can only be built from good actions in the present. The Forum is one of those good actions. The outlook is positive, because if it weren't, holding the Forum wouldn't make sense. As for the next steps, we'll wait to build those together, in this new time of alliance.

AP: Through this gathering, we hope to begin the complex work of bridging Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing, which is an unfolding process. This event, many years in the making, we hope will help build alliances. We need cross-cultural conversations and partnership not just around ethical plant medicine stewardship, but to address all the pressing issues humanity faces on our shared planet; coming at these questions from different perspectives adds richness that a single, limited lens can’t. 

 As we speak, Indigenous territories are being invaded by narco traffickers and extractivists, their lives threatened. We need to address these and other urgent issues, and meanwhile, alliance means moving at the speed of trust. It means respecting Indigenous rights and governance, and entering a relationship with care, patience, humility, and responsibility.

ICEERS is a nonprofit working at the intersection of research, harm reduction, and policy around ayahuasca and other traditional psychoactive plants. It supports defense programs in the field, offering scientific and legal support to people prosecuted for engaging in ancestral plant practices.

The Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute is an Indigenous-led organization based in the Brazilian Amazon, founded and led by Benki Piyãko, an Asháninka political and spiritual leader who has spent over 30 years helping Indigenous communities across the Amazon reclaim their cultural heritage and strength. The Institute integrates traditional knowledge with modern techniques to regenerate the rainforest and safeguard Indigenous wisdom.

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