A Culture's Catalyst: Historical Encounters with Peyote and the Native American Church in Canada by Fannie Kahan (review)

Summary

A historian discovered an unpublished 1950s manuscript by journalist Fannie Kahan that sympathetically portrayed Indigenous peyotism on the Canadian Prairies and advocated for the Native American Church of Canada, then under state pressure. The text, co-authored with scientists, combined journalism, anthropology, and psychology to critique racist federal Indian policy and the restriction of peyote. Its failure to find a publisher likely stemmed from its prescient, angry attack on government racism, which contradicted nationalist narratives. The historian argues the work should be read both as a lost scholarly contribution and as a period artefact, noting its ethnographic richness and early seeds of later residential-school critiques.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Historians find all sorts of interesting things in the archives, including reams of gossipy correspondence, doodled to-do lists, and the occasional gem. This seems to be what Erika Dyck, a historian at the University of Saskatchewan, decided she had encountered when she came across Fannie Kahan’s unpublished manuscript in the papers of Abram Hoffer. Written more than a half-century ago as an account of peyotism on the Canadian Prairies, A Culture’s Catalyst languished without a publisher in spite of Kahan’s impressive credentials as a journalist. Its failure to see the light of day leaves one with some significant questions. Was it simply no good? Was it ahead of its time? What other reasons might explain the text’s failure to find a publisher? More than this, the reader is left to wonder how we might approach the text in the early twenty-first century. Do we read it as a long lost, but significant, work of scholarship? Or is it a curiosity, an artefact of the 1950s that speaks mainly to the peculiarities of its time? Dyck, whose credentials as a historian of Canadian psychedelia are impeccable, thinks it needs to be read as a little bit of both. She seized on the text because of its ethnographic richness – we have here a series of chapters by Kahan as well as articles by Humphry Osmond, Duncan Blewett, Teodoro Weckowicz, and Abram Hoffer, which together paint a deeply sympathetic picture of Indigenous peyotism on the Canadian Prairies. Reading like a mix of long-form journalism, anthropology, and psychology, the articles collectively make a compelling case for the Native American Church of Canada, which was then under pressure from the Canadian state. Many Canadians viewed the peyote religion as a mere cover for the use of dangerous drugs, and peyote was restricted by federal policies that required users to acquire it through a prescription. This text sought to reshape the public narrative about this practice as well as offering a sharp critique of Federal Indian policy. Kahan’s articles, though clearly of her time, are also shocking for their prescience. She writes with an angry voice, attacking the virulent racism of Canadian government policy, its combination of foolishness and malice. We see the seeds of a much later critique of the residential schools, though here it is mostly a dark tail of authoritarianism and loss and not so much ethnocide and abuse. Indeed, her narrative is so at odds with nationalist narratives of the day that it seems unsurprising that the book languished. Osmond’s ‘‘Night in the Tipi’’ turns the narrative more specifically to the peyote ceremony, brilliantly capturing a moment in which a certain Orientalist approach to Native Americans and scientific curiosity played humanities 305