When Michael Pollan wrote in How To Change Your Mind that psychedelic underground facilitators “operated as professionals working from a body of accumulated knowledge and experience…” he was speaking from dangerous naivety. His brief, largely positive, experience with the psychedelic underground was nothing like mine. My experience was more like American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda, a new biography about the controversial Peruvian-American writer, by Ru Marshall. 

Castaneda’s books, the first of which was called The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge published in 1968, sold millions of copies despite the fact that don Juan wasn’t real. University of California press at first cast the book series as groundbreaking works of cultural anthropology and Native American studies, only recently recategorizing them. Castaneda’s books remain popular around the world, but especially in the psychedelic underground — my own father has sent me two copies of The Teachings — and many people working in psychedelics today seem to be repeating the Castaneda paradigm: claiming an Indigenous lineage to feign authenticity and dodge accountability.

We’ve all seen the popular and profitable psychedelic renaissance grift: Brand your practices or facilitators as Indigenous, then let that lineage justify whatever subsequent exploitive, inappropriate, and/or dangerous behavior occurs. It often appears when there are few or no Indigenous people around. I experienced this phenomenon during four years actively engaged in the underground, and it continues to be a documented issue within the psychedelic movement, such as when researchers debunked the conveniently accepted idea that milking Sonoran Desert toads to smoke their venom has an Indigenous origin, when, in fact, it first occurred in the early ‘80s, according to the journal Psychedelics. 

Still, psychonaut bros continue to argue that they are in “right relationship” with their “toad relatives” on the internet, despite harming these animals and hiding behind a fabricated pretext of Indigineity — all in the name of enlightenment. Meanwhile, scholars who speak out about this kind of grift are blacklisted and accused of undermining the psychedelic movement’s supposed altruistic goals. But the Indigenous lineage grift is not a new cultural phenomenon. Carlos Castaneda minted it in the 1960s, according to Ru Marshall’s new biography, and it padded him with status and money, similar to how some underground facilitators are exploiting the current psychedelic resurgence.  

Too much of American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda sounded eerily familiar to my experience in the psychedelic underground. By the end of it, I was convinced my psychedelics teacher, a famous underground guide in L.A., copied Castaneda, walking the path of appropriating Indigenous identity forged by the writer back in the 1960s. 

As Marshall, Castaneda’s biographer, warns: “We believe stories that fit narratives to which we already subscribe.”

Guilty as charged. For most of my time in the psychedelic underground, I wasn’t even aware of the narratives to which I had subscribed. Unraveling them has been the most painful project of my life. As I observe the increasing commercialization of psychedelics and the continued commodification of Indigenous identity in the renaissance, I’ve decided it’s time to speak up. To be clear: I am white. I have no genetic testing results that show I’m Indigenous. I grew up white in Montana, a state where 6% of the population is Native American, and where intense racism is directed at Native Americans in multiple forms: In rural areas many people are openly racist, including members of my immediate family; structural racism is ever-present in institutions like schools and health care; and in the more liberal enclaves filling with Taylor Sheridan’s transplants, it wears a friendlier face: appropriation —  the soulless, extractive practices and businesses also rife in the psychedelic renaissance. It’s the white–guy-with-a-sweat-lodge phenomenon. 

From 2016 to 2021 I was part of a big underground psychedelic therapy network run by a L.A.-based guide whose adherents claim he and their practices are of Peruvian Indigenous descent. But my teacher and his facilitators — who are mostly affluent white women — elided questions about his “sacraments,” his inappropriate relationships with women from his groups, and his origins. The women who introduced me to the group said we were engaging in Indigenous plant medicine and suggested my teacher was more authentic than others in the underground because he was Peruvian and believed to be Indigenous. I asked him about his origins on several occasions, but he always avoided the questions, just like he omitted answering what exactly was in the little white pills he gave members of his groups. 

American Trickster shows how Carlos Castaneda invented the idea of a shaman for a white American audience in the 1960s, even though don Juan, the Yaqui elder who was his main source, never existed and much of the alleged Indigenous knowledge from his books is false. For example, R. Gordon Wasson — the American banker and amateur mycologist who put Maria Sabina, a Mazatec curandera, and her culture’s psilocybin mushroom ceremonies on blast to the mainstream — pointed out that Castaneda’s descriptions of smoking psychoactive mushrooms using a pipe seemed fabricated. He asked Castaneda to send him a sample of don Juan’s mushrooms and, although Castenada promised he would send some for testing, he never did. In fact, American Trickster points out that the psychedelic use described in Castaneda’s books appears to have come from published research papers of other anthropologists, not an Indigenous elder. 

It’s hard to say how much of my teacher’s mimicry of Castaneda was intentional and how much was playing to the expectations of his audience. He expressed ambivalence about the role he played, sometimes telling people not to call him a shaman, and other times decrying his (largely) white, affluent audience’s inability to understand him. He said he refused to do the “smudge and feather thing” — seemingly refusing to perform Indigeneity — but everyone around him gave him credibility for it anyway.

The similarities between my teacher and Carlos Castaneda were many. My teacher told tall tales about himself, including that he had a photographic memory, that he once played — and won — a dozen simultaneous chess games, that he could make any plant psychedelic. Castaneda said he had worked for the CIA, had been stabbed in the abdomen during a dangerous mission, and that he played jazz trumpet in New York. Castaneda surrounded himself with tall blond women who had connections to rich and famous people. My teacher also preferred beautiful white women, especially actresses and heiresses. No one ever saw Castaneda using psychedelics. It was the same with my teacher, who said he couldn’t use his own sacraments because of his health problems.

When I went to L.A. in February of 2020 to drink Ayahuasca and check out working for my former teacher, I encountered a troubling, off-putting scene. He said he would pick me up from my hotel for dinner and then showed up with a young bleach-blond Russian woman in fishnet tights. He took us to True Food Kitchen, acting as if everything was normal, but I was confused because I had never met her or heard of her. He said he wanted to hire the other woman to coordinate his Russian groups and be his assistant. He said wanted to hire me to write a book about him.

But that wasn’t the weirdest part of my almost-employment for an underground psychedelic group. The next day when my former teacher picked me up and took me to his house for a company meeting, I noticed a woman parked outside in an expensive car who was glassing us with binoculars. He said she was a former client who had a psychotic break during a psychedelic journey and now believed she needed to protect him from evil energies by surveilling his house. My former teacher’s facilitators and people in his groups excused these types of situations because crazy things were believed to happen around psychedelic prophets. A former friend put it differently: Crazy stuff happened around him because he was a drug dealer for the rich and famous. 

During the company meeting they talked about monetizing facilitator training, what to do about the woman parked outside, and issues with groups that had gotten too wild and were too much like parties. Everyone seemed to be jockeying for proximity.

Even weirder than the meeting was the scene at the Ayahuasca journey my teacher drove me to a few hours later at a temple in Pasadena. When we got out of his SUV, a crowd of people greeted him as though he was a celebrity, including the young Russian woman from dinner the night before. Inside the ashram, a facilitator came up to me and demanded to know everything I knew about the Russian woman: whether my teacher had spent the night with her, whether they had been alone together, and what promises he had made to her. I repeated what my teacher had told me: that she needed a green card and that he wanted to help her and was considering marrying her so she could stay in the United States. The exasperated facilitator said, “I wish he would upgrade this part of his life.” One of the most troubling aspects of my experience in the psychedelic underground was the behavior of the women around my former teacher, who covered up his unethical practices and competed to maintain proximity to him.

In the end, I credit Ayahuasca with breaking the spell. During the 3-night ceremony, I saw visions of my maternal grandmother, then in her 90s, nearly blind, and living in a border town on Montana’s Hi-Line near where her family homesteaded in the early 1900s. I am a 5^th generation Montanan who has never wanted to live in L.A. And Ayahuasca made it very clear, as if it was screaming from inside me: I had to go north, to Box Elder, Montana, a place so far on the periphery that the psychedelic renaissance couldn’t reach me.

So, instead of accepting his job offers, in 2020, I elected to move to a Native American reservation on Montana’s Hi-Line to teach English and be near my grandmother when she passed. She died in a nursing home in 2021. Living on the reservation caused me to wake up to the hypocrisies in the psychedelic renaissance. In 2021, the cognitive dissonance overwhelmed me, and I cut ties with my teacher and his network. 

The years that followed leaving the psychedelic underground were a low point of my life — I think of them as a trip through my personal psychic underworld. I quit my teaching job because I felt like a hypocrite in front of my Native American students. I knew too many white guys who punctuated their sentences with “Aho” and wore ponchos with Indigenous weaves. Meanwhile, I kept shedding friends and family the deeper I got into researching psychedelics. I was frequently altered and not sure I wanted to live. To get through, I watched my former students play basketball. I read Russian literature. Eventually, I decided writing was all I had left, the only way to integrate what had happened. The relationship between me and my former teacher never turned physical, and I hadn’t given up my independence to be with him as many others had. Living in the Native American community 30 minutes from where my mother grew up helped me through my psychedelic renaissance delusions, even if it was rough. In many ways, I was lucky. 

In the groups I was in, people regurgitated the renaissance’s lofty rhetoric as though it were gospel: We believed we were elevating consciousness and undertaking a new form of mental health care, one that was superior to talk therapy and pharmaceutical medications. We believed in net zero trauma and that mass psychedelic use would usher in human awakening (and that these were good things). We were blind to the risks and blind to the insanely appropriative practices we were a part of and what the consequences of those practices actually were in the real world. 

On the reservation, my students saw me as just another undependable drug addict. They thought I had been in a cult. (Which, I don’t know, maybe I was.)

Giving up the delusions was not easy. When I first started using psychedelics, I needed my teacher’s validation to make sense of the visionary world I experienced on psychedelics, which I couldn’t believe was real. When I ditched him, I became confused about reality. 

At first, I held onto hope that I could ferret out a few of my delusions and go back to life as usual. But I didn’t realize delusions are like a snake den — where you find one, you will find others. I thought that if psychedelics showed me I was an entirely different person, or my life fell apart, that my teacher would be there to talk me through it. Except he wasn’t. And my journey friends weren’t either, largely because most of them had financial and psychological interests in maintaining the delusions. One of my psychedelic mothers told me as much: Maintaining her access to him and his spurious sacraments was more important to her than calling out the lies because she believed she was helping people with psychedelic therapy. 

But my Reservation students didn’t care that psychedelic therapy was helping affluent white people. It wasn’t helping them. In fact, the psychedelic renaissance was making peyote more expensive and harder to get. I wasn’t helping them either, they said, unless I told the truth. So here I am, still in Montana. Although I sometimes miss the hope of elevating consciousness, I don’t think the psychedelic movement can succeed unless it addresses its underlying colonial and exploitive ambitions, especially the ones having to do with commodifying Indigenous lineages. 

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