Born in Chicago in 1951, the young UCLA anthropologist Susana Eger came to Mexico in 1975 to conduct a month-long investigation of the Huichol (Spanish for Wixárika) culture. Forty-three years later she is still there. She married into the Wixárika nation, is a mother of three Wixaritari and wants to make sure her offspring and the new generations can find Huichol culture in places other than history books.
Thus, she created the Huichol Center for Cultural Survival and the Traditional Arts, of which she is the passionate director. The goal of the Huichol Center is to build a sturdy bridge between tradition and future that will allow the Wixaritari to enter modernity on their own terms, without destroying the spirit and substance of their ancient culture.

Susana was only 24 years old when she got inspired by the work of the Norwegian anthropologist Carl Lumholtz who, around the 1900s, was the first to document the Wixárika art and iconography. Susana embarked on a scholarly quest to help the Huichols document their way of life, language, plants, shamanism and visionary art, for posterity. As her ethnographic research progressed, it became clear though that Wixárika cultural survival was severely compromised and Susana eagerly turned her scholarly investigation into a huge rescue operation, spearheaded from the Huichol center, nowadays in Huejuquilla del Alto (state of Jalisco). The focus of its programs is on 5 areas: documentation, education, economic self-sufficiency, conservation of traditions and food and water security. Through all the projects generated at the Center, Susana Valadez has been actively providing aid to thousands of Huichols

The spine of the Wixárika nation are the approximately 25 autonomous ceremonial centers in the Huichol homeland in the Sierra Madre Occidental where the traditional marakame (shaman) leadership organizes social life according to ancient religious rituals. One of the most important is the Peyote hunt, the pilgrimage to Wirikuta, the holy place 500km further to the East, in the Chihuahua desert, where the gods and ancestors live at the Cerro Quemado mountain and the peyote sacrament grows. Between February and May, small groups of pilgrims led by the mara'akame of their ceremonial center travel past the Huichol Center in Huejuquilla, strategically located at the start of the pilgrim road: the natural transit point for the departing and returning pilgrims, suitable for material support of the travelers and the collection of incoming information from all corners of the Wixárika homeland. As the Center is convinced that the sacred peyote cactus is essential to Huichol survival, Susana has become the appreciated listener and confidential adviser of the traditional Huichol leadership.

The increase in outside attacks on the Huichol survival of the last decade have strengthened the call for greater international legal protection and some form of central government. Both have produced mixed results so far. The UNESCO cultural heritage claims are stalled in the bureaucratic mills and the Wixárika nation building has been marred by internal strife and incomplete democratic representation.
Susana witnessed developments all along, discussing them with the Wixárika leadership and formulating their wishes for improvement into fields for Huichol Center assistance. Two priorities were defined: the recognition of the Huichol pilgrimage to Wirikuta, the peyote hunt, the archetypal quest for peace between man and the universe, as UNESCO Best Safeguarding Practice and the building of the Nación de Paz Wixárika (The Wixárika Peace Nation) as a viable home for the Huichol people.

Susana’s anthropological research led her, in the 1990s, to a unique collaboration with Ulu Temay, Arrow Person, one of the few known wolf shamans, capable of shape-shifting. Although she never witnessed such an exceptional feat of wolf-people she became convinced of the sincerity of Ulu Temay’s account and reported on it in the scientific literature. The "inter-species communication" which the Huichols insist takes place between themselves, the wolves, and the sacred psychoactive plants represents a kind of breakthrough in human understanding of the ways nature provides its multiplicity of life forms, Susana beliefs. A way of sharing in what might be called a "meeting of the minds". Susana herself proved that open-mindedness lifts all barriers: the gringa became the midwife of a first Nation and the guardian of the guardians.

For more information on Ms. Eger Valadez, please see the interview with her and the expert views of shaman Mara’akame Avila Robles, ethnobotanist Dr. James Bauml, anthroplogist  Professor emerita Stacy Schaeffer, the educator Jesús CANDELARIO COSÍO and the indigenous activist leader Braulio MUÑOZ HERNANDEZ and Huichol art expert Yvonne Negrín.