Episode #54

Episode #54 Full Transcript: 

My name is Laura Dawn and you’re listening to a very special episode of the psychedelic leadership podcast, featuring my conversation with two truly incredible human beings. 

Cody Swift, is a philanthropist, a licensed psychotherapist and executive director of the RiverStyx foundation and Miriam Volat who is the Co-Director of Riverstyx and the co-director of the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund, of which Grow Medicine is a project of. 

I am so thrilled to be featuring both Cody swift and Miriam Volat on the podcast today and the work they are doing with Riverstyx foundation and the indigenous medicine conservation fund and the origin story of these initiatives, not only because they are templating and modeling a new philanthropic paradigm, especially in the psychedelic space,  but also because it weaves together the origin story of Grow Medicine, which is a project I am helping to steward,  and through a partnership collaborating Grow Medicine is a project of The Indigenous medicine conservation fund, and I’ll share a little more about grow before we dive in, 

And I know some of you listening have been tracking my journey with this Grow Medicine project, and wondering wait a second, I thought you were launching that last year, well I was about to until I met Miriam from the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund, and we entered a partnership agreement and now Grow has really become an integrated part of the fund. 

So for this episode, I really want to highlight the work that Cody and Miriam have been doing at Riverstyx foundation, because Riverstyx along with Dr. Bronners (and other unnamed philanthropists) really helped to birth the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund – which is so incredibly needed. 

Because right now we are approaching a crucial tipping point in the psychedelic movement. 

As these medicines rapidly enter Western culture, This rise in demand is placing significant pressure on the Indigenous communities, and biocultures, and their medicines.  

As the world comes to embrace the healing potential of sacred medicines, how do we ensure the original stewards of these medicines are uplifted, honored, and supported in this search for our collective healing? 

 

And how do we step towards right relationship and ensure that these biocultures thrive for generations to come? And this is the work that the Fund is doing and by extension, Grow Medicine as well. 

And so Miriam is the co-direcotr on the fund, and she is a researcher an educator a facilitator and ecologist, she’s also a mother,  and Miriam is the executive director of IPCI – the indigenous peyote conservation initiative and  sits on the board of the MAPS public benefit corporation,  and she is so passionate about biocultural conservation, and I feel very fortunate to have learned an enormous amount from her, especially over the past 6 months. 

1. Cody Swift, MFT is a philanthropist, qualitative researcher, and licensed psychotherapist. Through the Riverstyx Foundation, he has collaborated extensively on projects addressing healthy society through working with stigmatized populations and issues – those most likely to be overlooked for funding and support- and since 2007, has helped to fund over 20 psychedelic research trials. He has served as a therapist-guide in the Johns Hopkins psilocybin and cancer-anxiety study, and has conducted dozens of qualitative interviews with study subjects into the subjective aspects of their experiences with psilocybin and MDMA. He has dedicated himself to this field, not only because of the efficacy of these medicines, but because of they way they heal- by helping individuals to turn towards difficult or painful aspects of their lives, to reconcile them into greater wholeness, and gain perspective on life beyond illness. He has a passion for reinvigorating religious traditions through psychedelics and has also worked for over 7 years supporting indigenous communities in the conservation of their sacred plant medicines, such as the Native American Church in the preservation of Peyote and the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund. 

And Cody is honestly just such a kind-hearted human being, and both Miriam and Cody are both doing such good work and they really bring such a depth of perspective to some of the crucial issues that we are facing in the psychedelic space right now, especially these topics around reciprocity and plant medicine conservation and being in right relationship with indigenous cultures and communities that have been stewarding these medicine and the importance of supporting indigenous communities so they can continue to thrive, but even how to go about that, is not so straight forward. And through their depth of understanding, that really able to shed light on so much of the nuance in these topics and also highlight the importance of the words we choose, that’s been a big learning curve for me. How we talk about these topics and the specific words we choose is really important, like understanding the difference between reciprocity and benefit-sharing, which Miriam will speak to in this conversation. 

so I really just wanted to elevate their voices, give them space to share their perspective, so you can also learn about how they are thinking about these topics and my hope is that it will influence how you think about these topics as well. Because we know that the narratives we repeat actually do inform our behavior.  

And to set the context for this, one thing I didn’t ask Miriam in this conversation was to explicitly share the mission of the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund, so I wanted to share it with you before we dive in because it’s really a powerful mission and I want to illuminate the magnitude of what this fund is really doing. 

And the IMC Fund is working to    

Ensuring a future where Indigenous Peoples, their medicines and knowledge thrive for generations to come. 

As an indigenous-led philanthropic vehicle, we work to ensure the resilience of our Peoples in the face of cultural appropriation, environmental extractivism, human rights violations and climate change. 

Partnering with funders globally, informed by robust ecological and community-based assessments, we build alliances with organizations on ground, fund their efforts and do strategic engagement with leaders of each bio-culture. 

Really it’s such a powerful mission. And they are in the process of a 20 million dollar philanthropic raise, and so if you know anyone who might be interested in supporting  on a larger scale, you can learn more by going to IMC.fund. 

 And the Fund has 6 commitments, and I want to share those with you as well, because it illuminates the mission in action: 

1. Build a new philanthropic paradigm of right relationship and trust between Indigenous communities and funders.
2. Ensure conservation strategies are Indigenous-led and strengthen the core principles of Unity, Territory, Autonomy and sustaining culture.
3. Advance the realization and recognition of Indigenous Peoples rights.
4. Work to ensure strategies are in place that reduces harm from increasing global pressure and strengthens traditional medicines and the Indigenous cultures that steward them.
5. Amplify the voices of traditional knowledge holders and the crucial importance of the health of their cultures for humanity and the planet.
6. Create a mechanism for benefit sharing for the psychedelic industry and the broader community – this is where Grow Medicine comes in.

And so Grow Medicine is like the forward facing brand, the crowd funding arm of the IMC Fund, and so we have created an easy-to-use mobile-friendly application that empowers the psychedelic and medicine community to step towards right relationship by donating to support plant medicine conservation, Indigenous sovereignty and biocultaral diversity. 

So Grow Medicine is an extension of the governance and the assessment that the fund undergoes. 

And we are going live May 31st and starting that day, you can go to grow medicine.com 

It’s easy and done in three simple steps

1. Head to GrowMedicine.com
2. Select the keystone medicine you wish to directly support that has enriched your life (and their are 5 keystone medicines to choose from. Ayahuasca, Peyote, Iboga, Mu shrooms, or Toad ) 
3. Pick your donation amount – and we encourage you to hit “make this a monthly donation”

Your donation goes towards Indigenous-led initiatives that are strengthening their communities in their efforts to conserve keystone plant medicines and traditional knowledge that they rely on for their healing and cultural survival.

After making a donation, scroll through the page and learn more about the risks and threats these keystone medicines and their biocultures face, which is also part of the mission of Grow Medicine, to educate and inform people about the impact of our choices. 

 And so the initiatives and Indigenous-led organization we are featuring on Grow Medicine have gone through a very in-depth assessment and Miriam and Cody speak to this process in the conversation it’s all about building relationships, building trust and listening, and supporting in the way these communities asking for support, which is solidarity-based support. 

This is another term we’re helping to grow awareness around,  And you can learn more about these narrative shifts by going to growmedicine.com 

Please sign up if you would like to support the launch and share it with your communities ad help us to amplify this really important message. 

And I really hold the vision that grow medicine becomes an integrated part of the psychedelic movement. 

So again, I encourage you to check out imc.fund to learn more about what the fund is doing, and please check out growmedicine.com and share it with your friends. And all links can also be found at lauradawn.co/54 where you can learn more about Miriam and Cody. 

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Laura Dawn: Hi Cody. Hi Maryam. Thanks for joining me today. It’s nice to have you guys here. Thanks for having us Lauren. I thought a good place to start would be for Cody. If you could introduce yourself, share a little bit about your background and I would love to hear the origin story of river sticks

 foundation.

Cody: Sure. So I am a licensed psychotherapist in California and I’ve also been. Directing the river sticks foundation for about 14 years. And Miriam came on about five or six years ago now, um, as co-director and, um, river Styx is ostensibly a small family foundation. That’s a grant making, uh, foundation. So we, we do give grants, but we also initiate projects.

And, um, how it came about is really from my great grandfather, um, who was, um, an early, um, early involvement with ups United process service. And, and my grandmother left me, um, the small foundation called river sticks and. So I was about 21 or 22 at the time and had just graduated with a degree in psychology and, um, really taking on this responsibility of the foundation, which really didn’t have a clear mission or vision.

And so I was tasked with this very interesting challenge to look at the world’s issues and problems, and to try to figure out with a relatively small amount of money, you know, giving away a million, a million and a half dollars a year to try to make some kind of substantial difference. And in these gargantuan issues that we’re facing today of, of climate change and massive economic disparities and you know, really a psychological, spiritual crisis of meaning and purpose and addiction and depression.

And, uh, so I spent many, many years just in this deep, deep grappling, really my own existential struggle with, um, how, how do you begin to trusting some of these issues and through my own process and from my training in psychology, really coming to understand that our collective latent anxieties are really fueling each of these major crises in the world from climate change to economic disparities, either that from our collective anxiety, we’re driven towards this compulsive way of engaging in the world and with each other and in a very exploitive manner, trying to attract.

Uh, that anxiety and that a lot of those anxieties have come from a deep historic disconnection from our ecologies, a disconnection from a sense of spirit and meaning and place in society. And, and so that really kind of drove this understanding of needing to, to help avail tools, tools that could perhaps in gender or reconnection.

And so that was a deep basis for getting early involved with the psychedelic work and finding our way to Johns Hopkins. About 14 years ago, where we began funding trials, uh, with cancer, anxiety, and psilocybin. So cancer patients who are suffering existential distress and, um, and really beautifully finding that the suicide.

W it did not just provide a, an instant cure or relief. It was a deep journey in reconciliation with one’s deepest shadows and one suffering and, and relationship to death and with cancer and, uh, just, uh, a really, really poetic and beautiful way of empowering people on their own journey that wasn’t just about taking away suffering, but helping people to grow through that crisis they had.

And I’ll, I’ll try to wrap up quickly here, but sort of moving into my own graduate school. I in psychology G again, really focusing on how a lot of our collective pathology. We’re really born from this, this breakdown of religion in our culture and how religion used to really serve this, this holding of meaning this fabric of meaning and place and purpose and community, and that the clergy, where are, you know, they were our mental health professionals and that there’s been a significant collapse of, of really.

The whole structure of, of ideology and that con cosmology that’s left us bereft. And I think that was also a, uh, a deep kind of basis for finding our way to supporting the native American church as well. When I first met Sandra our iron rope, who was the president of the native American church of north America, um, and really learning more deeply about the native American church and, and their history and their use of peyote and discovering that there were these traditions, indigenous traditions who, despite all the traumas and the colonialization, everything, all the difficulties that they face, they managed to, to really preserve that thread of, of tradition and spirituality and, and having.

This really remarkable tool and ceremony and culture in place that could help reinforce and recondition and reconnect to the core elements of life, to the water, to the fire, to earth and air. And that for me, personally, that this religion, and I’m almost emotional talking about that this, this way of practicing spirituality was something that I had.

I think I’d always longed for in a way that wasn’t subscribing to this transcendent sort of sense of God that. You know, what’s just talked about, but actually being able to have a context to experience the divine is intimate and immediate and present. And so learning about it, I was just so moved to, to support their ways in any way that I could.

And so trying to dig into that and really listen and learn and be patient and trying to really hear what they want that needed to, to continue. And what I came to discover is that what they wanted and needed most was support to ensure that they had continued access to their medicine. This powerful medicine that has helped them, you know, for tribes in Mexico for thousands of years and, and more recently for the last 150 years in north America.

And so that’s kind of the background of what, uh, led us to make this big investment in ITCI and purchasing the land the six oh five as we call it the 605 acres down in, in Southwest Texas. And, uh, And I, and I, I do believe that, you know, circling back to this again, this collective anxiety that we’re facing in the west, I think that all sort of stems from what we’ve done to native American communities that we have, not that we’ve not taken time to slow down and, and have deep reconciliation and that we just bulldozed so fast, you know, these landscapes and cultures and built up so quickly and that we’ve cut ourselves off from what was here.

And I think that’s probably felt on a, on a deep bodily level and, and starting to do this work of finding a way to, um, to not just give back, but empower those communities to. To come into health. And again, you know, all what they’re asking for is just to have access to this medicine peyote medicine that has helped them so much and to be, you know, to be left, to pray, pray in their way.

Yeah. So it’s just been a privilege and an honor, beyond, beyond words to have gotten, to participate and partner with the native American leadership in this way, that’s beautiful. I’d love Merriam for you to sort of insert yourself into this timeline. Share a little bit of your background. And when did you and Cody meet and was it through the indigenous peyote conservation initiative?

Is that how you guys met? Um, no, actually how we met is all utilized as a way of sharing a little bit about my background. I had the very good fortune of growing up north of San Francisco in the Oak Woodlands and redwoods of Sonoma county. And so. Got to grow up in a place that I was completely in love with and became academically trained to do ecological work, specifically working in Agra ecosystems and bringing sustainability into our food system.

And I would say food and medicine and system, because food is one of the very important medicines. And, and my focus in that arena, working on water and environment issues has always been process. So community process, community health, doing multi-stakeholder work, bringing folks together who otherwise might be in conflict to really come into agreement about how.

Um, their homes and their territories could be, uh, protected. And so one of the projects that I worked on was actually how to legalize and make available the ancient technology of composting, our waste and composting toilets. And, and so that was how I met Cody. And. And, you know, it’s interesting coming from a process perspective and a process background as an ecologist, because it’s really all about relationships.

And so the way that I actually really entered into, um, this work with river sticks was, uh, Cody invited me to come and serve as a facilitator to the national council of native American churches in their conversations and strategy sessions around what to do around contracting. And so from there, they actually requested that I stay on as the sort of initiating director of the organization and river Styx has continued to support me to be in that role.

And you know, this is a little bit about where our commitment to kind of expanding our ability to support indigenous communities came from. Because interestingly enough, it was really hard for funders to understand. The value of supporting this, even though, you know, we were talking about communities with intact set and setting for microscopic amounts of money, compared to the research on set and setting and that’s happening, you could actually support native Americans to continue.

Like Cody said, having access to their medicine on their own terms. And then we started. Supporting assessment work and other kinds of projects in other places like in Gabo and doing community-based assessment and conservation assessment with Ebola and with the Wiki people. And we partnered at that time with ICEERS and burners to support that assessment work and learn that a lot of the issues there were very similar, the pressures from different kinds of industries, but also the psychedelic Renaissance.

And the fact that I began was being this very successful medicine for opiate use disorder and PTSD with bets was already in just 10 years, making major pressures on the populations there and impacting the ability of the local people that we T bond to and pick me to access their medicine the way they had.

Millennia, you know, in that case, you know, the Pygmies learned how to use Ebola from elephants, and then they taught the other tribes. Um, and then we also, um, began to do similar work in south America a