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

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.

Automated summary

This article follows the activities of a mood-altering entheogen called peyote, which affected Native peoples, particularly those living under colonial occupation in the early 20th century. The article also discusses the opposition to peyote worship and the governmental policies and measures related to it.