A Culture's Catalyst: Historical Encounters with Peyote and the Native American Church in Canada by Fannie Kahan (review)
University of Toronto quarterly August 1, 2018 Alexander Dawson
A historian discovered an unpublished 1950s manuscript by journalist Fannie Kahan that sympathetically portrayed Indigenous peyotism on the Canadian Prairies and advocated for the Native American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.