Moved by Another Life: Altered Sentience and Historical Poiesis in the Peyote Craze

The article examines how peyote, an entheogen that alters mood and perception, spread among Native peoples under colonial occupation around the turn of the twentieth century, tracing its movement through the episodic narration of Sam Blowsnake's autobiography. Settler governance viewed the Peyote movement as a "craze" and intensified efforts to constrain intoxication through Native bodies. Government agents, reformers, and sensationalist press campaigned against "peyote worship" by exploiting revulsion and fascination to target it as a "mind poison" for prohibition. Beneath projected images of psychotoxicity and sexual disorder, the article argues, a struggle over property and personhood under the settler-capitalist regime of allotment occurred. In peyote meetings, altered sentience could unbind the reproduction of property-bearing personhood, composing a historical moment of refusal against allotment's drives for individuation.

Study at a glance

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.