Science’s “Savage Slot”: The appropriation and erasure of Indigenous science in the psychedelic renaissance

This article examines the operations of what Trouillot named the “Savage slot” in psychedelic science. Indigenous efforts to break out of the “Savage Slot” (to which they are continuously re-allocated) threatens a foundational narrative of Western science. This is that the West has rational, experimentally validated facts and “they” have beliefs and traditions. Unsettling the dichotomy between Indigenous and Western sciences is often caught in double-bind: it requires contrasting the two to make the point, thereby reanimating the distinction it is trying to dismantle. This article proposes that the reiteration of the idea of radical incommensurability between these knowledge systems at times serve to circumvent the difficult labour of creating Otherwise modes of engagement between Western and Indigenous Sciences. Drawing on a series of ethnographic vignettes of working alongside Indigenous colleagues in the psychedelic science renaissance, the article maps how Indigenous ways of knowing about healing are strategically (and oftentimes partially) appropriated while Indigenous past contributions to the field are erased. Against the focus on human brains and cognition that predominate in psychedelic science, Indigenous experts locate knowledge in territories and remind Westerners that other beings may also be thinking with us.