Opening Questions

Listening across worlds. Walking with humility.

Asking better questions.

For millennia, Indigenous peoples have cultivated profound knowledge of the natural world, consciousness, healing, and the relational fabric of life.

This wisdom, rooted in direct experience, deep ecological awareness, and ancestral continuity, holds vital relevance in our time of planetary crisis.

Yet too often, Indigenous knowledge has been ignored, extracted, or engaged with through frameworks that fail to honor its depth, sovereignty, or context.

This is the context for asking better questions, for wondering how relationships between Indigenous knowledge holders and scientists might unfold differently, if these relationships could be grounded not in extraction or hierarchy, but in care, humility, and respect.

If science is to be of use when it meets the sacred plant medicines, it must be placed in service to those carrying their traditions, guided entirely by their priorities and authority.

Rather than offering answers or frameworks, we approach this with a first question:

What could it look like for scientific approaches to support Indigenous visions, without seeking to lead or define them?

Different ways of Listening

This is not a program or a project. There are no fixed goals.

It is a relational space. An evolving network of dialogue, learning, and listening across different ways of knowing.

Without preconceptions, we ask:

- What becomes possible when Indigenous knowledge is engaged with on its own terms, outside the constraints of Western academic models?

- How can partnerships center Indigenous leadership and cultural continuity, while offering scientific tools where invited?

- In what ways might science contribute to the preservation, amplification, or protection of Indigenous knowledge; if and only if requested by its holders?

- How can we create space for meaningful dialogue between elders and scientists without predefining outcomes?

- What if we took concepts seriously that don’t easily translate, like spirits, ancestral memory, plant intelligence; not as metaphors, but as meaningful realities?

- What might true collaboration look like when we resist collapsing one worldview into another, and instead learn to live in the space between?

These are not rhetorical questions, but living ones, lines of enquiry to be shaped through ongoing conversations, relationships, and trust.

Opening questions - without frameworks

In collaboration with a growing, open collective of Shipibo healers and other Indigenous elders, student of Shipibo medicine and psychiatrist Dr Simon Ruffell is broaching these questions, exploring what respectful partnership might mean when it is led entirely by Indigenous priorities.

Accepting an invitation into curiosity around these questions.

This is a time of humility, and co-responsibility.

To move slowly and listen deeply.

To remain open to the possibility that science, when placed in service, can become a bridge, not a boundary, between worlds.

And to what collaboration might mean when it is not defined in advance.

To be continued.