Peyote and the Indian in the Colonial Imagination

Spanish colonizers spent a surprising amount of time trying to make sense of peyote. Early botanists tried to understand just what it was, and how it fit into indigenous medicinal practices. Catholic friars worried that it and other native hallucinogens were evidence of the presence of the devil in the New World. Doctors, miners, priests and other Spaniards were drawn to its powers, whether for good or bad. Even the Spanish Inquisition got involved, banning the consumption of peyote in 1621 because of its link to a series of heretical practices. For these and other reasons, Spanish efforts to make meaning from peyote offer us an important opportunity to explore the complex ways an indigenous plant was linked to the Spanish idea of indigeneity during the colonial period. We see this not just in the variety of ways peyote was and was not talked about as an Indian thing, but also in the ways that colonial officials made sense of the devotion to peyote they found among groups like the Huichols when they tried to conquer the Sierra of Nayarit in the 18^th century. This paper argues that while peyotism was linked in some ways to indigeneity, colonial officials did not link peyote and the Indian in any kind of seamless or systematic way. In part because of this, when they entered the Sierra of Nayarit in their effort to conquer the local peoples, peyotism became not a sign of immutable alterity, but of diabolism, as something that in fact made the Huichols legible in the eyes of the colonial state.