Native American Church

The Native American Church is an Indigenous American religious tradition that uses peyote, a small spineless cactus, as a sacred sacrament in ceremony. Its practices developed from older Indigenous peyote traditions carried by tribes including the Kiowa and Comanche, and took organized, intertribal legal form in Oklahoma, where the Native American Church of Oklahoma was formally incorporated in 1918 to protect the practice.

The Native American Church is one of the longest-standing examples of legally recognized religious sacrament use in the United States, and its history helped shape the broader legal landscape — including the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — that protects sincere religious practices such as ECC's ceremonial use of ayahuasca. ECC is a separate and distinct organization with its own tradition, lineage, and sacrament, and is not affiliated with the Native American Church.