Taking Responsibility through Restoration, Liberation, and "Righter" Relationship

Join two movement lawyers of color who have spent the last year “sensemaking” with over 30 BIPOC and Native land-based communities, and who walk a path and practice of weaving traditional ethical frameworks into the mainstream psychedelics community. Speakers will discuss legal and ontological complexities of the “Psychedelic Renaissance,” and will offer audience members footholds for developing their identity as a relational being: How can we participate in cultural renewal and collective liberation – even in the political sphere? How are our communities truly centering respect and responsibility toward our human and more-than-human relatives – including sacred plants? How are people healing with land and each other – and what does that have to do with psychedelics? This presentation will include a discussion of the Doctrine of Domination and Discovery as the foundational underpinning of US and Western law, how the doctrine manifests in the “Psychedelic Renaissance,” and what the psychedelics community might do to liberate ourselves from this colonial posture. The presentation will discuss concepts of Anishinaabe law and treaty agreements, the “Third Space” or “Ethical Space,” and related legal and cultural frameworks utilized by separate and distinct communities with different worldviews coming into contact around medicinal “resources,” or “relatives,” depending on where you sit. We will then discuss observations from our own participation in and with land-based and ceremonial communities, and as founding board members of The Psychedelic Bar Association, a community of lawyers dedicated to engaging with these ethical principles. How are communities truly centering respect and responsibility toward our human and more-than-human relatives? How are people healing with land and each other and what frameworks and community agreements support the deep relational healing our times are calling for?