Magic mushrooms helped a Navajo woman deal with trauma. Now she wants to help others

Even though therapy helped Marlena Robbins better understand her intergenerational trauma, she wanted to delve deeper into her healing practice. In 2019, on the recommendation of her partner, Robbins sat at her home altar with a dose of psychedelic mushrooms. Drawing upon her Diné, or Navajo, heritage, she said a prayer and asked the mushrooms for guidance. The experience changed the trajectory of her life.

“When I sit with [mushrooms], it’s like engaging with the holy people. I see them as doctors,” Robbins said. “They’re already writing the prescription. They’re already writing the treatment plan.”

The 35-year-old left a career as a multidisciplinary artist to study Indigenous perceptions of psilocybin, a hallucinogenic substance in some mushrooms. Her ultimate goal is to make psychoactive fungi, otherwise known as magic mushrooms, accessible to Indigenous communities throughout the nation. Though magic mushrooms are federally illegal, some states are creating their own policies to regulate the substance. Within a culturally sensitive framework, Robbins believes that psilocybin could help treat mental health and addiction issues among Native Americans.

“It could have ripple effects into the community, into the tribe, into the clanship systems, into their family systems,” said Robbins, who’s in her second year as a public health doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley. “Trauma and addiction, all of those things tend to push us off our paths. And these medicines … have the ability to put us back in line with who we’re meant to be.”

As a psychedelic movement spreads throughout the nation ( Oregon and Colorado have legalized psilocybin and some other states are taking steps to do the same), Robbins seeks to ensure that Native Americans aren’t left behind in the conversation. “A lot of these psychedelic businesses and industries are all talking about Indigenous people as being the original caretakers of these medicines and yet tribal reservations [have] high rates of addiction, trauma, depression and anxiety,” Robbins said. “There’s no real discourse about what these medicines look like on the Navajo reservation.”

While Oregon and Colorado ’s policies include some input from Native Americans or look at the traditional Indigenous use of psychedelics, Utah and New Mexico ’s legislations, for instance, do not incorporate their perspectives.

So far, Robbins’s research has focused on perceptions of psilocybin among urban Natives who live in cities in California, Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Montana, Oklahoma and Alaska. Next year she plans to expand her work to the Navajo Nation, where she lived until she moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, at 10 years old.

She hopes her analysis will bridge these perspectives and inform state and tribal policies around psilocybin-assisted therapy that affects Native American communities.

Creating a microcosm

Research on the historical Indigenous use of psilocybin is inconclusive. While the Mazatec and Huichol in Mexico used psilocybin in their spiritual practices, there’s scant evidence of “true Indigenous traditions with psilocybin outside of those two tribes”, said Christine Diindiisi McCleave, a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Anishinaabe Nation. Diindiisi McCleave, who’s researching Indigenous use of traditional medicines at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, is also working with the state of Colorado to facilitate a tribal working group . The group, which Robbins also recently joined, will discuss issues surrounding the commercialization of natural medicines.

In Robbins’s eyes, her work melds historical and contemporary use of psilocybin by looking “at those new and innovative ways that Native people can use this medicine, but also how they incorporate ceremony from their own cultures, information from the way Mazatec sit with them and create this microcosm”. Currently peyote – a cactus with hallucinogenic effects – is the only psychedelic protected under a 1994 amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, which allows members of the Native American Church who are citizens of tribal nations to practice peyote ceremonies.

A concern about the psychedelic movement among some Native communities is that the commercialization of traditional plant medicine can lead to unwanted tourism in their areas and the stealing of Indigenous ceremonies. María Sabina was a Mazatec healer in southern Mexico, for instance, who was ostracized from her community and died in poverty after introducing psilocybin’s healing properties to non-Native people in the 1960s. Non-natives using the medicine can also lead to conservation issues, such as the overharvesting of peyote. “The clinical side, scientific side and even economic side of the psychedelic movement in a western context doesn’t really consider the implications and holisticness of what these medicines mean to Indigenous peoples,” said Diindiisi McCleave.

‘Adapt, adopt and evolve’

Studies have shown that psilocybin can relieve end-of-life anxiety for cancer patients, as well as treat clinical depression. Robbins believes that psilocybin could help address those issues within her own community, since some Diné who grew up in the 1950s and 60s were exposed to uranium mining that eventually led to cancer.

But most of the clinical trials did not incorporate Indigenous perspectives. “Marlena’s research and her work is really important because at this point tribes need to be informed in order to form their own policies,” said Diindiisi McCleave, “and be prepared to engage with psychedelic legislation either at the state level or the federal level.”

So far, Robbins has interviewed people in Los Angeles, Seattle, Oregon and the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s seen geographic and generational divides, where Indigenous communities in the north-west use magic mushrooms recreationally at parties, and on nature hikes. And in the south-west, closer to the Mexico border, participants use psilocybin for spiritual purposes, to connect with ancestral wisdom and to heal intergenerational trauma.

Meanwhile, the older generation of participants has negative perceptions of psilocybin use fueled by campaigns such as the war on drugs that began in the 1970s.

After she completes her doctorate, Robbins hopes to continue her research in Mexico to bridge the cultural gap between Native communities there and in the US that have been separated by a border, she said.

“Does this medicine have the ability to revive those [ancestral] trade routes,” Robbins asked, “to learn from one another, adapt, adopt and evolve?

• This article was amended on 12 June 2024. An earlier version omitted Montana and incorrectly included Minnesota among the states Marlena Robbins’ research has focused on.