Robert Shumake

Robert Shumake is an American author, publisher, minister and AI researcher born in Detroit, Michigan in 1968. He has published more than 140 books, including the 69-volume Living Archive Series of restored American newspapers, and 87+ DOI-registered academic publications. He also writes as Ajarn Shaman Shu on African, Buddhist, Hindu and Tamil Siddhar traditions.

Yes. Ajarn Shaman Shu is the religious name Robert Shumake writes and teaches under. Robert Shumake is used for historical and business titles; Ajarn Shaman Shu is used for spiritual and consciousness titles. His legal surname is Japhia, taken from his mother, Rev. Deborah L. Shumake Japhia, after her death.

More than 140 published titles. Sixty-nine of them form the Living Archive Series of restored American newspapers, and 68+ are wisdom, consciousness and ancestral-tradition titles published as Ajarn Shaman Shu. A complete A–Z directory of every title is available on this site.

The Living Archive Series is a set of 69 restored American newspapers that preserve original typography and page layouts, with particular attention to Black-owned publications whose reporting rarely survives in digital-only archives. It covers cities from Atlanta to Albuquerque and from Butte to Charleston.

He authored Proposal E, the citizen ballot initiative Detroit voters approved on November 2, 2021 by 53,730 votes to 34,234 — 61.08 percent. It decriminalized personal possession and therapeutic use of entheogenic plants to the fullest extent allowed under Michigan law. It did not legalize sale or commercial distribution.

Before writing full time he worked in real estate and private equity, assembling a portfolio of nearly three million square feet and serving Fortune 500 clients including UPS and General Motors. In June 2011 Black Enterprise ranked his firm, Inheritance Capital Group of Southfield, Michigan, tenth among the largest Black-owned private equity firms in the country.

He studied at Ferris State University and Morehouse College, holds an honorary doctorate from Lewis College of Business in Detroit, and completed the Harvard Data Science Initiative Agentic AI Intensive (certificate UTHW-KVJS). His research is indexed under ORCID 0009-0007-4429-7802 on Zenodo (CERN) and the Open Science Framework.

Five: Ifá and Òrìṣà practice (Yoruba), Thai Theravada Buddhism, the Tamil Siddhar tradition, Maasai shamanism in East Africa and Bon jhākri shamanism in the Himalaya. In Yoruba practice he was received into the Osain high priest society at the rank of Oluwo; in Tamil practice he received the honorific Swamikal.

Shurooms is the first ethnomycological study of sacred mushroom ceremony authored from within the African initiatory tradition. It documents 300+ guided psilocybin ceremonies in Detroit, is indexed on Zenodo with DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21349908 under a CC BY 4.0 license, and provides scholarly grounding for Detroit's Proposal E.

It is Robert Shumake's 2026 book presenting a framework for building wealth with artificial intelligence, drawing on his private equity career and his work structuring large primary-source corpora for AI retrieval.

Seven digital religious universities: Buddha University, Orisha University, Shiva University, Krishna University, Islam University, Enoch University and Egziabher University. Their curricula draw on his published library.

His titles are distributed through Apple Books and Google Play Books, and every book has a detail page on this site with retailer links, description and subject matter. The complete A–Z list is at /books/all.

Use the contact page on this site. Press, podcast, workshop and speaking requests are read personally, and replies typically arrive within three to five business days.