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I Didn’t Grow Up Knowing

I grew up with only a thin thread connecting me to my Puerto Rican and Dominican roots. I was adopted into an Italian-Irish family in New York. I still knew some of my biological aunts and uncles, and I had plenty of Dominican and Puerto Rican friends, many from families that had migrated to New York generations earlier.

Sure, we had salsa and bachata playing. We ate mangú and empanadas. But if I’m honest, when school taught me about Christopher Columbus and “the Indians,” I never once saw myself in those pictures.

I knew Columbus had landed on Hispaniola, the island now shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti. And like a lot of us, I assumed the people who greeted him were gone. Maybe a little DNA had trickled forward somehow, but the culture? Extinct. The Native Americans in the history books were the Cherokee and the Navajo. Not me. Not my ancestors.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I started pulling on that thread. What didn’t I know about my Indigenous ancestry? And the bigger question: what did I want my children to know about it?

Those questions sent me down a long road of research and self-discovery.

Later, when I retired from the Army after 21 years and transitioned to a career as a psychedelic chaplain, I never imagined that my ancestors had their own sacred plant medicine traditions. Years later, after these experiences had changed my own life, learning about cohoba gave me another way to understand where I came from.

What I Wanted My Children to Know

It turns out the “extinct” story was never the whole truth. The Taíno people of the Caribbean were devastated by conquest, enslavement, and disease, but their descendants survived. So did elements of their language, knowledge, and ways of life. Words like hamaca (hammock), huracán (hurricane), and barbacoa (barbecue) are part of that inheritance.

Ancient DNA research has confirmed connections between precolonial Taíno ancestry and present-day Caribbean populations. But descendants didn’t need a genetic study to begin remembering their families or preserving their traditions. Living communities across the islands and the diaspora have continued that work, even while history books told a different story.

I wanted my kids to grow up knowing this from the start, rather than stumbling onto it as adults like I did. So I wrote and published a children’s book for my daughter, Zandunga: The Taíno Warrior. When Sky was born, it was the very first book I read to her, on her first day of life, in the hospital. I wanted her to hear about our ancestors before she ever encountered a history lesson that treated them as gone.

Shortly after writing it, I took a DNA test out of curiosity. I was surprised to learn that more than 12 percent of my ancestry, roughly one-eighth, was Indigenous Caribbean ancestry connected to the Taíno. The results also linked me to ancient DNA samples from Maya individuals. That was a curveball, almost as surprising as discovering that I had 2 percent Jewish ancestry. But I digress.

I also wanted a relationship with the living community. I joined the Higuayagua Taíno tribe, a community working to keep Taíno culture, language, and traditions alive today. Reconnecting with my ancestry meant learning about the past while also finding my place among people carrying that heritage into the present.

My own healing journey eventually led me to become a psychedelic chaplain. Today I lead Heartspace Church, a community that honors sacred plant medicines, and I work with nonprofits helping veterans find healing through psychedelic therapy. I didn’t expect that path to deepen my connection to my ancestors, but learning about their medicine traditions did exactly that.

Cohoba and the Sacred Plants of My Ancestors

When Columbus and the Europeans arrived in the Caribbean, they encountered Taíno people practicing ceremonial, mind-altering plant medicine. By then, those kinds of practices had largely been stamped out in Western Europe.

Columbus commissioned a friar, Ramón Pané, to live among the Taíno and record their beliefs. His account, completed around 1498, is recognized as the first book written in a European language on American soil. It preserves an early description of cohoba and other Taíno spiritual practices, although we are reading them through the perspective of a European missionary. You can read it yourself in An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians.

Most people interested in plant medicine have heard of ayahuasca, used by the Shipibo and other Indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Many know about peyote, sacred to the Wixárika, often called the Huichol, and to communities within the Native American Church. Far fewer know that the Taíno of the Caribbean had their own visionary sacrament.

Taíno communities were generally led by a cacique, or chief, with behiques, sometimes spelled bohiques, serving as healers and spiritual intermediaries. Their work brought together medicinal plant knowledge, care for the sick, and relationships with the spiritual world.

One of their central ceremonies was cohoba, a name also used for the sacred snuff associated with it. The powder was prepared from the seeds of Anadenanthera peregrina and inhaled through the nose using a Y-shaped tube. Carved ceremonial stands held the powder, sometimes in a bowl above a cemí figure’s head.

The seeds contain bufotenin, also known as 5-HO-DMT, a compound related to DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. Cohoba brought participants into a visionary state through which they sought guidance, understood illness, and consulted the cemís. These were spiritual beings associated with deities and ancestors, as well as sacred objects understood to embody their presence and power. The ceremony was especially associated with caciques, behiques, and other people of high standing in the community.

Indigenous peoples in parts of South America still prepare and use Anadenanthera snuffs under names such as yopo and vilca, using different species within the genus. I think of these peoples as distant cousins. The Taíno had ancestral connections to northern South America, and it seems likely that these related medicine traditions grew from knowledge shared by common ancestors long ago.

That family-tree connection matters to me. Colonial violence cut through the transmission of ceremony in our branch of the family, while related traditions continued in others. Learning about them helps me see cohoba within a much older and wider Indigenous history.

Cohoba wasn’t the only sacred plant. My ancestors also held tobacco as holy. Early European accounts describe Taíno people in Cuba smoking rolled bundles of dried leaves, a practice that helped introduce tobacco to Europe. What had spiritual and communal meaning became a global commodity with a long and complicated legacy.

Pané also recorded the use of a plant called güeyo, which later researchers have identified with coca. His descriptions and the analysis that followed belong in the story of Taíno medicine alongside cohoba and tobacco. Coca is the leaf from which cocaine was later isolated, but its traditional use as a whole leaf has its own history across Indigenous communities in Latin America.

The behiques’ medicine knowledge extended beyond any single plant. Early accounts describe fasting, purification, and the use of herbs in healing and ceremony. Those records offer glimpses of a much larger body of knowledge, only some of which Europeans wrote down.

The disruption of that knowledge was also deliberate. Spanish colonization sought to impose Christianity, treating Indigenous spiritual practices as idolatry to be replaced. Because cemís were tied to community authority and resistance, attacking them also served the effort to bring Taíno people under colonial control. The suppression of religion reached into the relationships through which culture and medicine were passed from one generation to the next.

Carrying It Forward

The behiques cared for people through their knowledge of plants and their relationship with the sacred. Learning about them has changed how I understand my own path. I found my way toward sacred medicine through my own healing, and only later learned that my ancestors had approached plants as part of their spiritual lives centuries before me.

I didn’t learn the cohoba ceremony from my family, and the medicines we work with at Heartspace are different. Still, I feel a deep connection to the relationship between healing, community, and spiritual life that I see in these accounts. In my own practice, I approach ceremony as a way to listen, care for others, and commune with God.

That connection gives me both gratitude and responsibility. I want to keep learning about my ancestors, support the living communities preserving our heritage, and honor what I learn through the way I serve.

For my children, whether they ever choose to work with sacred medicines is entirely theirs to decide. What I want them to carry is the knowledge: who their ancestors were, what they knew, what was taken from them, and what survived. I want them to grow up knowing that Taíno people and culture are still here, and that they have a place in that living story.

On Sky’s first day of life, I read her a story about our ancestors. As she and her siblings grow, I hope to keep learning alongside them.

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