Peyote Politics: The Making of the Native American Church, 1880-1937

Regarding peyote use among Native Americans, an ethnologist noted in 1891: “The ceremonial eating of the plant has become the great religious rite of all tribes of the southern plains.” But, as Lisa D. Barnett observes in Peyote Politics: The Making of the Native American Church, 1880–1937, Peyotism quickly came under scrutiny, with opponents, both non-Native and Native, seeking to prohibit the religious practice by transforming peyote into a narcotic, thereby drawing Indigenous people into...