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In the summer of 1930, the anthropologist Margaret Mead and her second husband and fellow anthropologist, Reo Fortune, made their way to the Omaha Reservation in northeastern Nebraska. At age 28, Mead had already gained renown for her ethnographic study Coming of Age in Samoa. In Samoa, she had found a society whose looser sexual mores she came to view as a challenge to rigid Western norms. But in Nebraska she encountered a people that had already assimilated into Western civilization. In the decades after their catastrophic subjugation and confinement to the reservation, she discovered, many Omaha had embraced a new syncretic religion, the Native American Church, fusing elements of Christianity with native traditions, notably the ritual use of the hallucinogenic peyote cactus. Mead believed that by enabling the transcendence of familiar categories, the Omaha use of peyote was part of their attempt to forge a new culture in the wake of losing their own.