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

Applied ethnobotanical research conducted for federal land management differs from mainstream quantitative ethnobotany in design, validity, and regulatory effect. Whereas academic indices such as Use Value, Relative Frequency of Citation, and the Index of Cultural Significance seek to characterize a cultural group's plant knowledge, applied contract research in federal settings is bounded by administrative jurisdiction, directed toward statutory management questions, and validated primarily through tribal government endorsement rather than statistical adequacy. This paper analyzes the 2019 Memorandum of Agreement between Buffalo National River and the Cherokee Nation, one of the first government-to-government plant-gathering agreements executed under National Park Service regulation 36 CFR 2.6. The underlying study used a two-phase design. Phase One identified 281 traditional Cherokee use plants among the 1,780 species documented within the park. Phase Two consisted of on-site ethnographic field sessions with four tribally appointed Medicine Keepers and documented 76 plants in relation to contemporary use, seasonality, collection volume, plant parts, collection methods, and sustainability practices. These findings informed a National Environmental Policy Act environmental assessment and a Memorandum of Agreement whose species stipulations and annual Special Use Permit structure convert ethnobotanical evidence into enforceable management conditions. The agreement thus marks a shift from significance scoring to sovereign cultural authority as the basis for protecting culturally significant plant resources, while preserving ethnobotanical documentation as the evidentiary foundation of the regulatory process.