Every student of peyote has been met with a sometimes odd mixture of suspiciousness and candor, an ambivalence in attitude derived primarily from the native attitudes toward peyotism itself. Most of the younger adherents of the cult have had White schooling of a sort, but though the express intent of this schooling has been the deculturation of the Indian, on returning to their tribes old loyalties are characteristically reestablished and old ways of thinking fallen into; the total effect of Christian teaching on peyotism, therefore, has not been particularly profound. But all peyote adherents are aware of the efforts, both religious and secular, to suppress the movement, and most of them are familiar with the arguments advanced against peyote as an allegedly harmful drug. They have commonly met this with the counter-propaganda that peyote is a specific cure for alcoholism, but nevertheless this attitude on the part of bearers of the powerful and prestige-full White culture has not left them unimpressed, and there is a consequent lack of psychological security in their belief and practice of peyotism. Though the cult is a compromise solution between Christianity and older native religions, there is still a large number of persons whose attitude toward peyote is thoroughly precarious—as evidenced by the vacillations, defections and rationalizations we are about to list. Save for the Caddo (and there are perhaps historical reasons for this) ordinary sincerity and interest are met by the Plains practitioners with corresponding candor and friendliness toward the ethnographer. There is no very great difficulty in a sympathetic White man’s attending a peyote meeting nowadays. Indeed, some groups, out of naïve faith in the plant’s power, seem even to invite attendance in the hope of producing a propagandist for the cult to counteract the unfriendliness which they feel, and not unrightly, has arisen from ignorance and prejudice. An instance of this good faith and even naïveté occurs in an Osage petition to Congress that in the event of a law being passed to regulate the use of peyote, an exception be made for the “Indian lodges using it as a sacrament,” and they promised to use it only under the supervision of reservation superintendents![1] And a sincerity not open to doubt was evidenced by a Cheyenne, one time president of the Native American Church, who sent 200 peyote buttons on his own initiative through his agency-superintendent to a chemist at Stanford University, requesting a thorough and disinterested scientific analysis, and offering his further services if necessary.[2]