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Reuben Alvis Snake Jr. (1937–1993) was an American Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) activist, educator, spiritual leader, and tribal leader. He served as a leader within the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the 1970s, and in the National Congress of American Indians in the 1980s. Snake worked towards the establishment of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which passed in 1994, after his death. He advocated for the use of religious, ceremonial peyote.
In 1950, he briefly attended the Haskell Institute (now Haskell Indian Nations University) but dropped out while struggling with alcoholism. He joined the United States Army, serving from 1956 to 1958, and was honorably discharged.
Snake served as a spiritual leader and roadman (a peyote leader) within the Native American Church starting in 1974. Snake fought the overturn of Employment Division v. Smith (1990) and subsequently organized the Native American Religious Freedom Project to lobby for national legislation, an effort that culminated in a 1994 amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, extending protections of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to religious peyote use by Native Americans.
A year after his death, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was amended by President Bill Clinton under the name the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which allowed for the use of peyote in religious ceremony.
He was the subject of the posthumous biography, Your Humble Serpent: The Wisdom of Reuben Snake (1995; Clear Light Books; written by Jay Fikes) and a documentary film of the same title (1996; Peacedream Productions; by film director Gary Rhine). His archive is located in the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
Michael Pollan wrote the book How to Change Your Mind (2018), which became a Netflix docuseries in 2022 of the same name and featured a segment on Native American use of peyote (mescaline) and mentions Snake's legal battle (season 1, episode 4).
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