"There was a white man invited to the peyote ceremony," says José Barreiro, Taino scholar and elder by marriage of the Mohawk Tribe of Akwesasne. "He was sick, thin as a skeleton, wasting away with muscular dystrophy, his back hardly able to hold him up. Night after night, they prayed for him until the sun came up.
"The young men said, 'Why are we doing this?' The old man, the ceremony leader, said, 'We may never know, but the spirit said it's right.'"