From September 9 to 13, 2026, the first World Ayahuasca Forum took place at the Palau de Congressos in Girona, Catalonia. By the organizers' count, 1,800 people attended and 36 Indigenous peoples were present, from the Māori of Aotearoa to the Lakota of the United States, with UMIYAC, the Union of Yagecero Indigenous Doctors of the Colombian Amazon, among them. On the Indigenous side, the Forum was organized by the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute, founded by the Ashaninka leader Benki Piyãko, with Instituto Nixiwaka; on the European side, by ICEERS. 

Some 200 Indigenous representatives went to Europe to talk about the worlds these medicines come from: the peoples, territories, forests, rivers, spiritualities, and knowledge systems that have sustained them for generations, apart from which no ancestral medicine can be understood. 

Girona was a test of a paradigm shift: could peoples and institutions that do not share a cosmology build something together, over the long term, without one absorbing the other? Nobody came to Girona expecting consensus. But it did offer an opportunity for cosmic diplomacy, or a framework in which Indigenous, scientific, spiritual, and commercial stakeholders negotiate as equals, with no single world view setting the rules. Now, whether it becomes a durable method remains to be seen. 

Since 2017, Indigenous peoples have held the Indigenous Ayahuasca Conference in Acre, Brazil, and closed each edition with a public letter approved in plenary. Across the five letters, the peoples called for a body of Indigenous representation on ayahuasca, for free, prior and informed consent, and for direct standing before governments and courts. The fifth letter, approved in January 2025 by representatives of 34 peoples in the Yawanawá's Sacred Village, formally created the Council of Indigenous Spiritual Leaders and put the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute in charge of advancing its agenda between conferences. It also set a schedule: the Forum in Girona in 2026, followed in 2027 by the council's first meeting in Colombia and a sixth conference back in the Sacred Village.

The most common criticism arrived before the Forum began: why Spain, and to whose benefit? 

The decision was taken inside the Indigenous Conferences. Two reasons were given: to make it easier for Indigenous peoples to be heard in the Global North, by those most responsible for the political economy that weighs on ayahuasca, on Indigenous territories and on other biocultural relationships; and to travel the old colonial routes in the opposite direction. For decades that world has spoken about Indigenous peoples in rooms they were not in, and a process that wants to change how its power is exercised has to appear where it is exercised. Nêgo Bispo's word for this is counter-colonization, the defense of one's own ways of life, carried into the place where the terms are set. For leaders who live days from an airport, it was important for them to sit at the table where decisions about their medicines are made. 

The Forum was built over a year and a half by institutions rooted in different countries, languages, and cosmologies, with the program, the guest list, and the outcomes decided by consensus with Indigenous leaders. The method was intercultural dialogue, a term worth defining, since it is used loosely. Dialogue, as it was brought to Girona, is the placing of different perspectives on the same questions in one space, on the condition that the diversity of thought is respected and that the ancestral concepts of Indigenous peoples on medicine, territory, health, and spirit carry the same weight as those of people who usually place themselves above. The long talking circles the Indigenous delegations held in hotel lobbies after each day's sessions demonstrated how people can have differing opinions without needing to win. They listened, even if they didn’t agree or come to a consensus. After speaking with others came the internal dialogue allowing alliances to form  and strategies to unfold late into the night. The Forum functioned as a cosmic embassy of sorts rather than a typical conference.

An embassy is what worlds build when they do not share a law and intend to stay in relation anyway. But instead of the authority belonging to the state, it belongs toIndigenous assemblies, from the institutions they mandate, and from the letters. 

Cosmic diplomacy is a term we take from Ailton Krenak's description of Davi Kopenawa and from Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's anthropology: negotiation between worlds that intend to remain in relation without erasure; or learning to build relations between different worlds without one having to disappear for the other to exist. Dialogue is the method of the encounter; cosmic diplomacy is the architecture that keeps worlds in relation over time; confluence, Bispo's word for rivers that join without losing their sources, is what can emerge from that relation without fusion.

That diplomacy matters more the closer the worlds come to open conflict, and the week of the Forum showed how close that is. On the Friday the Forum opened, Eli Lilly completed its purchase of AtaiBeckley: 2.8 billion dollars in cash, up to 3.8 billion with milestone payments, for a pipeline led by an intranasal synthetic 5-MeO-DMT, a compound also secreted by the Sonoran Desert toad, and a buccal film of DMT, the compound found in chacruna leaf and jurema bark. On the Monday after it closed, the FDA held a public hearing on the future therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs outside Washington: 80 speakers offered testimony for two minutes each before a panel of federal agencies. 

Two months earlier, armed men had entered the Ashaninka village whose institute convened the Forum. Meanwhile, ayahuasca is increasingly cultivated commercially far beyond South America, including in Hawaii, an island state in the US — a country that never ratified the Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit-sharing international protocol on benefit sharing. Some of these commercial monocultures have become important hubs for the international supply of ayahuasca. The pharmaceutical industry and regulators set their timelines around molecules and markets, while Indigenous peoples set theirs through assemblies and consensus.  Cosmic diplomacy is the wager that the two can be brought into relation before one absorbs the other. 

The diplomacy in Girona reached beyond ayahuasca. It embraced the resistance of other peoples, the Lakota who keep the peyote and the Truká who keep the jurema, and to a future for the next generations beyond techno-nihilism, one in which standing forest, clean water, and healthy food sit on the global agenda of philanthropy. 

The first experiment was among Indigenous peoples themselves. Nations from South America, North America and Oceania sat in the same rooms and produced a common message about a planet in polycrisis. 

The second was between Indigenous knowledge systems and the institutions of academic science. Benki Piyãko described the forest as his people's university. In our view as participants, the claim that Indigenous science is science rests on three things it shares with all science: method, validation, and transmission. Indigenous cultivators distinguish many varieties of ayahuasca by effect, color, and growth where botany sees one species. Transmission runs through apprenticeship, dietary restriction and years of training, with songs as archive and manual. What differs is the method's relation to its object: one science isolates a variable to understand it; the other understands by staying in relation with medicine, territory, community and ancestry. The encounter was never a contest to decide which is superior. It was a chance for the field to evolve on one condition: that Indigenous sciences enter as sciences rather than as objects of science. Once they sat down together, there was room to discuss integration, economics and investment, mental health research, regulation and psychedelic-assisted therapy. Paul Stamets said it was “by far the most significant conference he has ever attended”. 

The third was between biocultures. Peyote, iboga, the sacred mushrooms, and jurema had their places in the program; Indigenous initiatives and protection funds had their place on the stage; and an existing bridge between these traditions, the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund, created in 2022, joined the movement. Girona was more than an ayahuasca gathering: a meeting of biocultures, and a rehearsal for a global coalition able to discuss plant medicines in all their dimensions from a standpoint that is not Europe's. We saw the traditions share a program; we did not yet see them negotiate as a bloc. 

The fourth was with political economy, and it produced the clearest shared commitment: wherever this knowledge travels, to universities, companies or clinics, there is an ethical responsibility to recognize the peoples who kept it alive. That commitment goes beyond benefit sharing and free, prior and informed consent for research. It means the co-production of knowledge and durable working partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous institutions. 

The Forum was also a place of controversy and difficulty, and money came first. Between 2011 and 2020, international funding for Indigenous and community land tenure and forest management averaged 270 million dollars a year, less than one percent of climate aid, and only 17 percent of it named an Indigenous organization. In the United States, large foundations direct 0.4 percent of their grants to Native communities and causes. Against that background, the difficulty of funding a forum co-led by Indigenous institutions is a symptom: the fundraising never finished, and the Forum came close to cancellation more than once. The medicine was not in the building: there were no ceremonies, by design, since carrying the brew across European borders would have exposed the delegations to legal risk; Edna Shanenawa told a Catalan daily she wished she could have brought it for the people she had seen at the airport. The logistics were considerable, and so was the culture shock between teams and institutions, which is intercultural dialogue tested in budgets, schedules and chains of command. 

Before the opening, UMIYAC explained in DoubleBlind why it was sending seven representatives and two human rights lawyers: yagé cannot be discussed apart from the rivers and forests that give it meaning, and the five nations in its union have been recognized by Colombia's Constitutional Court as at risk of physical and cultural extermination. Its spokesperson, Miguel Evanjuanoy of the Inga people, put it plainly: "There are enough doctoral dissertations and academic articles." 

Our reading of that position is that one of the field's central problems is relational, and that vulnerable people and communities are better served when healing is understood as a relationship rather than as the output of an individualized approach to health. What Girona suggests is that relationships can be built institutionally. 

A paradigm shift, if the phrase still means anything, is also a shift in who decides and who is included. In April 2026, a United States executive order on psychedelic drugs, ibogaine among them, mentioned no people and no plant; two months later, Colorado made benefit-sharing plans with Indigenous communities a condition for ibogaine research sites. In Girona, the decisions were taken by consensus with Indigenous leaders. Executive orders, treatments and regulations are not written by molecules in a vacuum; they are written inside webs of relations between people, nations, plants and territories, by whoever is in the room. Girona tested whether that arrangement can run an event of 1,800 people. Whether it can run an international field remains to be seen. 

If that is right, the method matters more than the event, and spaces of this kind can be built wherever decisions about these medicines are made: in conferences, ministries and ethics committees, in companies developing products from compounds and practices with much longer cultural histories, and where philanthropy decides what gets funded. What the Indigenous letters ask for, and what Girona practiced, is participation on terms the leaders help set, with consequences: voices that change decisions, and a share in deciding about what, as one of us puts it, historically also belongs to them. It also means trusting Indigenous voices with the co-production of events, the moderation of panels and the curation of speakers. 

Bispo taught that movement does not have to be linear. It can be beginning, middle, beginning. The Forum did not end. It entered another beginning, and the calendar is written, with future editions to be hosted by UMIYAC, by the Ashaninka of Apiwtxa and by the Shanenawa. 

We left Girona with the sense that something had shifted, and with a caution. Dialogue is not consensus, and difference is not a problem to be solved. Friction, discomfort, and what resists translation are part of the encounter. Not every system of knowledge needs to be rendered into a common language in order to enter into relation.

True alliances do not stay on the plane of ideas. The test of cosmic diplomacy is whether, long after everyone has gone home, the relationships built in Girona keep moving resources, legal defense and political protection toward the territories; whether the next generation there inherits the knowledge; and whether intercultural dialogue can also produce intercultural science, and models of health able to go beyond the twentieth-century biomedical model in method, and not only in molecule. In July, armed men entered Apiwtxa, the village of the family whose institute convened the Forum and the home of one of the authors of this text. A forum in Europe protects no hectare of forest by itself, and neither does a psychedelic conference.
The measure of what it sets in motion is whether the relationships forged there continue to move knowledge, resources, protection, and decision-making power across worlds once the gathering itself has ended.

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