Episode 167 - Talking Plants & Remembering the Ghost Dance w/ Michael Stuart Ani

In this episode, I am very honored to have legendary activist, author, speaker, and psychedelic elder.. Michael Stuart Ani. Michael shares powerful, captivating, historical knowledge as we traverse his history within psychedelia, entheogenic ethnobotany, and tribal cultures starting in the 1960s. We also talk about the impact of widespread plant medicine use on tribal cultures, and how the amazon still needs our help. As the episode continues, we talk about his history with uncontacted tribes, the mystical Ghost Dance -which Michael was called to find and reconstruct after a powerful Peyote session, and other riveting topics.. A timeless, enthralling episode.. Drop in!

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Michael Stuart Ani Bio:

Michael Stuart Ani has been a student of plant wisdom for almost fifty years. As a young man, the Lakota sage, John Fire Lame Deer, guided him through his first peyote ceremony and then sent him south to Mexico in search of the steps of the Ghost Dance. A lost ritual of early humanity..

These steps led Michael to the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca, famous for its sacred mushrooms. From the 1960s through the 1970s, Ani lived in the Mazateca’s most remote cloud forest and became the only outsider who was ever allowed to collect the sacred mushroom species of the region.

During the 1980s, the steps of the Ghost Dance led Ani to the remote tribes of the Amazon Jungle. With his Amazonia Foundation, Michael was instrumental in fighting the epidemics among the Yanomami in the rainforests of Venezuela. His work in Venezuela was subsequently featured in the 1994 documentary, Yanomami, Keepers of the Flame, which won the US Environmental Film Festival’s Best Documentary of the Year.

Dedicated to helping the Yanomami survive the epidemics, Ani would periodically leave the jungle to raise money to support the medical effort. In this time he took on many different careers. He became an author, producer, university lecturer, and radio and TV guest speaker.

During the early years of the 2000s, Ani focused his attention back on the Northern States of the Americas and worked to repatriate some of the very last genetically pure Bison to the Brule, Lakota tribes on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota. While on Rosebud, Ani responded to the requests of tribal elder Leonard Crow Dog and brought an eyeglass clinic to the reservation.

Because of his efforts in South America and Mexico, and his work to build a ceremony house for the renowned healer, Grandpa Roy Stone, the Amazonia Foundation was honored by being included as an organization under the umbrella of the National Congress of American Indians.

Today Michael Stuart Ani lives in the cloud forest of the Sierra Mazateca with his partner, Heather, and dog, Gracie Goose.

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