This fall 2024 conference at UC Berkeley will investigate the increasing salience of multiple figures of ancestry, inheritance and transmission – across bodies, generations, humans and more-than-human-others, the living and the dead – to psychedelic and plant medicine culture in the contemporary United States and beyond. The event will feature activists, artists, educators, healing practitioners, scholars and writers whose lives and work explore these themes. Speakers’ topics will include encounters with ancestral presences and the dead; the use of plant medicines by Indigenous, Black, and Asian communities in the U.S. to heal intergenerational trauma; Bay Area psychedelic counterculture and its legacies; ancestral lineage repair work across traditions; and addressing the problem of cultural appropriation within White psychedelic culture. 

Why center the conversation around the figure of “reckoning,” or the work of appraising and calling to account? In doing so, the conference invites debate and reflection on the centrality of intergenerational and ancestral-oriented frameworks and practices in this current moment of intense interest in psychedelics and plant medicines. How do familial and collective inheritances enable and constrain possibilities for life? Through what sensory and aesthetic forms – dreams, presences, emotions, bodily sensations, images, songs, prayers, stories, rituals – are these transmissions passed down? How are they affected by traumatic histories of slavery, genocide, (settler)colonialism, migration, and environmental devastation? 

Perhaps this contemporary intersection of the intergenerational-ancestral with plant medicines and psychedelics registers the need for an expansive practice of therapeutics for our time, one that is capable of a broader reckoning with unresolved legacies and on-going conditions of capitalist extraction, (settler)colonialism, and racial injustice. At the core of this therapeutics is a work of discernment: What do we inherit? What do we want to leave behind? And how are suppressed ancestral lineages, forgotten family stories, and the dead themselves allies in the transmutation of intergenerational suffering and the work of reckoning and living otherwise?