Ancestral Medicine: Healing the Streets Film

Ancestral Medicine – Healing the Streets is a vérité-style documentary that follows the intertwined journeys of Leajay and Ray—two formerly unhoused, formerly addicted community leaders in Oakland, California, navigating recovery through ancestral medicine and now helping others do the same.

Leajay, a Black woman, and Ray, a Latino man, emerge as powerful healers whose lived experiences fuel a grassroots movement that defies conventional models of treatment and reclaims ancient pathways of transformation.

Their stories unfold within HDRSS (Holistic Detox and Recovery Support System), a peer-led network that weaves together entheogenic plant medicine, Indigenous ceremony, housing justice, and radical community care. From Ayahuasca to Iboga, Bufo to psilocybin, these sacred medicines are integrated alongside sweatlodges, prayer, medicine songs, storytelling, and service restoring healing traditions once violently suppressed by colonization and criminalization.

Leajay and Ray embody what healing looks like outside of institutions. Once caught in cycles of addiction, incarceration, and homelessness, they now lead rites of passage, peer support circles, and spiritual recovery work rooted in ancestral knowledge. Their transformation reflects a larger community movement that insists healing is not only possible—it is sacred, collective, and culturally rooted.

Rather than participating in the so-called psychedelic renaissance—a movement often driven by profit, extraction, and exclusion—Ancestral Medicine – Healing the Streets challenges it. The

film insists this is not a renaissance, but a revolution—a reckoning and reclamation. For Leajay and Ray, these medicines are not new, experimental, or elite. They are ancestral tools of survival, rooted in cultural memory, ceremony, and collective liberation.

Through archival material and intimate vérité footage, the film reveals the deep legacy of harm carried by Black and Brown communities: the War on Drugs, mass incarceration, housing insecurity, and the trauma of systemic neglect.

Yet, within these shadows, Leajay and Ray rise. Once trapped in cycles of addiction and incarceration, they now lead rites of passage, spiritual detox ceremonies, and community healing grounded in reverence, resilience, and love.

Ancestral Medicine – Healing the Streets is both a portrait and a provocation. What does healing look like when it is led by the very people who were never meant to survive? What becomes possible when recovery is no longer about assimilation into broken systems, but about cultural renewal, spiritual sovereignty, and communal rebirth?

Through the journeys of Leajay and Ray, this film offers more than a story of survival—it offers a vision of healing as resistance, recovery as ceremony, and medicine as a return home.

Funds will be used exclusively for project-related expenses, including: