From cultural significance to sovereign authority: ethnobotany, federal land management, and the Buffalo National River/Cherokee nation plant gathering agreement

1 Introduction

Plants occupy a distinctive place in American Indian cultural resource law. Federal agencies operating under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA, 1969), the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA, 1966), and the American Indian Religious

Freedom Act (AIRFA, 1978) are required to assess the effects of proposed actions on traditional cultural resources, including the plant resources of affiliated tribes. This mandate presumes that cultural significance can be identified, documented, and communicated in categorical, comparative, and, where possible, quantitative terms legible to regulatory systems. Yet the cultural significance of plants for Indigenous peoples resists such reduction. Within American Indian epistemologies, plants are not merely resources; they are relatives, medicines, obligations, and expressions of enduring relationships between people and place. No index can fully capture those dimensions. This tension between relational epistemologies and the categorical logic of resource management runs throughout the broader TEK literature, from Nadasdy's critique of the politics of knowledge “integration” (Nadasdy, 1999) to Whyte's account of TEK as an inherently collaborative, co-produced concept rather than a discrete corpus to be extracted and applied (Whyte, 2013).

For four decades, this tension between the relational character of Indigenous plant knowledge and the categorical demands of federal resource management has shaped applied ethnobotany on federal lands. Quantitative tools developed in response to that tension, beginning with Turner's Index of Cultural Significance (Turner, 1988) and extended through the Ethnic and Cumulative ICS adaptations developed by (Stoffle et al. 1990) for Southern Paiute cultural resource assessment at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, have supplied land managers with empirical evidence of cultural significance to inform recommendations, environmental review, and protection decisions. These tools have been useful, but they also have clear limits. The validity analysis in Puchuxwavaats Uapi (Stoffle et al., 1999) showed that ICS scores for the same plant, drawn from the same ethnic group, varied by as much as 94 percent across four studies, raising basic questions about the precision and regulatory utility of any single project's findings.

The 2019 Memorandum of Agreement between Buffalo National River and the Cherokee Nation addresses this longstanding tension in a way earlier regulatory instruments did not. Rather than generating a more refined significance score, it grounds protection in tribal sovereign cultural authority rather than researcher-generated indices. Executed under 36 CFR 2.6, the National Park Service plant-gathering regulation that took effect on August 11, 2016, the agreement is among the first government-to-government plant-gathering agreements issued under that rule (National Park Service, 2016). It authorizes Cherokee Nation members to gather traditional plants within four designated areas of the park under an annual Special Use Permit, with species stipulations and collection conditions derived directly from ethnobotanical field documentation produced by the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) at the University of Arizona in partnership with the Cherokee Nation. In doing so, the agreement translates ethnobotanical findings into enforceable management conditions without requiring the Cherokee Nation to rank resources that its epistemology regards as equally sacred. This approach partially resolves what (Stoffle and Evans 1990) termed the cultural triage dilemma: the ethically costly process through which regulatory systems compel Indigenous peoples to prioritize resources they understand as equally important.

This paper analyzes the agreement, the ethnobotanical study that provided its evidentiary foundation, the regulatory process that conferred legal authority, and the theoretical significance of its departure from index-based resource protection. Three principal arguments are advanced. First, the applied contract research design underlying the Buffalo National River study differs from mainstream quantitative ethnobotany in ways not sufficiently articulated in the methodological literature. Applied studies in federal land management contexts operate within administrative boundaries defined by agency jurisdiction, address management questions established by statute, and treat tribal government endorsement as the primary validity criterion. These are not methodological shortcomings but design features that reflect the legally relevant unit of analysis for federal resource management decisions.

Second, the Buffalo National River study implemented this design within the parameters of 36 CFR 2.6, producing a gathering agreement with species stipulations and permit conditions directly traceable to field-documented ethnobotanical data. It represents the first application of a methodological approach piloted at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (Stoffle Richard et al., 2015) and developed specifically in anticipation of the new regulation. The result is a tribally endorsed, NEPA-compliant ethnobotanical foundation for a binding government-to-government gathering agreement.

Third, the MOA achieves outcomes that ICS-based significance scoring cannot. Earlier applied studies produced scores intended to persuade land managers, and their regulatory force depended on official discretion. By contrast, the Buffalo National River MOA mandates management action through a government-to-government process grounded in Cherokee Nation sovereignty. This approach does not replace ethnobotanical methodology; the technical report's plant-specific documentation supplied the empirical basis for the MOA's conditions. What changes is the basis of protection: not a formula's output, but tribal sovereign authority formalized in a regulatory instrument.

The paper moves from legal context to methodology, findings, and regulatory and theoretical implications. Section 2 outlines the federal regulatory system shaping applied ethnobotanical research at NPS units, including the regulatory gap 36 CFR 2.6 was designed to close. Section 3 presents the ICS methodological lineage and compares applied contract research with mainstream quantitative ethnobotany. Section 4 details the two-phase study design, the Cherokee Plant Gathering Form, and the EA/NEPA process. Section 5 presents findings from the 76-plant dataset: contemporary use, seasonality, collection volume and methods, and Medicine Keeper statements on sustainability ethics. Section 6 analyzes the gathering agreement as regulatory output, including its shift from significance scoring to sovereign authority. Section 7 considers broader implications for NPS practice, replicability, the composite ICS concept, climate change, and data sovereignty.

2 Regulatory and historical context

2.1 The federal regulatory framework for traditional plant resources

The legal architecture governing traditional plant resources on federal lands reflects over four decades of legislation and executive action. (NEPA 1969) requires federal agencies to assess proposed actions' environmental impacts, including on cultural resources. NHPA Section 106 (1966, as amended) requires agencies to identify historic properties, including plant-gathering cultural landscapes, and consult affected tribes. (AIRFA 1978) directed agencies to evaluate their effects on American Indian religious practices, often inseparable from traditional plant use. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, 1990), though primarily concerned with human remains and funerary objects, reinforced tribal cultural authority over traditional resources more broadly. Executive Order 13007 (Indian Sacred Sites, 1996) directed land managers to accommodate access to and ceremonial use of sacred sites, a category frequently encompassing associated plant communities.

Together, these authorities establish that plants of cultural significance to traditionally associated Indian tribes are subjects of affirmative legal obligations. Federal agencies must identify them, assess proposed impacts upon them, and consult with tribes about their protection. The practical difficulty is that these obligations presuppose a form of cultural significance that can be documented and acted upon within the logic of environmental review, a logic that often favors quantification, categorical comparison, and discrete impact findings. As (Stoffle and Evans 1990) argued, American Indian peoples' initial and epistemologically authentic position is holistic conservation: all plants are important, all are interconnected, and none can be prioritized without distorting the relational fabric they constitute. Regulatory systems, however, require prioritization, creating a structural tension that no prior federal instrument had fully resolved.

That tension was compounded, in the NPS context, by a specific regulatory gap. Existing NPS regulations at 36 CFR 2.1(d), promulgated in 1983, explicitly prohibited tribal members from taking, using, or possessing plants in park areas for ceremonial or religious purposes, except where federal statutes or treaties specifically authorized such activity. Traditional plant gathering that had occurred in areas now administered as national parks had no regulatory pathway for continuation under those regulations. Prior to 2016, the regulatory system that required agencies to document the cultural significance of traditional plant resources provided no mechanism for those same agencies to authorize the continuation of the practices that made those resources culturally significant.

2.2 36 CFR 2.6—the NPS plant gathering regulation

The plant gathering regulation, published July 12, 2016, and effective August 11, 2016 (81 FR 45024), was designed to close this gap. Co-authored by Watkins, Evans, and Cochrane, the rule amended existing NPS regulations by creating an exception to the prohibition at 36 CFR 2.1(d), authorizing the NPS to enter into agreements with federally recognized Indian tribes to allow for the gathering and removal of plants or plant parts from National Park System areas for traditional purposes.

The rule's operative framework has five essential elements. First, gathering is limited to enrolled members of federally recognized tribes that are traditionally associated with the specific park area, and that traditional association must predate the establishment of the park. Second, gathering must serve a traditional purpose, defined as a customary activity and practice rooted in the tribe's history and important to the survival of the tribe's distinct culture. Third, authorized gathering must be sustainable and may not result in a significant adverse impact on park resources or values. Fourth, the NPS must prepare a NEPA environmental assessment and issue a finding of no significant impact before any gathering agreement takes effect. Fifth, all gathering agreements require the concurrence of the Regional Director and are implemented through annual Special Use Permits issued by the Park Superintendent.

Two aspects of the rule's design are especially important for the Buffalo National River case. First, the framework is grounded in the government-to-government relationship between the United States and Indian tribes. Gathering authority derives from tribal sovereignty, formalized through an agreement and annual permit, while ethnobotanical documentation serves the distinct function of supporting NEPA review and specifying permit terms. Second, the rule's preamble cites the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore ethnobotany study (Stoffle Richard et al., 2015), commissioned by Evans while the rule was being drafted, as exemplary of the NPS Cultural Anthropology Program's research supporting the regulatory framework.

As of 2024, the NPS had executed plant gathering agreements under 36 CFR 2.6 at three park units. The first was with the Tohono O‘odham Nation at Saguaro National Park (2018), which largely formalized gathering activities already underway. The second was with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians at Great Smoky Mountains National Park (2019), initially focused on a single plant species in a portion of the park contiguous with Eastern Band reservation lands. The third was with the Cherokee Nation at Buffalo National River (2019/2022), developed through purpose-designed ethnobotanical fieldwork for a tribe reclaiming access to a landscape from which it had been historically removed. A fourth agreement, with the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi at Indiana Dunes National Park, was pending. A FONSI was signed in August 2022 for the environmental assessment; a final agreement had not yet been approved and signed. A fifth case was in active development at Acadia National Park in Maine, where a FONSI for the environmental assessment was signed in July 2024. The park was actively consulting with each of the five federally recognized Wabanaki tribes (the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, the Mi'kmaq Nation, the Passamaquoddy Tribes at Pleasant Point and at Indian Township, and the Penobscot Nation) for the gathering of sweetgrass (Anthoxanthum nitens) from coastal salt marshes within the park for traditional ceremonial and basketmaking purposes. The Buffalo National River agreement remains distinctive in scope: it covers the broadest range of documented use plants, encompasses the most ecologically varied gathering areas, and was developed for a tribe returning to a landscape from which it had been removed by federal action. As documented in the technical report (Stoffle Richard et al., 2019), this distinctiveness is measurable against the nearest comparison case: the initial Great Smoky Mountains agreement authorized the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, whose reservation is contiguous with the park, to gather a single edible species (sochan, Rudbeckia laciniata) under a fixed annual quota, whereas the Buffalo National River agreement authorizes the Cherokee Nation, a tribe with no reservation contiguous to the park, to gather across a 76-species field-documented inventory. The difference in scope reflects the difference in purpose: the Great Smoky Mountains agreement formalized an existing, continuous single-species practice, while the Buffalo National River agreement was built from purpose-designed ethnobotanical fieldwork supporting a tribe's renewed access to a landscape.

2.3 Buffalo national river and the Cherokee nation

Buffalo National River was established in 1972 as the first national river in the United States, preserving a 135-mile undammed stretch of the Buffalo River in northwestern Arkansas (Figure 1). The park encompasses approximately 95,000 acres within the Ozark Plateau, a landscape of rugged hills, limestone bluffs, karst formations, river corridors, and upland forests that supports extraordinary biological diversity. Park botanists have documented 1,780 plant species within its boundaries, distributed across eight plant communities: upland oak-hickory forest, upland oak-pine forest, beech forest, riparian forest, glades, glade-forest transition areas, river cane thickets, and post-oak barrens.

American Indian people have occupied the Buffalo National River area continuously for more than 10,000 years (Zedeño and Laluk, 2008). Cherokee connections to the landscape are historically documented from the eighteenth century. A group of Cherokees known as the Old Settlers migrated westward from their southeastern homelands beginning in the early 1700s and established communities in the Ozark region, including the Buffalo River watershed. The river and its tributaries lie within lands granted by treaty to the Old Settlers in 1817. Although a subsequent treaty in 1828 rescinded that grant and ultimately resulted in Cherokee removal to Indian Territory, the cultural and ecological connections established during the Old Settler period persisted. The Ozark highland environment is ecologically similar to the Cherokee Nation's ancestral Southern Appalachian homelands, and many of the plant species traditionally used by Cherokee people are present within Buffalo National River in greater abundance and health than on the Cherokee Nation's current trust lands in northeastern Oklahoma (Stoffle Richard et al., 2019; Carroll, 2015).

The institutional history of the Buffalo National River ethnobotanical study reflects the convergence of research and regulatory timelines that characterize the case. Funding for the study was secured in 2014, and background research and initial meetings with the Cherokee Nation began in 2015. Following a scoping trip to meet with Park staff, a field session was held in 2017 with four tribally appointed Cherokee Medicine Keepers, Anna Sixkiller, Phyllis Edwards, Bonnie Kirk, and Gary Vann.

The Cherokee Nation submitted the official gathering rights request in July 2017, and a preliminary technical report followed that November. After a period of administrative transition at the Park, the Cherokee Nation reinitiated the process in June 2018; the Park transmitted a draft Environmental Assessment and gathering agreement that August. The Cherokee Nation reviewed both documents for sensitivity and returned them with approval in June 2019, after which they were posted for public review and drew nine responses. The final technical report was completed on September 13, 2019, and the NPS signed the final agreement that December. A public signing ceremony, delayed by COVID-19 restrictions, was held with the Cherokee Nation in April 2022 (Figure 2).

A prior publication has examined this case from the perspectives of Cherokee cultural governance and the politics of Indigenous co-stewardship in national parks (Stoffle Richard et al., 2024). The present paper addresses the ethnobotanical methods, plant inventory findings, and policy implications of the gathering agreement, focusing on aspects not developed in the earlier work. This pattern is consistent with the broader co-stewardship literature, which finds that institutional structures for knowledge translation, rather than the mere availability of Indigenous knowledge, determine whether collaborative management succeeds (Bohensky and Maru, 2011; Ross et al., 2011).

3 Theoretical and methodological structure

3.1 Applied Ethnobotany in federal land management: a distinct research tradition

The legal conditions of the NPS plant gathering regulation made the Buffalo National River agreement possible; the BARA and NPS research tradition made it workable in practice. The Buffalo National River ethnobotanical study differs from mainstream quantitative ethnobotany in its basic design, validity criteria, and the character of its outputs. These differences follow directly from the structural conditions of contract research conducted in support of federal land management. Clarifying this distinction situates the paper's contribution within the wider ethnobotanical literature.

Studies in the tradition from which the Buffalo National River work stems share three defining features. First, the study area is defined by administrative or project boundaries set by the commissioning agency, an agreement authorizing plant gathering at Buffalo National River requires documentation of resources within Buffalo National River, not a census of everything the Cherokee Nation knows about plants wherever they grow. Second, the research questions are defined by regulatory requirements rather than disciplinary curiosity: the study was designed to provide the information 36 CFR 2.6 requires before a gathering agreement can be executed, not to generate an academic significance index. Third, cultural significance within the study area is defined by the tribal participants themselves rather than by researchers applying external criteria, the four Medicine Keepers who participated in the May 2017 field sessions were appointed by the Cherokee Nation, and it is their designation of what is significant, not an etic criterion, that the data record.

Taken together, these features make applied federal land-management ethnobotany distinct from mainstream quantitative ethnobotany in its assumptions, validation, and outputs, summarized in Table 1.

Table 1. Comparison of applied federal land management ethnobotany and mainstream quantitative ethnobotany.

The critical literature on these indices identifies real weaknesses in the academic tradition. (Coe and Gaoue 2020) analyzed twelve commonly used quantitative ethnobotanical indices and found eleven to be statistically redundant. (Leonti 2022) showed that most indices lack sample-size correction and covariate adjustment. (Fraser and Junqueira 2010) identified conceptual vagueness in the definition of ‘use,' undermining comparability across studies. These critiques matter within the academic index tradition, but they apply only partially to the Buffalo National River study, which was not designed to estimate a culture's total plant knowledge. In this applied context, the central validity question is whether the Cherokee Nation endorses the findings as faithful to its concerns within the defined study area.

3.2 The ICS methodological lineage

The Buffalo National River study did not emerge from a methodological vacuum. Its data-collection instrument, analytical categories, tiered research design, and interpretive framework all derive from a body of applied ethnobotanical work developed over four decades in support of federal cultural resource assessment.

Nancy Turner's Index of Cultural Significance (ICS) (Turner, 1988) provided the first systematic, quantitative framework for assessing composite plant cultural significance in an indigenous context, moving beyond frequency-of-mention measures toward a multidimensional score that incorporates quality, intensity, and exclusivity of use. Turner acknowledged explicitly that the resulting scores are ‘ at most an estimate rather than an absolute value' and noted that evaluations of cultural significance should ideally be made by native peoples themselves. The formula's theoretical commitments, particularly the quality hierarchy, which ranks food above medicine above ceremony on a Western survival logic, reflect the academic comparative context in which it was developed.

(Stoffle et al. 1990) made the first application of Turner's model to an alternative ethnobotanical dataset as part of the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, Native American cultural resource assessment, a contract study involving sixteen tribes. The adaptations made to Turner's formula were driven by the requirements of American Indian cultural resource assessment. The quality hierarchy was abandoned in favor of domain equality. Storage and management practices were added to the intensity-of-use category. A contemporary use multiplier (c = 2 if currently used, 1 if not) was added to distinguish plants actively maintained in cultural practice. For multi-tribe studies, the Ethnic Index of Cultural Significance (EICS) and Cumulative Index of Cultural Significance (CICS) provided per-group and summary scores. The Spatial Area Significance (SAS) framework translated plant-level significance into area-level significance relevant to land management decisions. The resulting formula (EICS = Sum (p/u × i × e × c)) and its cumulative variant formed the analytical basis for subsequent work in the tradition.

The Puchuxwavaats Uapi paper, published in Human Organization, subjected ICS methodology to a systematic validity analysis using data from four Southern Paiute ethnobotanical studies (Stoffle et al., 1999). Sixty-five controlled comparisons showed that ICS scores for the same plant could vary by as much as 94 percent across studies. Chi-square analysis identified three statistically significant sources of variation: the number of interviews conducted (χ² = 10.979, p < 0.05), the proportion of elders among respondents (χ² = 7.461, p < 0.05), and the proportion of female elders (χ² = 9.002, p < 0.05). Female elders emerged as keystone knowledge holders. The study's principal methodological implication was that project-specific scores are partial estimates rather than definitive measures, a point that becomes important again in the discussion of the Buffalo National River dataset in Section 7.

The most proximate methodological antecedent to the Buffalo National River study, commissioned by Evans while 36 CFR 2.6 was in draft form, documented 210 Odawa traditional use plants across seven ecozones at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (SLBE) (Stoffle Richard et al., 2015). The study developed the Native Plant Use and Resource Availability Recording Form, which was the direct precursor to the Cherokee Plant Gathering Form used at Buffalo National River. The five use categories (medicine, food, craft, construction, and other) and the volume scale (handful, bucket, bushel, more) were carried forward to Buffalo National River without modification. The SLBE study was explicitly designed in anticipation of the proposed plant gathering regulation, and the rule's preamble cited the SLBE study as exemplary of the NPS Cultural Anthropology Program's research tradition.

3.3 Holistic conservation, cultural triage, and relational ontology

Two theoretical concepts, developed by (Stoffle and Evans 1990) from a systematic analysis of 11 American Indian cultural resource assessment projects, are key for interpreting the Buffalo National River findings and understanding why the gathering agreement represents a qualitatively different kind of resource protection than ICS-based significance scoring.

The first is holistic conservation. When Indian peoples are formally asked to evaluate the potential impacts of a proposed development project on their cultural resources, their initial and epistemologically authentic response identifies all cultural resources as equally important, put on the earth for a purpose by the Creator, interconnected in ways that make any prioritization a distortion of the relational fabric they constitute. This response is presented in formal oration and is not a bargaining position; it is an accurate description of how the resources are understood within the cultural system.

The second concept is cultural triage. Holistic conservation is effective as a means of resource protection only when it prevents a project from proceeding. When projects proceed despite holistic conservation positions, which, (Stoffle and Evans 1990) documented is the typical outcome, Indian peoples face an ethically costly forced choice: remain silent and lose all influence, or prioritize resources they believe equally sacred to achieve some degree of protection. Like medical triage in mass casualty situations, cultural triage entails selecting some resources for special status while accepting that others will be placed at greater risk under conditions of power asymmetry, not free choice. Tribal elders who engage in cultural triage experience genuine ethical conflict, emotional stress, and fear of reprisal.

Together, these concepts identify the structural problem that the Buffalo National River gathering agreement partially resolves. Earlier ICS-based studies protected resources through ranked significance claims, a framework that required cultural triage. The agreement instead authorizes Cherokee gathering across designated areas of the park without requiring the Cherokee Nation to declare any plant less important than another. Its specific exclusions, such as Missouri Bladderpod, Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission tracked species, and the bark-collection prohibition during bat pup season, are grounded in ecological protection requirements rather than in a ranking of Cherokee cultural values.

The relational ontology within which this resolution makes sense is expressed most directly in the statements of the Cherokee Medicine Keepers. Their founding statement, nvwoti asquangododi, ‘to keep the medicine going', acknowledges the role traditional medicine plays in maintaining Cherokee relationships with the land. (Carroll 2015) documents that numerous Cherokee elders have stated that if the people do not use the plants, the Creator will take them away. Plant use and plant protection are not opposites within this ontology, they are obligations of the same relationship. The gathering agreement accommodates this ontology by grounding the authorization in Cherokee Nation sovereignty and deferring to Cherokee cultural authority for management questions not enumerated in the permit conditions.

4 Methods

4.1 Study design and the two-phase approach

The methodological distinctions outlined above are incorporated into the Buffalo National River study's research design. The study used a two-phase approach, utilizing the tiering principle to build on prior research rather than duplicating it. Phase One produced a documentary baseline that informed site selection, instrument development, and field preparation. Phase Two generated the ethnographic field data that constituted the primary evidentiary record for the EA and the gathering agreement.

Phase One—Traditional Cherokee Plant Index. The first phase was a documentary research effort comparing the full inventory of plant species recorded within Buffalo National River against plants documented as traditional Cherokee use plants in published ethnobotanical literature. The NPS had cataloged 1,780 plant species within the park's administrative boundaries. Five published ethnobotanical studies were consulted: Banks (Banks William, 1953), (Garrett 2003), (Hamel and Chiltoskey 2002), (Mooney 1932), and the Cherokee Nation Natural Resources Department (Cherokee Nation Natural Resources Department, 2009). Carroll's internal Cherokee Nation Ethnobotanical Study database, maintained since 2004, and his published booklet Wild Plants of the Cherokee Nation (Cherokee Nation Publications, 2009) offered evidence of contemporary use. Comparison of these sources against the park plant inventory identified 281 species (approximately 16 percent of the total park flora) as both currently present within Buffalo National River and previously documented as traditional Cherokee use plants. These 281 species constituted the Traditional Cherokee Plant Index.

The Phase One index is itself a regulatory finding. It demonstrates, through published ethnobotanical literature predating the study, that Cherokee cultural relationships with specific plant species within Buffalo National River are historically documented and continuous, establishing the cultural affiliation required by 36 CFR 2.6 before a gathering agreement can be negotiated.

Phase Two—Ethnographic Field Work. The second phase was on-site ethnographic documentation conducted with four tribally appointed Cherokee Medicine Keepers as Cherokee representatives. They identified traditional plants within the park, provided cultural context for their uses and significance, and articulated traditional gathering and management practices. The tribal government's selection of participants, rather than researchers', is the mechanism by which the sovereign authority of the Cherokee Nation is expressed in the research design. The Medicine Keepers are recognized by the tribal government as tradition bearers and advisors to the Nation's resource programs. The study's tiered character builds directly on (Stoffle Richard et al. 2015) for its methodological structure and on (Carroll 2015), Roots of Our Renewal, for cultural context.

4.2 The Cherokee plant gathering form

The primary data collection instrument was the Cherokee Plant Gathering Form, developed for this study from the Native Plant Use and Resource Availability Recording Form created by (Stoffle Richard et al. 2015) for the Sleeping Bear Dunes study. Categories carried forward from that previous study without modification were: contemporary use, classified into five categories (medicine, food, craft, construction, and other); season of collection (spring, summer, fall, winter); and volume or quantity of plant material typically collected at one time (handful or less, bucket, bushel basket, more). The ‘other' use category serves a specific additional function: it provides a recording space for ceremonially sensitive information that participants may identify as significant without wishing to document in detail for a public record.

The categories added for 36 CFR 2.6 compliance were: plant parts collected (flower, leaf, fruit/seed, stem/trunk, root); collection methods and tools (hand, spade, clippers, hatchet, other); traditional management practices; factors that would make sustainable gathering difficult or impossible; and gender-specific gathering considerations. Each of these additions corresponds directly to a specific information requirement in the rule's text, assuring that every plant-specific interview generates precisely the information needed to populate the EA's impact analysis and the gathering agreement's operative permit conditions.

4.3 Field session

The field session was preceded by a January 2017 scoping trip in which Evans, Carroll, Cherokee Nation administrative liaison Pat Gwin, and University of Arizona researchers visited Buffalo National River to review potential field sites. Three sites were evaluated and selected: Lost Valley, Rush Landing, and Buffalo Point Overlook.

The formal field session was held in May 2017. University of Arizona and University of Colorado Boulder researchers conducted a preliminary team meeting to review recording procedures and archiving protocols. After the Cherokee Medicine Keepers arrived, field data collection began.

Formal data collection included plant-specific interviews using the Cherokee Plant Gathering Form, audio recording, and photography and produced 76 data collection events. Informal participant-guided discussions covering Cherokee history, park geography, cultural connections, and ecological observations yielded 12 additional data collection events across the two sites (Figure 3).

The Medicine Keepers brought both deep traditional plant knowledge and institutional authority as representatives of the Cherokee Nation Medicine Keepers, a group formed in 2008 in response to elders' concerns about the declining transmission of land-based cultural knowledge (Figure 4). Their founding statement, nvwoti asquangododi, ‘to keep the medicine going', articulates the purpose that animated their participation. Several Medicine Keepers observed that areas within the Park bore a strong ecological resemblance to the Cherokee ancestral homeland in the Southern Appalachians, and that plants at Buffalo National River were, in some cases, more abundant and healthier than on the Cherokee Nation's current trust lands in northeastern Oklahoma.

4.4 The environmental assessment and NEPA process

The EA and gathering agreement were transmitted to the Cherokee Nation in May 2019, with an explicit request that the documents be reviewed for sensitive information to be removed before the public review period. This sensitivity review serves both as a data-sovereignty mechanism and as a practical recognition that the ethnobotanical record contains information whose disclosure could compromise the cultural practices the agreement is meant to protect. After the Cherokee Nation returned the reviewed and approved documents to Buffalo National River staff, those documents were then transmitted to NPS officials in Washington, D.C., for Washington office review.

Once the Washington office reviewed the documents, the EA and gathering agreement were posted on the NPS Planning, Environment, and Public Comment (PEPC) website in August 2019. The public review period ran through September 2019 and nine responses were received. An errata document issued in October 2019 made two corrections: one plant species was removed from the gathering list on conservation grounds, and the term ‘mitigation' was corrected to ‘stipulation' throughout the document. The FONSI was signed by the Park superintendent in November 2019, and, as required by the regulation, concurred by the Regional Director in December 2019.

5 Findings

5.1 The traditional Cherokee plant index

As detailed in Section 4.1, Phase One documentary research identified 281 species as both currently present within Buffalo National River and previously documented as traditional Cherokee use plants, constituting the Traditional Cherokee Plant Index, a finding of direct regulatory significance independent of the subsequent field session.

It thereby establishes, through literature predating this study, the cultural affiliation required by 36 CFR 2.6 before a gathering agreement can be negotiated.

Of the 281 traditionally documented species, 76 were recorded during the field sessions as plants of contemporary cultural interest and use to the Cherokee Nation. The 76-species field dataset and the 281-species Phase One index together trace a living tradition of Cherokee plant knowledge: the index documents the breadth of Cherokee cultural relationships with the park's flora as established in the ethnobotanical literature; the field dataset represents a contemporarily confirmed subset of those relationships.

5.2 Contemporary plant use

The 76 plants documented during the field sessions were distributed across five use categories. Medicine was the primary use category, with 53 plants identified as medicinal. Food was the second category, with 35 plants. Craft and other uses each accounted for five plants, and construction for one. The names of the documented plants are presented in Table 2.

Table 2. Cherokee plants recorded at buffalo national river (N = 76).

The predominance of medicinal plants reflects the central role of plant medicine in Cherokee cultural identity and practice. Cherokee plant medicine is not solely pharmacological; it represents a philosophy grounded in Cherokee ontology that connects the physical and spiritual worlds (Carroll, 2015). Medicinal use encompasses healing, conjuring, and spiritual practice.

Food plants formed the second-largest category; nearly half were also classified as medicinal, and 23 of the 76 plants served two uses (Figure 5). The craft category is small but notable: the paradigmatic craft plant is rivercane (Arundinaria gigantea), central to Cherokee basket-making for more than a thousand years (Hill, 1997) until removal disrupted access and prompted the development of buckbrush as a substitute (Power, 2007). The abundance and health of rivercane at Rush Landing therefore represents a practical opportunity to support the revitalization of traditional basketry.

The ‘other' category accommodates ceremonially sensitive information that participants identified without elaboration in the documentary record, thereby providing a data sovereignty mechanism embedded within the instrument's architecture.

5.3 Seasonal gathering patterns

Use categories alone do not determine how gathering must be managed; timing matters as well. Seasonal patterning shows when access must remain available if the agreement is to accommodate the contemporary uses identified above. Spring was the primary gathering season, with 55 of 76 plants identified as gathered in spring. Fall was nearly as significant, with 52 plants; summer followed with 47 plants. Winter was the least common season, with 28 plants. Multi-seasonal gathering is the standard rather than the exception: 34 percent of identified plants are available for gathering year-round; an additional 26 percent are gathered across two or more seasons. Only 40 percent of identified plants are gathered in a single season. A gathering agreement that restricts access to specific seasons would exclude a significant portion of the documented cultural plant resources from authorized use.

5.4 Collection volume and methods

The regulation requires that any agreement specify the amount of plant material that will be gathered and the means to do so. These variables are especially important because they translate most directly into permit conditions and sustainability review. The majority of plants (41 of 76) require no more than a handful for their identified uses. This is predominantly the medicinal category: medicinal plants are gathered in the smallest quantities and, across the entire dataset, never exceed a bucket. Twenty-two plants require approximately a bucket's worth, a category dominated by food plants. Eight plants require a bushel basket, and seven require even larger quantities; these categories are dominated by craft and construction plants, most significantly rivercane and buckbrush.

Hand collection was identified as the method for 59 of 76 plants. Spade was specified for 20 plants, primarily those requiring root collection. Hatchet was specified for 18 plants, primarily those requiring bark or woody stem collection. Clippers were specified for 8 plants. All specified methods are consistent with 36 CFR 26′s prohibition on gathering using tools or machinery powered by electricity, fossil fuels, or any other source of power other than human power.

Plant parts collected are distributed as follows: fruits/seeds (39 plants); stem/trunk (37 plants); roots (37 plants); leaves (24 plants); and flowers (23 plants,). Forty-one percent of documented plants require the collection of a single part, and only 5% require the removal of the whole plant.

5.5 Sustainability ethics as cultural data

Cherokee ethical and ontological principles govern gathering practice. The Medicine Keepers' statements on plant sustainability are primary data, and not simply supplementary context for the quantitative findings. They constitute the emic record of the relational ontology within which the 76 documented plants are culturally significant.

Cherokee plant gathering sustainability is grounded in a relational understanding of the relationship between people and plants. Collection practices begin with acknowledgment:

“You do that when you first start because you are asking the Creator to protect the plant and to always be there for us to use, you never ever collect more than what you need, and you always leave some.”

“You have to tell the plant your name. If it is a medicinal plant, you tell [the plant] what you want that medicine for, and who you are getting it for, to cure.”

“We were taught to tell our full Cherokee name, what clan, and we pray to collect the plant and let it [know]. But we do not take it all. We just take a little bit, you know? In that way, it can keep growing.”

These statements describe gathering practices that are both practical and relational, embedding ecological conservation within a spiritual and interpersonal framework. The relational framework is not merely an addition to the practical; it serves as its foundation. Respect for plant communities is instilled from early childhood, and the traditional stories through which knowledge is transmitted also serve as vehicles for teaching ecological relationships (Duncan and Arch, 2008).

Contemporary Cherokee plant gathering does not exhibit a rigid gender division in collection practices. Of the 76 documented plants, only one, dwarf prairie willow, was identified as requiring collection by men specifically, due to the potential harm the plant can cause to women during gathering. Gender distinctions appear more prominently in post-collection handling: certain medicinal plants are kept away from pregnant or menstruating women, reflecting Cherokee beliefs about the spiritual power associated with those states (Perdue, 1999). This pattern contrasts with the Southern Paiute pattern identified in the Puchuxwavaats Uapi analysis, where female elders were the primary knowledge holders, and the proportion of female participants was a statistically significant predictor of ICS score variation (Stoffle et al., 1999). At Buffalo National River, the Medicine Keepers include both men and women, indicating the Cherokee Nation's specific institutional structure for the stewardship of traditional knowledge (Figure 6).

6 The plant gathering agreement as regulatory output

6.1 Structure and operative provisions

The study's research design and findings were used to create a binding management document. The plant gathering agreement between Buffalo National River and the Cherokee Nation is a government-to-government instrument executed under 36 CFR 2.6, which creates an exception to the general prohibition on plant collection that otherwise remains in effect under 36 CFR 2.1. It is not merely a permit or management accommodation, but a formal recognition of the sovereign relationship between the United States, acting through the National Park Service, and the Cherokee Nation, a federally recognized tribal nation with documented cultural affiliation to the Buffalo National River landscape predating the park's establishment in 1972.

The agreement is implemented through an annual Special Use Permit issued for an initial 5-year renewable term. The permit specifies the conditions under which authorized gathering may occur: gathering groups are limited to twenty persons, gathering is authorized during daytime hours only, and gathering is restricted to four designated areas totaling approximately 3,722 acres within the park's approximately 95,000-acre administrative boundary. Two of these areas were the primary field sites visited during the field sessions, and two were added during the EA process to disperse potential gathering impacts across a broader ecological footprint.

The operative species and stipulation list is contained in an appendix to the agreement, which translates the field findings directly into enforceable management conditions. The first category consists of species fully excluded from collection: Missouri Bladderpod (Physaria filiformis) is excluded as a state-listed threatened species; Ozark Spiderwort (Tradescantia ozarkana) and Ozark Least Trillium (Trillium pusillum var. ozarkanum) are excluded as species tracked by the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission; and the exclusion extends categorically to all Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission-tracked species present within the gathering areas. The second category consists of stipulations on collection methods: no entry into caves or mines; bark collection from hardwood trees greater than six inches in diameter at breast height is prohibited from March 15 through October 15 (bat pup season); and greenbrier, trillium, and spiderwort species require species-level identification verification before collection.

The third operative element is the permit's adaptive management architecture. The annual Special Use Permit is renewed each year, providing an administrative mechanism through which both parties can incorporate new botanical survey data, adjust species stipulations, respond to monitoring findings, and expand or refine the scope of the gathering authorization. The 5-year renewable term of the overall agreement provides a longer planning horizon. This structure directly reflects the composite ICS principle documented in the Puchuxwavaats Uapi analysis (Stoffle et al., 1999): the 76 plants identified during the field sessions are a project-specific sample, not a definitive inventory, and the agreement is explicitly designed to grow with the knowledge base it rests on.

6.2 From significance scoring to sovereign authority

The plant gathering agreement differs in kind, not merely in degree, from the outputs of earlier applied ethnobotanical studies. Prior ICS-based studies produced cultural significance scores whose regulatory effect depended on persuasion: a high score was evidence that a land manager should consider protecting a plant or site, not a legal requirement to do so. The Puchuxwavaats Uapi self-critique underscored the fragility of that arrangement by showing that scores for the same plant could vary by as much as 94 percent across studies of the same ethnic group. Under that framework, protection ultimately rested on the good faith of individual managers.

The Buffalo National River agreement changes that structure. It is a binding intergovernmental instrument whose authority derives from the Cherokee Nation's sovereign cultural authority, recognized through a government-to-government process and operationalized through 36 CFR 2.6. The annual Special Use Permit issued under the agreement is a legal document. The ground of protection has thus shifted from a formula's output to the formal authority of a sovereign nation within a regulatory framework designed for that purpose.

This shift resolves three structural limitations of the ICS-based approach.

6.2.1 The validity problem

ICS scores are project-specific estimates that vary with the study sample's characteristics; no single project's scores definitively represent an ethnic group's cultural relationship with the documented plants. The agreement's authority does not depend on any ICS score's precision, it derives from Cherokee Nation sovereignty, which is immune to sampling error and the epistemological commensurability problems any quantitative index applied to indigenous knowledge must navigate.

6.2.2 The cultural triage problem

ICS-based approaches require Indian peoples to rank, for regulatory purposes, cultural resources their epistemology holds to be equally sacred, which is a forced prioritization that Stoffle and Evans (Stoffle and Evans, 1990) documented causes genuine ethical conflict, emotional stress, and fear of reprisal. The Buffalo National River agreement does not require this: it authorizes Cherokee gathering across the four designated areas, with exclusions grounded in ecological protection rather than any ranking of Cherokee cultural values.

6.2.3 The implementation problem

Significance scores are evidence; managers exercise discretion. The gathering agreement instead creates a formalized obligation: because the permit is a legal instrument within an intergovernmental framework, protection no longer depends on any individual superintendent's disposition toward a technical report's evidence.

Within this framework, ICS methodology retains an essential evidentiary role. Without the technical report's plant-specific documentation, the EA could not have been completed, the species stipulations could not have been specified, and the permit conditions could not have been drafted. Ethnobotanical documentation therefore remains the evidentiary foundation of the regulatory structure. What has changed is not the necessity of that documentation, but its relation to the management decision. The plant gathering agreement is what the documentation made possible, not what the documentation itself determined. That relationship, rather than a significance score, is what the agreement secures.

7 Discussion

7.1 Significance for NPS practice: the Buffalo national river model

The Buffalo National River agreement demonstrates that effective collaboration between the NPS and tribal nations around traditional resource use depends on the convergence of institutional, cultural, and methodological conditions. Its success required the alignment of several elements: documented tribal cultural affiliation predating the park's establishment; a tribal nation with the governmental capacity and institutional commitment to sustain a multi-year consultation process; a park administration and regional office willing to dedicate the necessary time and resources; and an NPS program office that had spent four decades building the methodological infrastructure on which the study rested. The central question of replicability, then, is not whether the regulatory mechanism exists, but whether the conditions that enabled its use can be reproduced elsewhere in the NPS system.

Several necessary conditions can be identified from the Buffalo National River case. Under 36 CFR 2.6, a federally recognized tribe must provide documentation of cultural affiliation with the specific park unit predating the park's establishment. The park's management mission must be compatible with authorized traditional resource use: the NPS Organic Act's non-impairment standard, together with any resource protection directives in the park's enabling legislation, establishes the legal boundaries for gathering activities. Parks with more restrictive enabling legislation may require additional procedural steps before an agreement can be authorized. Adequate ethnobotanical documentation is a legal prerequisite, and the tribal government must possess the organizational and legal capacity to enter into a binding government-to-government agreement and sustain consultation across what, at Buffalo National River, was a 5-year process from initial funding to signed agreement.

This case also reveals several complicating factors that future efforts must anticipate. The involvement of multiple affiliated tribes is the most significant organizational challenge: the Yucca Mountain and Grand Canyon studies both involved three ethnic groups and sixteen or more tribal governments, while the Acadia National Park FONSI completed in 2024 involves five distinct Wabanaki tribal nations, each negotiating a separate agreement. Where multiple tribes are involved, early and continuous communication with all tribal governments is essential, and designing modular permits or parallel agreements may be necessary. State endangered species listings present a separate complicating factor, as the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission exclusions in the Buffalo National River agreement illustrate. Finally, there is meaningful variation among NPS superintendents in their interpretation of agency obligations under 36 CFR 2.6.

It is important to recognize that 36 CFR 2.6 applies exclusively to the National Park Service and its relationship with federally recognized tribes. Other federal land management agencies, the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, operate under statutory mandates that require balancing resource extraction, recreation, and conservation in ways that the NPS's non-impairment mandate generally does not. The gathering agreement model developed at Buffalo National River is therefore not directly transferable to those agencies without substantial modification. The primary policy significance of the Buffalo National River case lies within the NPS system, where 36 CFR 2.6 established a uniform regulatory pathway that did not exist before 2016.

Within that system, the methodological lineage documented in this paper is a prerequisite for successfully navigating that pathway. The Cherokee Plant Gathering Form, the tiered two-phase research design, the consultation structure, and the species-level data collection categories that translate directly into permit conditions were all available to the Buffalo National River study because they had been developed, tested, and refined across four decades of applied contract research. The model is replicable not because any NPS unit can produce a gathering agreement on demand, but because the methodology that makes one possible is documented, tested, and transferable.

7.2 The composite ICS and its policy limits

The Puchuxwavaats Uapi analysis introduced the concept of the composite Index of Cultural Significance; the proposition that project-specific significance scores are partial estimates of an ethnic-group-level value that can only be approximated asymptotically through repeated study. The implications of this concept for the Buffalo National River dataset warrant explicit discussion.

The 76 plants documented during the field sessions represent what four Medicine Keepers identified at two sites over 2 days of fieldwork. They are project-specific samples, shaped by the participants present, the sites visited, the field session season, and the time available for formal data collection. The Puchuxwavaats Uapi analysis revealed that ICS scores for the same plant identified by members of the same ethnic group varied by as much as 94 percent across studies. The Phase One Traditional Cherokee Plant Index provides a better baseline for the true scope of Cherokee cultural plant significance at Buffalo National River. The 76-species field dataset represents approximately 27 percent of that index, which is a substantial and culturally meaningful sample, but not a comprehensive inventory. This proportion describes the evidentiary base compiled to date, not a ceiling on the agreement's authorized scope: the permit's species stipulations operate principally by exclusion (Section 6.1) rather than as a closed positive list, so the remaining species in the Phase One index are not thereby foreclosed from gathering, and can be confirmed and, where warranted, separately stipulated as future monitoring and gathering visits generate additional field documentation.

The annual permit structure and 5-year renewable term of the Buffalo National River agreement are well designed to accommodate this reality. Each permit year provides an administrative occasion to review the current species list, consider additions or modifications based on new information, and incorporate findings from the gathering visits themselves into the management relationship. The gathering agreement is not the end of the documentation process; it is its institutionalization. A Cherokee gathering at Buffalo National River will generate knowledge that no pre-agreement study could fully anticipate, and the agreement's adaptive architecture enables that knowledge to inform management on an ongoing basis. In practice, renewal is initiated by a written request from the Cherokee Nation to the Park Superintendent in advance of the expiring permit period; Park staff review the request against current resource conditions and monitoring data, consult with the Cherokee Nation on any proposed adjustments to species stipulations or gathering areas, and the Superintendent then issues the renewed Special Use Permit, with Regional Director concurrence required for modifications to the underlying agreement itself rather than for routine annual renewal.

7.3 Climate change as an unresolved challenge

The composite ICS discussion underscores that the agreement must remain adaptive as knowledge accumulates over time; climate change introduces a second reason for that adaptability by altering the plant communities on which the agreement depends. The Sleeping Bear Dunes study documented that 77 percent of the 210 Odawa traditional-use plants at the park showed evidence of environmental change, and that climate change affected 55 percent of those resources (Stoffle Richard et al., 2015). This was the single largest driver of observed plant change in the dataset. The Buffalo National River study did not incorporate a systematic climate change assessment of comparable scope.

Carroll's Preface to the technical report addresses the climate change question with both ecological and political urgency. The Cherokee Nation is located at the confluence of two climate zones, a semi-arid tallgrass prairie zone to the west and an eastern deciduous forest zone to the east. Climate change is shifting the boundaries of these zones, driving increases in temperature and reductions in precipitation across the region (Shafer et al., 2014). A shift of the Cherokee Nation out of the eastern deciduous biome and into the tallgrass prairie biome would devastate the cultural practices that depend on eastern deciduous forest plant communities. As Carroll notes, citing tribal biologist Pat Gwin, this climate-induced displacement could be viewed as no less than another forced removal (Stoffle Richard et al., 2019).

Against this backdrop, the Buffalo National River gathering agreement takes on added significance. The park's Ozark Plateau plant communities include many eastern deciduous forest species that are currently more abundant and healthier within the park's administrative boundaries than on the Cherokee Nation's trust lands in northeastern Oklahoma. The agreement provides authorized access to a landscape where the relevant plant communities are currently stable, and acts as a resilience mechanism within a legal framework designed to sustain that access across successive permit terms.

The current documentation does not yet include systematic climate vulnerability assessment for either the 76 field-documented use plants or the 281 species in the Phase One index. Developing such an assessment is a priority for the collaborative research agenda that the annual permit structure is designed to support. Conducting supplementary botanical surveys across all four gathering areas and establishing longitudinal monitoring protocols that integrate tribal observations with ecological survey data would provide a baseline for tracking climate vulnerability trends across successive permit years. Because the annual Special Use Permit already functions as the administrative point at which species stipulations are reviewed, that same cycle offers a ready-made vehicle for phasing in climate vulnerability monitoring: each renewal could incorporate updated survey findings for a defined subset of the 76 field-documented species, building toward full coverage over successive permit years rather than requiring a separate, freestanding assessment process.

7.4 Data sovereignty and the ethnographic resource inventory

Permit renewal and species monitoring depend on how ethnobotanical knowledge is stored, governed, and revisited over time. The answers to those questions frame a final issue: who controls the data infrastructure through which the agreement's future adjustments will be made. The ethnobotanical findings from the Buffalo National River study are maintained in two institutional locations: the final technical report, a public document reviewed for sensitivity by the Cherokee Nation and available through the NPS and the Richard Stoffle archive at the University of Arizona Library; and the NPS Cultural Resource Inventory System—Ethnographic Resource Inventory (CRIS-ER) database, an internal management system with restricted access that serves as the agency's system of record for ethnographic resources. In summary: the technical report is the publicly accessible record, reviewed by the Cherokee Nation for sensitive content before release; the CRIS-ER entry is restricted to internal NPS use.

Tribal nations across the United States are increasingly asserting data sovereignty as the right of indigenous communities to own, control, access, and benefit from data pertaining to their own cultural knowledge, practices, and resources (Carroll et al., 2020; Pinel Sandra and Michael, 1994; Kukutai and Taylor, 2016; Jennings et al., 2023). The tension between NPS management needs and tribal data sovereignty is present in the Buffalo National River case and is not fully resolved by either the sensitivity review mechanism or the CRIS-ER's restricted access protocols. This tension is grounded in a broader legal context: some federal laws acknowledge certain indigenous rights over cultural resources but do not explicitly address tribal authority over the management or disposition of ethnographic data held by federal agencies. The Cherokee Nation's review of the technical report before public posting is a meaningful data sovereignty practice, but it addresses only the public document. The complete dataset remains in NPS custody in a form that the Cherokee Nation does not control. This arrangement leaves unresolved who determines future access, correction, or removal of ethnographic records describing Cherokee cultural knowledge, a gap consistent with broader critiques that agency-led efforts to “integrate” Indigenous knowledge tend to preserve managerial control over the resulting archive (Nadasdy, 1999). Extending the CARE Principles (Carroll et al., 2020) to this internal management system, rather than to the public-facing technical report alone, is accordingly a necessary next step, not merely an aspirational one.

Future agreements under 36 CFR 2.6 would benefit from explicit provisions addressing these gaps: data ownership and co-stewardship arrangements; tribal rights to review, update, or correct the database record; protocols for handling information that the tribal nation subsequently determines should be restricted; and procedures for data retirement or transfer if the gathering agreement is not renewed. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations, 2007), while not directly binding on the NPS, articulates principles of indigenous intellectual property and cultural heritage protection that provide a useful normative framework for developing such provisions.

7.5 Conclusions

Taken together, the preceding sections have shown how a specific regulatory framework, a distinct applied research tradition, and a tribally grounded evidentiary process converged in a new form of cultural resource protection. The 2019 plant gathering agreement between Buffalo National River and the Cherokee Nation is, in the most immediate sense, a management document: a government-to-government instrument specifying which plants may be gathered within four designated areas of an Arkansas national park, under what conditions, in what quantities, and by what methods. Its provisions were derived directly from ethnobotanical field documentation produced through a two-phase research design built on four decades of applied methodological development. It is rooted in the applied contract research tradition from which it emerged: tribally endorsed, NEPA-compliant, and designed to produce actionable management conditions rather than academic significance rankings.

Beyond its operative provisions, the agreement marks a shift from quantitative significance approximation to sovereign cultural authority as the basis for cultural resource protection. Earlier applied ethnobotanical studies produced significance scores that could inform management but could not compel it. Here, protection rests on the Cherokee Nation's sovereign standing, recognized through a government-to-government process and implemented through a federal regulatory instrument. Ethnobotanical documentation remains indispensable as the evidentiary basis for the agreement, but it no longer serves as the sole ground on which protection depends.

As Section 6.2 details, this shift resolves, imperfectly, but at a qualitatively different level than any significance score could achieve, the validity, cultural-triage, and enforcement problems the Puchuxwavaats Uapi self-critique identified but could not remedy within the ICS formula's own logic.

The paper's contribution to the ethnobotanical methods literature can be stated directly. The applied federal land-management research tradition represented here is methodologically and epistemologically distinct from mainstream quantitative ethnobotany in ways the literature has not previously articulated with precision. Contract research in federal land-management settings operates within prescribed administrative boundaries, addresses regulatory questions defined by statute, and treats tribal government endorsement as the primary validity criterion. These are design features suited to the legal and administrative context in which the research operates, not methodological deficiencies to be overcome. Recognizing this distinction clarifies what the applied tradition has long been doing and why validation through tribal endorsement and sovereign agreement is appropriate to its purposes in ways statistical sampling procedures are not.

The Buffalo National River agreement is one of a small but growing set of precedents under 36 CFR 2.6. The Tohono O'odham agreement at Saguaro, the Eastern Band agreement at Great Smoky Mountains, the pending Pokagon Band agreement at Indiana Dunes, and the five pending Wabanaki agreements at Acadia collectively constitute the beginnings of a system-wide practice that the regulation was designed to enable. What each case can draw on is the methodological infrastructure that the research tradition developed and deployed for the Buffalo National River study.

Carroll's framing of the agreement in his Preface to the technical report and in his reflective account of the project from the perspective of Cherokee cultural governance (Carroll, 2020) captures what is ultimately at stake more clearly than any regulatory analysis can. The first 5-year permit term, renewed if the partnership remains strong and the plant communities sustain gathering, does not mark the end of consultation; it institutionalizes it. The ongoing relationship between the Cherokee Nation and Buffalo National River, carried forward through annual permit review, gathering visits, and the management conversations those visits generate, is the living expression of what this methodological lineage has been working toward. Not a score in a database, but a people's relationship with a landscape, recognized and protected by federal law. The Medicine Keepers who walked the hollows and riverbeds of the park did not go there to generate data points. They went because the land holds something their people have maintained across more than two centuries of displacement, and because the agreement, however imperfect in its regulatory architecture, makes return possible.

Correction note

A correction has been made to this article. Details can be found at: 10.3389/fsrma.2026.1963795.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Reniko Gondo, University of Botswana, Botswana

Reviewed by: Mohammad Reza Khalilnezhad, University of Birjand, Iran

Marcela Guerrero, Centro de Investigaciones y estudios Ambientales (CINEA), Argentina