Decolonizing Psychedelic Art Therapy: Indigenous Plant Medicines, Creative Healing, and Epistemic Justice

Abstract

The ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’ has catalyzed clinical investigation into plant-based therapeutics rooted in indigenous healing traditions, yet as these medicines migrate into Western clinical and commercial frameworks, an epistemological severance occurs: the plant is retained while its relational and artistic contexts are stripped away. Employing a decolonial conceptual methodology, this paper argues that art therapy is epistemologically equipped and ethically obligated to address this severance, without romanticizing indigenous traditions or Western frameworks, by engaging with knowledge hybridization, indigenous diversity, and the psychedelic industry’s political economy. Art therapy’s resources lie not in inherent anti-colonial virtue, but in disciplinary commitments to non-verbal meaning-making, relational process, and the image as a form of knowing that can support reciprocal engagement with indigenous healing traditions.