Fannie Kahan, Erika Dyck (ed), A Culture’s Catalyst: Historical Encounters with Peyote and the Native American Church in Canada
Nancy D. Campbell
Social History of Medicine February 15, 2017 DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkx013 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Historical analysis Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Intervention | Peyote |
| Topics | Mescaline |
| Key points | The book presents Fannie Kahan's anthropological account of a 1956 Native American Church peyote ceremony on the Red Pheasant Reserve, attended and documented by Abram Hoffer, Humphry Osmond, Duncan Blewett, Teddy Weckowicz, and two journalists. Kahan argues that peyote serves as a cultural artefact revealing Canada's ambivalent post-colonial relationship with First Nations peoples. |
Abstract
Much of the drama of A Culture’s Catalyst revolves around ‘The Night in the Tipi’, a legendary night on the Red Pheasant Reserve in the autumn of 1956 when Abram Hoffer, Humphry Osmond, Duncan Blewett and Teddy Weckowicz, accompanied by two other white men, Doug Skagi, a journalist, and Gordon Skogland, a photographer, both from the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, participated in and documented a Native American Church peyote ceremony. Erika Dyck’s deft introduction contextualises this signal event. While the term ‘hidden history’ has become cliché, this book was buried within the Hoffer archives until Dyck unearthed it and enrolled Fannie Kahan’s daughter and niece in bringing it to life. Completed over 50 years ago and written largely by Kahan, Hoffer’s sister, the collection was originally envisioned as an edited volume to which participants in the ceremony contributed. Kahan’s fulsome authorial voice structures the present volume. Hers was a keen anthropological eye. Peyote appears as a unique cultural artefact through which we can understand much about Canada as a post-colonial country with an ambivalent history towards the indigenous people of the First Nations. Raised in Hoffer, Saskatchewan, on a homestead in a Jewish agricultural settlement named after her family, Kahan was a creative and connected advocate for mental health. With her husband, social worker Irwin Kahan, and her brother, Abram Hoffer, who is best known today for his scientific work on the use of LSD as a clinical agent for treating alcoholism, drug addiction, mental health disorders and marital strife, she collaborated on projects involving public understanding of schizophrenia; alternative hospital architectures; orthopsychiatric techniques for treating schizophrenia and psychiatric nursing; and this book on peyote as sacrament and cultural catalyst.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on mescaline, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Schizophrenia: A New Approach. II. Result of a Year's Research | 1954 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Thought insertion as a self-disturbance: An integration of predictive coding and phenomenological approaches | 2016 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Entactogens: How the Name for a Novel Class of Psychoactive Agents Originated | 2022 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Steric and Electronic Relationships among Some Hallucinogenic Compounds | 1970 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| EFFECT OF DRUGS One individual | 1952 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | n = 1 |