One of the main developments in this process is the World Ayahuasca Forum, scheduled for September in Girona, Spain. The event is the result of a partnership between the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute, led by Benki Piyãko, and ICEERS. More than a conventional conference, the forum is being presented as a platform for Indigenous governance, with Indigenous peoples from around the world taking a leading role for the first time.
The meeting aims to discuss the global expansion of ayahuasca and other psychedelic plants, addressing issues such as regulation, cultural extractivism, biomedicalization, and the commercialization of traditional knowledge. According to Indigenous leader Nixiwaka Yawanawá, one of the founders of the Indigenous Ayahuasca Conference and a participant in the Girona project, the goal is to create dialogue with the scientific, academic, and economic worlds so these medicines can be understood without losing the ways Indigenous peoples preserve and use them.
Nixiwaka says the initiative is not only critical but also constructive. Rather than focusing solely on problems, the organizers want to build a broad alliance. One of the central goals is the creation of an international council of Indigenous spiritual leaders, able to act in coordination to defend traditional medicines and the knowledge connected to them.
This effort recently gained visibility when it was presented in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. There, Nixiwaka outlined the foundations of a global alliance aimed at protecting knowledge systems linked to medicinal plants and highlighting the contributions these traditions can offer in addressing major human challenges.
The proposed global council, sometimes described by its supporters as an “Indigenous UN,” is a response to the international spread of psychedelic plants in a context where medicines such as ayahuasca have become globally circulated but are rarely controlled by, or centered on, the peoples who developed the knowledge behind them. The initiative seeks to establish a spiritual governance structure led by guardians of ancestral knowledge.
