María Sabina Magdalena García (22 July 1894 – 22 November 1985) was a Mazatec curandera, shaman and poet who lived in Huautla de Jiménez, a town in the Sierra Mazateca area of the Mexican state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. Her healing sacred mushroom ceremonies, called veladas, were based on the use of psilocybin mushrooms, particularly Psilocybe caerulescens, a sacred mushroom important to the Mazatecs. María Sabina's veladas contributed to the popularization of indigenous Mexican ritual use of entheogenic mushrooms among westerners, though this was not her intent. Life and death María Sabina was born outside of Huautla de Jiménez in the Sierra Mazateca toward the end of the 19th century. Though Sabina herself was not sure, she believed her birth year was 1894. Her parents were both campesinos; her mother was María Concepción, while her father, Crisanto Feliciano, died from an illness when she was three years old. She had a younger sister, María Ana. Her grandfather and great-grandfather on her father's side were shamans as well, skilled in using the mushrooms to communicate with God, according to their beliefs. After the death of her father, her mother moved the family into town, and Sabina grew up in the house of her maternal grandparents. She died in poverty, suffering from malnutrition later in life. Interaction with the Western world María Sabina's interactions with the Western world, starting with R. Gordon Wasson, have been described, from an indigenous perspective, as "a story of extraction, cultural appropriation, bioprospecting, and colonization." María Sabina was the first contemporary Mexican curandera (also known as sabia i.e. "one who knows"), to allow Westerners to participate in the healing ritual known as the velada. All participants in the ritual ingested psilocybin mushroom as a sacrament to open the gates of the mind. The velada is seen as a purification and a communion with the sacred. In 1955, American ethnomycologist and banker R. Gordon Wasson, and his wife Valentina, a Russian pediatrician and scientist, as well as a passionate mycology enthusiast, visited María Sabina's hometown, where Gordon Wasson participated in a velada with her. Wasson was the first outsider to take part in the velada, and to gain access to the ceremony (which was used to locate missing people and important items), Wasson lied and told her that he was worried about his son back home and wanted information about his whereabouts and well-being, later admitting that