Ariel Donthnier Waagosh

Ariel Donthnier Waagosh (she/they) is an attorney advising clients in highly regulated and emerging spaces. For over 15 years, Ariel has provided business, corporate, and regulatory support to organizations, non-profits, government agencies, tribes, healthcare providers, and practitioners with an emphasis on cannabis, plant medicines, and psychedelics. 

Ariel was at the forefront of cannabis policy reform in California, advising clients as they transitioned from the “Prop 215 days” to the highly-regulated systems in place today. Her front-row seat with hundreds of cannabis start-ups provides valuable guidance for her clients. 

Ariel takes a common-sense approach to legal advice, and her clients are heart-based, brilliant people who care about building and maintaining successful, impactful, and ethical organizations and offerings. 

Ariel is actively engaged in the conversation about “psychedelic lawyering” (ethical lawyering grounded in our responsibilities to all our relatives) and helping to shape policies that emphasize open source, ethical business models that honor the Earth, peoples, and lineages. 

Ariel is a co-founder of the Psychedelic Bar Association (PBA) and serves on PBA’s Legacy Board. She co-produced the series Law & Ethics: The Psychedelics Industry and Indigenous Peoples, and related resource library (e.g. Rights of Nature, Nagoya Protocol, UNDRIP). Ariel has written on Rights of Nature as a vehicle to protect sacred plants and traditional cultural knowledge, and she regularly lectures at universities and law schools, including Columbia, Yale, Harvard, UCLA and Berkeley on biopiracy, Nagoya Protocol, and other issues related to ecological justice, drug policy reform, and Indigenous rights. 

Ariel recently joined the board of Benefit Honoring, an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building a global community rooted in Indigenous traditional lifeways and biocultural preservation. She is a member of Roots To Sky Sanctuary, a land-based healing and community project. She is also honored to be in study of Indigenous Peacemaking ways. 

She has a Bachelors of Arts from University of Michigan in Religious Studies (2000) and a JD from Berkeley Law School (2005). While in law school, Ariel participated with a group of other Native American law students in discussions at the United Nation for what became the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Ariel is an enrolled Tribal citizen of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa & Chippewa Indians and is Of Counsel with Calyx Law.