Christine Diindiisi McCleave, enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Ojibwe Nation, is the past CEO of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. She is currently a doctoral student in Indigenous Studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks with a focus on entheogenic plant medicines and Indigenous knowledge systems. With a B.S. in communication studies and an M.A. in leadership, she conducted her master's thesis on Native American spirituality and Christianity and the spectrum of Native spiritual practices today including peyote religion. She has pioneered an unprecedented national research scope, spoken at the UN in NY and Geneva, and helped write a bill for a truth and healing commission in the U.S. Her work continues to concentrate on the intersection of cultural, political, and spiritual agency for global Indigenous Rights and the healing of Indigenous historical trauma as a generational survivor of U.S. Indian Boarding Schools. She is also a member of the board for the Psychedelic Society of MN and lives in Minneapolis.

Psychedelics in America

State initiatives to support psychedelic research and access

As the profile of psychedelics continues to grow in both clinical discourse and popular culture, the quest for the underlying mechanisms of their effects has arrived as a matter of public interest.

Over the last decade, a series of findings from neuroimaging studies has yielded a variety of interpretations of the source of their therapeautic potential. These theories have often been breathlessly reported by the press and industry in service of advancing the plausibility of psychedelic medicine.

However, no consensus exists among the neuroscience community as to the origins of psychedelics effects and benefits, and neuroimaging is only one tool among many for investigating further.

In this session, we will hear from a panel of neuroscientists working towards a better understanding of underlying mechanisms about how to better consider and interpret the state of psychedelic neuroscience.