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Today’s lead story is about the World Ayahuasca Forum in Girona, Spain — just an hour north of Barcelona — on September 11-13, 2026. This is one of the first major platforms created by the Indigenous stewards of ayahuasca and the Amazon forest, where suits, ties, and lab coats aren’t controlling the agenda or messaging of a conference. You can find the story immediately below!

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As Big Pharma bets billions on psychedelics, the Indigenous nations who guarded ayahuasca through five centuries of erasure gather at the first World Ayahuasca Forum this September to declare a New Time of Alliance.

By Chief Biraci Nixiwaka Yawanawá,
Glauber Loures de Assis, and Benjamin De Loenen

This September, around 100 Indigenous spiritual leaders will travel from their territories in the Amazon and beyond to Girona, Spain, for the first World Ayahuasca Forum. Held September 11 to 13, it is the first platform in which the guardians of the forest set the agenda rather than appear as guests on someone else’s stage. And they are coming to deliver a mandate nine years into the making.

To understand the weight of that, you have to know what led up to this point.

Some of the most consequential documents to reach the psychedelic field in the past decade were not patent filings, ballot initiatives, or drug approvals. They were five letters from the forest, written by the Indigenous Peoples of ayahuasca, one gathering at a time, across nine years of autonomous organizing. In the villages where they were written, the medicine is not merely a molecule. It is considered a relative.

Out of that process a movement has been taking shape: Spiritual leaders of Indigenous nations of the Amazon and beyond, with a council, an agenda, and a name for this moment. The movement’s elders are calling it A New Time of Alliance.

For five centuries, Indigenous nations have endured colonial invasion, territorial dispossession, genocide, and the deliberate destruction of their ways of knowing. This is known as epistemicide. Under that kind of violence, the knowledge systems that sustain life in the forest were protected the only way they could be: guarded and passed on with care.

And many of these systems have survived. The movement calls them living sciences, built through generations of studying the spiritual and energetic interrelations of life in direct partnership with the natural world. The movement’s elders speak of the master plants at their center, ayahuasca among them, as living intelligences rather than commodities or cultural symbols.

So why speak now? Because humanity has crossed a threshold: The systems governing the world are driving toward collapse. Indigenous participation in how humanity sees, understands, and acts has become urgent.

It is hard to argue with that reading of the moment. In 2024, world military spending reached 2.7 trillion dollars, the sharpest rise since the Cold War, and the planet recorded its first calendar year averaging more than 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels. In 2026, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), and Meta plan to spend close to 700 billion dollars on machine intelligence, on a planet where 645 million people go hungry.

The psychedelic field is also entering a new scale of capital. In July 2026, Eli Lilly agreed to acquire the psychedelic drug developer AtaiBeckley for about 2.8 billion dollars upfront, with up to a billion more tied to milestones. This is the largest bet Big Pharma has ever placed on these medicines.

Biraci Nixiwaka Yawanawá, lives in the Sacred Village of the Yawanawá people, in Acre, Brazil, where recent years have swung between historic flooding and forecasts of record drought. The peoples who guard the planet’s largest tropical forest face no global protection architecture that matches the scale of the responsibility they carry. In that same July, five masked, heavily armed men walked into Apiwtxa, the main village of the Ashaninka people on the border of  Brazil and Peru. Days later, Ashaninka leaders, the Piyãko brothers among them, traveled to the capital, Brasília, asking the federal government for protection.

Psychedelics are being studied as treatments for depression, and for someone whose depression lifts after years of failed treatment, that matters enormously. This research has helped a lot of people and will help more. It is meaningful progress. But it is not yet a paradigm shift because clinical psychiatry still treats one person at a time, while many of the systems producing the suffering — such as capitalism, war, the widening wealth gap, to name a few — only grow. Treating a person and sending them back into the same world keeps producing the same wound. 

The ayahuasca movement reads the moment differently. The alliance it calls for would be guided by something older than geopolitics or artificial intelligence: the Ancestral Intelligence innate to the Earth itself, which has kept life in balance for millennia. In the years the world decided AI means artificial intelligence and bet hundreds of billions on it, the guardians of some of the oldest living knowledge systems on the planet are pointing to the original one: the Ancestral Intelligence tested across millennia. One runs on server farms that drink rivers. The other has kept rivers drinkable for thousands of years.

The deepest crisis of this age is a rupture of relationship. We have never been more connected to our machines or more unrooted from the living world; artificial intelligence extends the trajectory: more mediation, more distance from the soil. Ancestral Intelligence runs the other way. It is a technology of reconnection, and the master plants are among its teachers: ways of remembering that a person is not separate from a forest. What the movement is offering is not a rejection of science; it is a bridge back to Life.

While the Global North ranked its most influential voices and rode the renaissance up and back down, from the hype cycles to the FDA’s rejection of MDMA-assisted therapy to the market collapse (a story recently dissected in the journal Psychedelics), another history was being written in the forest, patiently, letter by letter.

The nine years began in December 2017, when representatives of peoples of the Juruá Valley met in the Puyanawa Indigenous Land, in Acre, Brazil, for the first Yubaka Hayrá, the Indigenous Ayahuasca Conference. Their first letter did something unusual for a founding document: instead of announcing positions, it sent questions home, asking each people to consult its communities on whether, how, and within what limits ancestral knowledge should be shared with the non-Indigenous world.

The answers built on each other, and the gathering moved between territories. The second conference, in 2018, described elders as living libraries and took its demands to the United Nations. The third, in 2019, met at the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute, founded by Benki Piyãko, whose 2026 Niwano Peace Prize citation names the Conference among his works. It insisted that songs and ritual are not decoration around traditional knowledge; they are the knowledge. The fourth, in 2022 — self-financed and 35 Peoples strong — called ayahuasca the guiding thread of life and declared that Indigenous spirituality is not for sale, though it can be shared within a deep ethics of relationship.

Then, in January 2025, the fifth conference met in the Sacred Village, with 34 peoples present from Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, and beyond. The village is led by Nixiwaka together with Putanny Yawanawá, a spiritual leader who was among the first women to receive her people’s highest spiritual initiation, opening a path long closed to women. When its letter reaffirmed the authority of Indigenous women as spiritual leaders and masters, the ground beneath the words was not abstract.

Putanny names the weapon of this new time. “We have to fight with other weapons, and use new strategies,” she says. “The strategy of this new time, that weapon, is our voice. It is our alliances.”

The same letter repudiated the commercialization that has turned ayahuasca into a global market outside ethical boundaries. It called for Indigenous rights and traditional knowledge to be protected under frameworks including UNDRIP, ILO Convention 169, and the Convention on Biological Diversity. It also established, by consensus, a Council of Indigenous Spiritual Leaders,  with the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute stewarding the process as the council is still being consolidated. One leader put it plainly from the plenary: “Ayahuasca is not a heritage of humanity. Ayahuasca is not open source. It belongs to our peoples, to our ancestors, and to our forests.”

Even the word “ayahuasca” is a diplomatic courtesy in these letters. The participating peoples agreed to use ayahuasca as a shared, generic term, while retaining their own names for medicine: Rami, Kamarãpi, Uni, Huni, Yage, Gaapi, Hayakwaska, and others. The shared word does not erase the distinct traditions behind it. The Afro-Brazilian quilombola thinker Nêgo Bispo has a word for this kind of meeting: confluence, rivers that join without losing their sources or identities. 

The watershed is larger still. Peyote in North America, iboga in Central Africa, the sacred mushrooms of Mesoamerica: each medicine has its own guardians, councils, and  course. What the ayahuasca peoples have spent nine years writing is the story of their river.

And the fifth letter did one more thing. It named a next destination: Girona, Spain, 2026.

Letter by letter, the conferences have been moving the field’s magnetic pole.

Parts of this history we know from the inside: Chief Biraci Nixiwaka Yawanawá hosted the fifth conference in the Sacred Village; Benjamin De Loenenfounded ICEERS, which has defended practitioners in court through the Ayahuasca Defense Fund and convened the three World Ayahuasca Conferences, in Ibiza, Rio Branco, and Girona, between 2014 and 2019.

Biraci Nixiwaka Yawanawá explains that the world has no shortage of platforms: Davos for capital, climate summits, and big psychedelic conferences. While Indigenous leaders get invited onto those stages, what they have never had is a platform that is theirs, where the guardians of the forest set the agenda. “We don’t have that,” he says. “So we decided to build it.” And the goal is larger than protecting ancestral medicines: it is to bring his peoples’ vision of planetary healing, physical and spiritual, into open debate with science, technology, and the global economy.

This September, the lineages meet in Girona, Spain, again, but the gathering is no longer called a conference. It is the World Ayahuasca Forum, a gathering rooted in the fourth Indigenous conference’s declaration and co-created by the Council of Indigenous Spiritual Leaders, represented by the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute, together with Instituto Nixiwaka and ICEERS. The new name marks an intention, not an achievement. A forum should be a place where different worlds converge, build deeper mutual understanding, and inquire into a shared path forward, and whether Girona lives up to that will depend on who holds authority once everyone is in the room. We are among the people accountable for that.

Around one hundred Indigenous spiritual leaders will travel from their territories to formally deliver the mandate of the New Time of Alliance to the international community, and, deliberately, to listen. Around that act, scientists, jurists, funders, artists, facilitators, families, and people from around the world will step into what the organizers call a ceremony of dialogue: working out the principles, conditions, and governance frameworks of collaboration between worlds. Girona is not a point of arrival but the beginning of a new stage. The longing for a New Time of Alliance is growing everywhere; the hard part is how. Girona, and the long path toward it, opens a window onto that how.

If ayahuasca has changed your life, what relationship does that create with the peoples and territories that carried this knowledge forward?

It would be comfortable to read all this as a story about Indigenous Peoples. It is also a story about everyone who has built a life, a practice, or a business around these medicines in the Global North.

Researchers can design studies with communities instead of about them. Funders can make benefit sharing legally binding, support Indigenous governance over Indigenous knowledge, and allow time for processes that do not follow quarterly schedules. . Anyone who sings in ceremony can ask where the songs come from, and what it cost for that knowledge to reach them. Above all, the measure of this alliance is to help ensure the knowledge reaches the next generation. 

Rivers, when they meet, do not stop being themselves. Five letters written in the forest, a council taking shape, a forum in Catalonia this September: many waters, each still carrying its own sediment, gaining force as they meet. And the waters will keep moving after Girona. The fifth letter already maps a Council gathering in Colombia and a sixth conference back in the Sacred Village.

For five hundred years, colonization did what it could to ensure these sciences would not survive. They survived, and they are organizing. And now they are making the inverse journey: out of their territories to Spain, with an invitation.

The moment to respond has a place and a date: Girona, September 11 to 13.

Biraci Nixiwaka Yawanawá is a spiritual and political leader of the Yawanawá people, host of the 5th Indigenous Ayahuasca Conference in the Sacred Village, and one of the conveners of the World Ayahuasca Forum.

Glauber Loures de Assis, PhD, is a Brazilian sociologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, executive director of Kura Alliance, and a collaborator of the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute on the organizing team of the World Ayahuasca Forum.

Benjamin De Loenen is the founder and executive director of ICEERS, the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service, and co-convener of the World Ayahuasca Forum.