Erika Gagnon

Erika Gagnon is a Canadian-born ceremonial leader who has followed what she calls the Red Road, a medicine path, for around thirty years. She has spent more than half her life learning from Indigenous elders in Peru, Ecuador, Mexico and the United States, studying their altars, ceremonies and plant knowledge, and has their blessing to carry these traditions forward. She is of mixed heritage and is clear that she does not identify as First Nations. She also turns down the titles shaman and medicine woman, preferring to describe her role as helping people remember their own capacity to heal.

Her work centres on ceremony: temazcal (sweat lodge), tobacco and water blessings, rites for life transitions and one-to-one sessions. At Esalen and Kripalu she leads residential workshops that pair teaching on ancestry and sacred altars with three traditional ceremonies, often on a gift-economy basis in which each participant decides what to give her at the end. She has also set up a bursary for Black, Indigenous and other people of colour who want to attend. Her short films and spoken prayers on YouTube, among them an Earth Day gratitude prayer recorded in 2020, return to the same themes of gratitude, reciprocity and care for water and the Earth.