Moved by Another Life: Altered Sentience and Historical Poiesis in the Peyote Craze
American Literature September 1, 2023 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10679209
Summary
The article examines how peyote, a mood-altering substance, influenced Native peoples during colonial times, particularly through the life story of Sam Blowsnake. It discusses the Peyote movement's anti-assimilationist currents and the government's efforts to suppress it by labeling it a 'craze.' These efforts were part of a broader struggle over property and personhood within a settler-capitalist context, where peyote meetings provided a space for collective resistance against assimilation policies.
Study at a glance
| Population | Native peoples living under colonial occupation |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Peyote meetings served as a form of collective resistance against colonial assimilation policies, challenging the restrictive notions of property and personhood. |
Abstract
Abstract This article follows the transsensory pathways opened by peyote, a mood-altering entheogen, as it diffused among Native peoples living under and along the edges of colonial occupation around the turn of the twentieth century. It traces that movement through the pulsions of temporal and sensorial animacy created in the episodic narration of The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (1920), the life story of a Ho-Chunk man named Sam Blowsnake. Apprehended by settler governance as a “craze,” anti-assimilationist currents of the Peyote movement met with intensifying attempts to constrain the biochemical flux of “intoxication” through Native bodies. Modern campaigns against “peyote worship” mounted by government agents, progressive reformers, and sensationalist press in the early twentieth century exploited scripts of revulsion and prurient fascination to target the border-crossing “mind poison” for prohibition. Just beneath the scenes of psychotoxicity and sexual disorder projected by the antinarcotic imaginary of the craze, this article posits, there ran an ongoing struggle over the restrictive capacitation of property and personhood within the settler-capitalist regime of allotment. Against the norms enforced by that policy, in peyote meetings the alteration of sentience could unbind the day-to-day reproduction of property-bearing personhood. Lines of collective transport opening from the passage of ecstasy thus composed a historical moment in refusal of allotment drives for schizochronic individuation.