ALASKA
ENTHEOGENIC
AWARENESS
COUNCIL
ALASKA
ENTHEOGENIC
AWARENESS
COUNCIL
AKEAC Board Members
Regina Randall
Founder & Chair
Regina is from Holy Cross, Alaska, an Athabaskan village located on the Yukon river, where she is an enrolled Tribal citizen. Gina works as an Indigenous rights advocate and political organizer in Alaska. She is the Founder and Chair of the Alaska Entheogenic Awareness Council and directs Arctic Visions, Alaska’s annual psychedelic conference.
In the spring of 2007, Regina traveled to Peru where she was introduced to the world of shamanic healing. Inspired by her experience, she moved to Peru in 2009 where she spent three years training with indigenous curanderos in the Amazon rainforest. Regina has a deep reverence and respect for the Shipibo-Conibo tribe and resonates strongly with their healing practices. She has organized and facilitated many healing retreats in Peru and is passionate about sharing the wonders of entheogenic plant medicine with the world.
Gina is currently pursuing an MA in Political Psychology at Arizona State University. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines.
Skipper Russell-Shimek
Skipper Russell-Shimek is a peony farmer and Iñupiat tribal healer from Northwest Alaska. With deep wisdom and extensive experience in traditional healing practices, she offers guidance, spiritual healing, and remedies rooted in indigenous knowledge. As an elder, Skipper has a profound understanding of her tribe’s cultural and spiritual traditions. She has dedicated her life to enhancing the physical, mental, and spiritual well-being of those she serves.
Deenaalee Chase-Hodgdon
Deenaalee, (They/Them) is Deg Xit’an Dene and Sugpiaq from the villages of Gitr’ingithchagg (Anvik) and Qinuyang (South Naknek), Alaska. Descended from Rivers, the Ocean and named after the great northern Mountain, Deenaalee seeks to ground their work in regenerative economies, food sovereignty and security, circumpolar geopolitics, and plant medicine in the lessons these being teach us; to flow and find grace through daily rapids and meandering; to find depth, breadth and pleasure in the vastness of our interspecies being; and to hold space for the multiplicity of life we interact with through time while deeply rooted to place.
In 2022, Deenaalee visited Peru for the first time to sit with La Medicina under the guidance of Shipibo Curanderos. Their experience with entheogens has led to their sobriety and investment of plant medicine as a path toward addiction recovery and reconnection with the land. Deenaalee is currently working toward building access to ceremony and strengthening the ties between northern and southern traditional healing modalities. They find their joy in spending time working with their hands mending fishing nets and tanning hides, and feasting in community with traditional foods that were gathered, harvested, and grown locally.
AKEAC Advisory Board
Candace Lewis
Candace aims to revolutionize mental health care by exploring dynamic environmental and genetic influences on brain-behavior relationships. A native of Alaska, she earned a Bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Alaska Anchorage. Next, she earned a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience at Arizona State University on a Harry S. Truman Scholarship while investigating the effects of early life stress on addiction behavior and neuroepigenetics.
Candace received a Fulbright Fellowship to learn advanced neuroimaging and psychedelic research methods at the University Hospital of Zurich. She was also awarded the Science Foundation Arizona Bisgrove Fellowship to investigate the interplay between early experiences, epigenetics, physiology and behavior.
Taken together, her research centers around the age-old question of nature versus nurture with a modern twist. Candace seeks to unravel how genetics and experiences continuously interact to shape neurobiology and behavior.
Bia Labate
Dr. Bia Labate (Beatriz Caiuby Labate) is an anthropologist, educator, author, speaker, and activist, committed to the protection of sacred plants while amplifying the voices of marginalized communities in the psychedelic science field. As a queer Brazilian anthropologist based in San Francisco, she has been profoundly influenced by her experiences with ayahuasca since 1996. Dr. Labate has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil. Her work focuses on plant medicines, drug policy, shamanism, ritual, religion, and social justice. She is the Executive Director of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines and serves as a Public Education and Culture Specialist at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Additionally, she is a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and an act as advisor for around 15 organizations, among them the Veteran Mental Health Leadership Coalition and the Alaska Entheogenic Awareness Council. Dr. Labate is also a co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Group for Psychoactive Studies (NEIP) in Brazil and the editor of its site. She has authored, co-authored, and co-edited 28 books, three special-edition journals, and numerous peer-reviewed and online publications (http://www.bialabate.net).
Larry Norris
Larry Norris, PhD is the cofounder of Decriminalize Nature, which began in Oakland, CA in 2019 and has sprouted across the US. He is also the co-founder of Entheogenic Research Integration and Education (ERIE), a nonprofit organization which offers education and integration support for those interested in entheogens. His doctoral research focuses on ayahuasca experiences and integration, as well as expanding integration concepts beyond the psychotherapeutic paradigm.
He believes it is an unalienable right to have one’s own relationship with Nature, and encourages empowering grassroots communities to build local and culturally relevant support structures related to entheogens.
