Recent Posts41
Frauds / Re: Keewaydinoquay Margaret Peschel
« Last post by Sparks on February 20, 2024, 06:50:17 am »Wasson … in 1978 he helped Kee get a book entitled Puhpowee for the People published under the auspices of Harvard’s Botanical Museum.
I found a 1998 edition of this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Puhpohwee-People-Narrative-Account-Ahnishinaabeg/dp/1879528185/
Quote
Puhpohwee for the People: A Narrative Account of Some Uses of Fungi Among the Ahnishinaabeg
Hardcover – January 1, 1998 — by Keewaydinoquay (Author), Keewaydinoquay Peschel (Author)
5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 5 ratings See all formats and editions
Keewaydinoquay is an Ahnishinaabe herbalist & shaman who, in her childhood, was apprenticed to the famous Ahnishinaabe herbalist, Nodjimahkwe, thus falling heir to the traditional knowledge of the plant world among her people. The native peoples of America actually believe that there is an herb to meet every possible need. The word PUH-POH-WEE is an old Algonkian term that means "to swell up in stature suddenly & silently from an unseen source of power." It is particularly suitable when referring to fungi. The Ahnishinaabeg can find a potential PUH-POH-WEE in their ancient cultural heritage. This is a book about the harmony of tribal life in which Keewaydinoquay weaves the medicinal uses of fungi with tales from her own life. Keewaydinoquay is well-known in medicinal circles & tribal organizations in the Lake Michigan & Lake Superior area, also having connections with institutions interested in the anthropology & history of that area."
The Margaret Cook Peschel story gets much crazier.
I certainly agree! Now I hope that a competent scholar will review all her writings for the obvious falsehoods, e.g. this one:
Quote
Kee’s writings suggest that red-capped A. muscaria —A. muscaria var. muscaria — virtually blanket Ojibwe country, but the opposite is true: they hardly occur there at all. In western or southeastern North America, yes; but not in northern Michigan. It would appear that Kee had read ethnographic studies like Waldemar Bogaras’ The Chukchi of Northeastern Asia and borrowed information from those studies without bothering to consult any distribution maps (or their equivalent) that might display the locations of several varieties of A. muscaria.
You might wonder where she obtained the dried specimens she gave to Wasson. Probable answer: either from one of the doubtless many dealers in psychotropic substances who would have hung out on the Ann Arbor campus in the 1970s or maybe from a West Coast acquaintance via the U.S. Postal Service. She would not have collected those specimens on Garden Island, however.
Since Wasson found the use of A. muscaria in virtually every nook and cranny in the historical woodwork, Kee would have been only too glad to inform him that the Ojibwe used the mushroom, too. For what better way to gain the attention of the Shining-From-Afar-Man than to seize upon the supreme object of his interest and inform him that your own people also believe in the potency of that mushroom, indeed drink the urine of its partakers? In fact, Wasson got Kee a gig at a 1978 conference on psychoactive drugs in San Francisco, where she told a rapt audience that the sacred quality of A. muscaria is passed on through urine, a drink of choice among her own people.
My boldings. Quote from: https://fungimag.com/winter-2015-articles/V8I4_Wasson_LR.pdf.
I read that book decades ago, and many other anthropological articles and books from Siberia about active ingredients of Amanita muscaria being distributed to other people via urine (and even to reindeer eating snow that had been urinated upon).
I include a couple of lexical articles for background information:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Gordon_Wasson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Bogoraz