We Are Huachuma Collective

Meet our Board of Directors

It was a warm, drizzly dawn in the Northern Andes when Josip and I stood with Don Simeon Castillo on the edge of an old roadcut that plunges a thousand feet down to the valley. Don Simeon calls this the “peña brava,” the rough rocks.

“When I was 10 years old, my grandfather used to dangle me from a rope down this very mountainside to harvest Remedio,” Simeon recalled. “Can you believe it? Now there’s none left here. The plant is in a state of extinction.”

An hour’s journey further into the peña brava brought us to a few spindly, spiky cacti which clung to the rocks. At Don Simeon’s orders, we spoke our names aloud and asked permission to the mountain to enter the area and make a harvest.

“If the mountain doesn’t accept you, we will have to leave,” he said worriedly. “Sometimes she won’t allow strangers.”

We all offered Agua Florida, Tobacco essence, and Kananga perfume - held in the mouth and sprayed in the four directions, twice, then three times, until my entire face burned from the strong alcohol. Don Simeon laid Coca on the rocks, murmuring to the mountain about all the offerings he had brought over the years, the respect he had shown her, and supplicating her to allow him to enter with his friends and harvest Remedio (Huachuma) for his patients back in Ayabaca.

He turned to us at last. “Three. We may harvest three plants today. You can help me - I can’t get down there as easily as I once could.”

So began our acquaintance with Don Simeon. He is not only an excellent curandero with an encyclopedic knowledge of the plants of North Peru, but also a valued member of the Comunidad Campesina de Arreypite. He is bringing his talents as a master herbalist to the Huachuma Collective board of directors as Director of Herbal Heritage.

For Don Simeon, Huachuma is the key to unlocking the knowledge and potential of the sacred mountains, highland lakes, and all the other medicinal plants in his apothecary. Through nighttime sessions with Huachuma, he can diagnose problems in his patients and learn which herbs, baths, or protections they need to get well. Wild Huachuma from his own peña brava is the spirit which potentiates and organizes his vast medicinal pharmacopoeia.

A second new member of our board of directors has also joined forces with us: Don Alberto López, more often known as Nachi, from the heart of the old-growth Huachuma on the central coast. A prominent member of the Comunidad Campesina de San Pedro de Casta, he has been growing, drinking, and serving Huachuma on his land for 50 years.

During that time, he has watched the transformation of the wild cactus from a plant that few have any use for, into a newly coveted commodity for which his community are exploited. “And on top of that,” Don Nachi says, “they are extinguishing the plants in this area without care. If this doesn’t stop, soon there will be no Huachuma left on our lands.”

Concerned by how little his community members are paid for their plants and worried for the future of Huachuma, Don Nachi is leading the charge to cultivate and repopulate the cacti in his community. He joins Huachuma Collective as our Director of Indigenous Communities, where he will bring his own experience with the democratic operations of his Comunidad Campesina to help other communities develop and implement systems for protecting their own Huachuma.

Don Nachi works with Huachuma as a sacred plant which gifts people self-knowledge and connection with the mysteries of nature. For him, the plant spirit is a source of wisdom which helps people transform that which once caused harm in their lives into powerful medicine for the soul.

Many of you have already met our third board member and Cofounder, Felipe Pereda. A gifted artisan, Indigenous rights activist, and master healer from a long line of curanderos, Don Felipe serves as the spiritual leader and cultural advisor to the Comunidad Indigena de Chimbote y Coishco.

Don Felipe is Huachuma Collective’s Director of Arts and Culture. He brings his long experience curating cultural events and teaching ancestral knowledge to guide our organization in our empowerment of cultural heritage and traditional arts in Northern Peruvian communities.

For Don Felipe, San Pedro is a plant which connects people with their ancestors and cultural memory. He works with the plant in the temples and sacred sites of his Moche ancestors to receive their power and teachings, and to transmit these to his community. As an artisan and a teacher, San Pedro connects him to the iconographic worlds of Peru’s ancient cultures, which he considers the source of true art.

Another Cofounder and board member of Huachuma Collective is Josip Orlovac Del Rio, who serves as our Projects Director. Josip started working seriously with Huachuma at the age of 15, when he met and apprenticed with Don Felipe in his healing practice while living in Chimbote.

Over the course of his 35 years working with Huachuma, Josip has planted thousands of cacti in his gardens and sees patients from Peru and around the world. He has demonstrated that a sustainable relationship with the plants is not only possible, but indispensable. His lifetime of travel both within and outside of Peru has made him a master communicator who can find common ground between different groups of people.

Josip works with Huachuma as a plant which shows us the path to freedom through love. He believes the plant liberates us from fear by creating harmony between humans and the forces of nature. Above all, it orients us in time, helping us to understand where we come from, who we are, and where we are going. Where we are going, he foresees, is a world in which Huachuma is once more honored, protected, and abundantly sustained.

Finally, I am Laurel Sugden, Huachuma Collective’s Executive Director and Cofounder. A longtime writer and plant lover from Montana, I am finishing my PhD research on Huachuma, which has confirmed through botanical surveys what Andean communities have known for decades: that the wild cacti are in fast decline due to overharvesting.

Josip is my beloved husband, and my relationship with him and part-time residence in Peru has given me a generous insight into the world of the cactus. I have had the opportunity to survey a great portion of Huachuma’s wild habitats and make pilgrimages to its most sacred sites over my years of research. Being in academia and the psychedelic science world in North America has given me perspective on the challenges we face and the potential we have to overcome them. I am usually the one writing, taking photos, and doing my very best to keep up with communicating (and fundraising for!) Huachuma Collective’s work.

In the meantime, Josip, Felipe, Simeon, and Nachi have been working hard behind the scenes, co-creating a new joint statement with 40 of the most important remaining curanderos and elders in the Northern tradition, along with their close allies.

We very much look forward to sharing this historic work with you soon - work which we hope will put Huachuma’s story squarely back where it belongs, in the hands of its legitimate heirs.

Read on to celebrate the completion of this year’s seed gathering, which you all so generously funded!

Hasta la proxima,

Laurel

Thank you!! We met the fundraising goal for our Seed Project thanks to the generous support of everyone who donated and shared.

In collaboration with our partner communities, the Huachuma Collective team made the sacred harvest of seeds from 42 distinct populations of Huachuma in Peru this season. We will germinate these seeds at Huachuma Collective headquarters and return them to their communities of origin as robust seedlings - at roughly 3 years of age.

The next step is to fund the conversion of space at HC headquarters into a fully-equipped nursery which will receive and nurture the seedlings as they grow.

Our deepest gratitude goes out to the 55 donors who made the Seed Project possible: Mark, Henning, Hunt, Eliot, David, Payton, Christopher, Katherine, Jonathan, Edwin, Thomas, Alistair, Augusto, Kendra, Kate, Geffen, Devin, Ed, Elizabeth, LeAnn, Bronwen, Amanda, Barrett, Stephen, Ananda, Nienke, Carmen, Shannon, Rebecca, Tiz, Magda, Noriko, Beth, Frances, Kasper, Jonathan, Daniel, Dayenne, Bas, Marleen, Jonas, Luc, Vasco, Anna, Jan, Yves, Joris, Tom, Steven, and to the many people who donated anonymously. An extra-special thanks to Kasper Van Der Meulen, the project’s top donor!

We are all Huachuma Collective.

Colectivo Huachuma (Huachuma Collective) is a Peru-based Nonprofit organization led by an alliance of Indigenous leaders, traditional healers, Andean community members, and academics. Our projects work towards the sustainability of Huachuma and cultural vitality in Northern Peruvian communities.