Indigenous Advisory Board

“Nothing about us, without us”

Our Indigenous Advisory Board is at the heart of everything Onaya does.

  • Don Rono Lopez

    Don Rono Lopez

    SHIPIBO CURANDERO LEAD

    Don Rono was raised in a family of curanderos & comes from a long lineage of Shipibo plant doctors. In his practice, his sense of humour & gentle spirit allows those around him to feel comfortable in his presence, creating an optimal environment for healing & connecting.

  • Indigenous Issues Advisor

    Jem Stone

    INDIGENOUS ISSUES ADVISOR

    Jem is a First Nations Woman with mixed heritage, a psychedelic-holistic practitioner and cultural educator passionately integrating original knowledge into education and health. Amongst other projects, she co-founded IPAT (Indigenous Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies).

  • Don Wilder Mahua

    SHIPIBO CURANDERO

    Wilder Etman Rojas Mahua is a traditional healer from the Shipibo community of Paoyhan on the Ucayali River. He was initiated into ayahuasca shamanism from the age of 12, learning the path of curanderismo from his grandparents and master plants like Noya Rao.

  • Doña Angela Lopez

    SHIPIBO CURANDERA

    Doña Angela is a Shipibo curandera at the Ayahuasca Foundation. With extensive plant dieta experience and a nurturing presence, she is also a talented artist creating traditional Shipibo clothing, jewelry, and crafts. Her decades of experience in plant medicine and unique singing style reflect her rich familial tradition.

Involved at every step

The seeds of the IAB were planted in 2016, when Don Rono Lopez took a keen interest in our study on personality changes and ayahuasca.

He said that the plants were encouraging him to work with scientists, to demonstrate the value of plant medicine work to the Western world.

Conception

When we asked Rono what he thought we should look at for our next ayahuasca study, he emphasised the relationship between people and plants.

This contributed to the design of our study showing that nature connectedness may be increased through using ayahuasca.

Rono was therefore an author on this peer-reviewed publication, one of the first time a Shipibo healer has authored an empirical study.

Other ideas that have come out of this dialogue include studying dreams and including dreamwork in our courses, and using EEG to try to isolate the effects of ‘icaros‘ (Shipibo healing songs). These are both key elements of Shipibo psychospiritual work.

Interpretation

We also seek help to understand the data collected from the Amazon, and sometimes scientific terminology maps neatly onto Indigenous concepts.

When we excitedly shared our groundbreaking results that ayahuasca may induce changes to the way our genes are expressed - a new field of research called ‘epigenetics’ - Don Rono was unimpressed.

“We’ve always known that ayahuasca does this,” he said flatly, “but we call it cleaning the ancestral lines.”

Dissemination

To ensure that Amazonian communities and Latin American scholars can access and understand our findings, we produce lay person’s summaries of our papers, and then translate them into everyday Spanish for dissemination.

Ethics and Cultural Safety

In all of our other offerings, we use the IAB - and First Nations scholar Jem Stone in particular - to inform our ethical approach.

Last year, we decided not to analyse data that would have made headlines in the world of science. Placing ethics first, we were concerned about the possibility of truly free, prior and informed consent, and worried that publishing the results would open the floodgates for exploitative research by others.

More recently, Jem has advised us on Indigenous issues in our Psychedelic Mentorship Training, and helped us set the criteria for our Indigenous scholarships.

Ricardo Assis Rosa - Psychedelic Coach with Patient

Our Indigenous Advisory Board is part of a broader commitment to prevent harms and correct imbalances through ongoing questioning of what genuine interethnic reciprocity looks like. This forms one of our guiding principles.

We realise that Indigenous people have worked with psychedelic medicines for generations and hold a vast and intimate knowledge. They are the experts, not us.

We want to uphold Indigenous voices, consulting and crediting wherever possible, and contribute to genuine benefit-sharing by contributing articles, lectures, collaborations and financial compensation.

We have also pledged to give 10% of our profits to local and global initiatives that support Indigenous communities and plant medicine habitats, including:

RECIPROCITY

Reciprocity