Training and education
Tribally based, culturally grounded learning that prepares providers, leaders, and communities for what is coming.
The Eighth Fire
A tribal-led coalition for Indigenous healing.
Research, education, training, and advocacy — bringing tribal nations, research partners, and allies together under one effort.
Meet our founderWho we are
Why The Eighth Fire
The Eighth Fire takes its name from an Anishinaabe prophecy: an era when all peoples, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, come together to walk a shared path of healing, respect, and restoration.
The Eighth Fire takes that prophecy as its calling — bringing Native voices, experts, and non-Native allies together to shape programs, education, research, and advocacy grounded in Native American traditions and values for healing.
Tribes in the lead
Founding voices
The coalition is being built with tribal nations at the center and remains open to every nation that wants to take part.
What the coalition builds
Shared capacity. Tribal direction.
Resources no single program could build alone are developed across the coalition and directed by participating nations.
A voice in the research
A seat directing what gets studied, where the work happens, and on whose terms.
A place in the work
Paths for tribal clinicians and staff to participate in research and build lasting capacity within their nations.
A collective legal path
One combined effort advancing self-determination and sovereignty over these medicines.
Our work
Four workstreams, one purpose.
The work begins with what tribes need to know, then builds what tribes need to do.
Education
Prepares tribal leaders, tribal health systems, communities, and allies to understand, fund, and administer Indigenous and psychedelic medicine on their own terms. The entry point for member tribes.
Training
Sets the standards of practice and trains the tribal-led workforce that delivers against them. Each nation decides who practices within its jurisdiction.
Research
Advances Native-centered research and advisory engagements through appropriate tribal oversight and community-led data governance.
Advocacy
Carries a unified tribal voice into national dialogue on psychedelic medicine and supports tribes that choose to declare sovereignty over Indigenous medicine within their jurisdiction.
Why now
Psychedelic medicine is moving from research toward regulated care. The question isn't only whether tribes will have access — it's whether Indigenous knowledge and authority have a meaningful place in how it's understood and used.
About The Eighth FireAbout us
Building a future led by tribal nations.
The Eighth Fire is a Native-led 501(c)(3) membership organization of Tribal Nations, bringing together Native leadership, clinical and scientific expertise, and non-Native allies to ensure tribes have a meaningful role in the development of psychedelic medicine.
Why we exist
Vision & mission
VisionA future in which Indigenous medicine is protected and exercised under tribal authority, in which tribal citizens have access to healing that honors both traditional knowledge and clinical evidence, and in which the relationship between tribal nations and the broader health system is one of sovereignty rather than supplication.
MissionRestoring wholeness through the unification of Indigenous wisdom and Western medicine in the emerging field of psychedelic medicine.
Our values
The lens for everything we do.
Sovereignty
Tribes lead. The Eighth Fire is a vehicle tribes use, not an organization that works on tribes' behalf. Standards are co-developed under tribal authority, research passes through tribal IRBs, and data belongs to the tribes that generate it.
Integrity
Traditional and clinical frameworks each meet their own highest standard. They run in parallel, each governing what it is designed to govern; neither is collapsed into the other.
Reciprocity
What the work receives from the land, from knowledge holders, from participants, and from funders is returned. Standards are published openly; knowledge stays with the communities that hold it.
Reverence
The medicines, the land, and the people seeking healing are sacred. This is a healing endeavor with a business architecture sufficient to sustain it, not a business with a healing theme.
Our team
Leadership
Focused leadership for research, education, training, advocacy, access, and sovereignty.
Founder/CEO
Michelle Driver
Citizen of the Choctaw Nation and founder of The Eighth Fire, working to advance culturally aligned healing under tribal authority.
Guidance
Board of Advisors
More to come…
Governance
Board of Directors
More to come…