Paula Graciela Kahn is a migrant justice social worker, consent and anti-oppression educator, and conflict transformation mediator. They designed and implemented consent, anti-oppression, and “decolonizing organizing: accomplices not allies” pedagogy for the Berkeley Student Cooperative, CODEPINK, and Freedom for Immigrants. They support organizations’ shift to an intersectional analysis of history and approach to movement building and provides consultation and conflict mediation to help climate justice, drug policy, psychedelic research, migrant justice, and peace organizations stay accountable to collective liberation. As a mixed-race person, Paula leverages the duality of their experience to build unity among disparate people and groups with varying relationships to oppression.
Paula builds bridges between individuals, groups, and movements. Inspired by the raver principles Peace Love Unity Respect (PLUR), her experiences with psychoactives, and the liberating power of music and dance, Paula is inspired to innovate demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration processes in contexts of armed conflict.
Paula’s work explores the role of entheogens in processes of historical memory, accountability, reparations, reconciliation, and transformative justice. In honor of her parents, Paula co-founded Cosmovisiones Ancestrales, envisioning popular access to preventative healthcare, treatment for PTSD, and building bridges between indigenous and other historically marginalized groups.
“As a mixed GuateMayan-Jewish migration, genocide, and trauma scholar, witnessing the open-air prison my mother’s homelands have become, I ask psychedelic science institutions and companies: What role are you playing in protecting the rights of indigenous peoples?” Paula says. “It is important that we reflect on whether our approach to curing planetary PTSD undermines or enforces the rights of indigenous peoples. Commodification of life-saving, sacred, psychedelic medicine is a conversation that must include diverse perspectives from indigenous communities from around the world.”
United to Cure Planetary PTSD: Demobilization, Disarmament, Reintegration & Uplifting the 19th Article of the UN Declaration of Indigenous People’s Rights
The 21st-century psychedelic revolution cannot afford historical amnesia. According to a landmark report released by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last fall, we have 11 years to transform our relationships to ourselves, each other, our planet, and our atmosphere to prevent global temperatures from further rising. Paula will invoke historical memory and vision for the future by identifying what is at risk if we delay performing the labor to heal from planetary historical transgressions and traumas. Demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration (DDR) is a framework used in the field of conflict transformation and peace building. Paula envisions ceremonial use of psychedelics playing a significant role in these processes to bring forth transitional, transformative justice and social cohesion and fulfill the Eagle and Condor, 7 generations prophecies and what U.S. climate activists call a “just transition.” These prophecies refer to the decisions we will make in this phase of human evolution—whether we will take bold action to unify and repair relations across race, gender, and socio-economic classes to ensure life on earth for the next seven generations. Paula recognizes the fulfillment of these prophecies cannot happen if it is not in alignment with the intrinsic human rights of indigenous people and ecosystems under attack by continued colonialism. Please join Paula for a conversation about advancing our collective liberation and preventing genocide, ecocide, and mass atrocities with sacred plant medicine and/or psychedelics.
Cosmic Sister (@CosmicSister) awarded Paula Kahn a Women of The Psychedelic Renaissance grant to present “United to Cure Planetary PTSD” at Spirit Plant Medicine Conference in Vancouver, BC.
Learn more about Paula Graciela Kahn at: http://cosmovisiones.org/about
**Paula uses the pronouns she/they interchangeably because they identify as femme (feminine) and non-binary/gender-fluid; she recognizes that gender is a social construct and a performance of the spectrum human characteristics/experiences that have been fallaciously fractured by the gender binary of male/female.
