behind the work

I am Marlena Robbins, Diné, from Window Rock, Arizona, and a Doctor of Public Health candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. My research examines the intergenerational transmission, disruption, and reclamation of psilocybin mushroom knowledge in urban Native communities, drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted across seventeen cities and analyzed through constructivist grounded theory.

At Berkeley I designed and direct the Collective Continuance: Indigenous Knowledge Fellowship, the first Indigenous knowledge fellowship established at a major psychedelic research center. My scholarship applies Two-Eyed Seeing, an approach that holds Indigenous knowledge systems and Western scientific methods in equal and reciprocal relation. This work has been presented at Harvard and published in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Psychopharmacology and Social Science & Medicine.

I founded Moiré Collective Research to bring this approach to the foundations, research institutions, and companies shaping the field of psychedelic medicine, so that Native communities help determine its direction from the outset.