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The Buffalo National River case becomes clearer when placed against the longer history of plant gathering in national parks. For most of the twentieth century, National Park Service regulations treated park resources as available for observation and appreciation but not for removal, a stance that effectively criminalized many traditional harvesting practices that tribes had carried out on those landscapes for generations before the parks existed. Gathering a medicinal root or cutting rivercane for a basket could be classified alongside commercial poaching, leaving tribal practitioners vulnerable to citation even when their harvest was small, seasonal, and ecologically benign. The 2016 plant-gathering rule was designed to close exactly this gap, creating a lawful pathway for gathering agreements while requiring environmental review under NEPA before any agreement could take effect. What the rule did not specify was how the underlying ethnobotanical evidence should be produced, and that omission is where the methodological questions examined in this research become practically consequential.

The two-phase structure of the Buffalo National River study reflects a deliberate sequencing choice. Phase One operated at the scale of the park’s full botanical inventory, screening the 1,780 documented species against records of traditional Cherokee use to identify the 281 plants with documented cultural relevance. This screening step matters because it prevents the field phase from being an open-ended search and instead focuses ethnographic attention on plants whose significance is already anchored in tribal knowledge. Phase Two then moved from the documentary record to direct observation, bringing four Medicine Keepers appointed by the Cherokee Nation into the park itself. On-site sessions differ fundamentally from interview-only methods because they allow researchers to record seasonality, collection volume, plant parts used, and harvesting technique in the presence of the actual plants, in the actual gathering locations, under the actual conditions practitioners encounter. The resulting dataset of 76 plants is therefore not a survey of opinion but a record of practice, which is precisely the kind of evidence an environmental assessment and a gathering agreement require.

The Cherokee Plant Gathering Form deserves particular attention as a methodological instrument. Structured data collection in ethnobotany has often been criticized for flattening relational knowledge into checklists, but the form used here was designed to capture the specific variables that regulation and environmental review demand: which plant, which part, what season, what quantity, what method, and what sustainability considerations apply. Each of these variables maps directly onto a management condition that can appear in a Special Use Permit. A statement that a certain root should be gathered only after seed set, or that bark must be taken in a way that does not girdle the tree, becomes not merely ethnographic description but an enforceable term of the annual permit. This traceability from field documentation to regulatory text is what distinguishes the agreement from earlier arrangements in which tribal access depended on discretionary accommodation rather than codified conditions.

The Medicine Keepers’ statements on sustainability ethics, documented in the field sessions, illustrate how Cherokee epistemology and regulatory requirements can align without assimilation. Harvesting practices described by the Keepers, such as taking only a portion of a plant population, rotating collection areas, and leaving enough for regeneration, function simultaneously as expressions of relational obligation and as conservation measures that satisfy NEPA’s requirement to analyze environmental effects. This convergence does not mean the two frameworks are identical; the obligations the Keepers describe arise from responsibilities to plants as relatives rather than from population viability calculations. But the practical overlap allowed the environmental assessment to rest on tribal knowledge as substantive evidence rather than as anecdotal color, a significant departure from earlier patterns in which traditional knowledge was consulted and then set aside when formal analysis began.

The comparison with index-based methods sharpens when one considers what would have happened had the study relied on a cultural significance score alone. A ranked list of plants, however carefully computed, would still have required someone, at some point, to decide which species merited inclusion in the agreement and which did not. That decision point is where the cultural triage dilemma operates most forcefully, compelling a tribe to declare some plants more important than others when its own knowledge system may regard them as inseparable. By grounding the agreement in Medicine Keeper documentation of contemporary use across all 76 plants, the process avoided forcing a ranking. Species stipulations in the agreement reflect what was actually documented as gathered and used, not a threshold score. The distinction is subtle but consequential: the regulatory instrument protects practices, not preferences.

The validity question also looks different in this applied setting. In academic ethnobotany, validity is typically assessed through statistical measures such as informant agreement or cross-study consistency, and the 94 percent variation in ICS scores observed across four studies of the same plant demonstrates how unstable such indices can be. In the Buffalo National River study, the primary validity criterion was endorsement by the Cherokee Nation government, acting through its appointed Medicine Keepers. This is not a weaker standard but a different one, appropriate to a legal instrument that binds two governments. A permit condition derived from field documentation and confirmed by tribal authority carries a legitimacy that no statistical index can supply, because the condition reflects the collective judgment of the sovereign whose members will exercise the gathering rights. The regulatory system, in effect, recognizes tribal government as the competent authority for its own knowledge.

The agreement’s annual Special Use Permit structure has implications that extend beyond the initial signing. Because the permit renews yearly, the species stipulations and collection conditions are not frozen at 2019 conditions but remain open to adjustment as plant populations, environmental conditions, or tribal practices change. This creates a built-in mechanism for adaptive management, allowing the parties to respond to drought, disease, or shifting phenology without renegotiating the underlying agreement. It also creates a recurring point of contact between park staff and tribal practitioners, which over time can deepen the working relationships on which cooperative management depends. The annual cycle thus serves both administrative and relational functions, embedding government-to-government interaction into the routine operation of the park rather than treating it as an exceptional event.

For other park units considering similar agreements, the Buffalo River experience suggests several transferable elements. The first is the importance of beginning ethnobotanical documentation before an agreement is negotiated, so that regulatory instruments rest on a completed evidentiary record rather than on promises to gather data later. The second is the value of structuring field sessions around the variables that regulation actually requires, which keeps the research focused and reduces the risk of collecting information that cannot be used. The third is the necessity of tribal government involvement from the outset, not as a consulted party but as the authority that appoints the practitioners, reviews the findings, and endorses the final conditions. Studies piloted earlier, such as the work at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, provided the methodological template, but the Cherokee Nation agreement demonstrated that the template could carry the full weight of a binding federal instrument.

The data sovereignty dimension of the arrangement also merits emphasis. Ethnobotanical documentation of medicinal plants can be sensitive, since detailed knowledge of harvesting locations and techniques may be information tribes do not wish to disclose publicly. The structure developed here, in which the technical report informs the agreement’s conditions while the underlying knowledge remains under tribal authority, offers a model for handling this tension. The park receives the enforceable conditions it needs for management; the Nation retains control over the knowledge that generated them. As federal agencies increasingly engage with tribal data governance principles, arrangements of this kind, which separate the regulatory output from unrestricted disclosure of the underlying documentation, are likely to become more important.

Climate change adds urgency to this whole enterprise. Plant distributions, flowering times, and population vigor in the Ozark Highlands are already shifting, and the plants documented in the 76-species dataset will not respond to those shifts uniformly. Some species may decline in the park while others become more abundant, and the seasonal windows for sustainable harvest may move. The agreement’s structure, with its annual permit and its grounding in observed practice rather than fixed assumptions, positions the parties to detect and respond to these changes. Medicine Keepers, who observe the plants directly each season, are well placed to notice such shifts early, making the agreement not only a mechanism for access but also a distributed monitoring network grounded in traditional knowledge.

Finally, the theoretical significance of the agreement lies in what it demonstrates about the relationship between knowledge and authority. The four-decade effort to quantify cultural significance treated the central problem as one of measurement, as though better indices would produce better protection. The Buffalo National River case suggests the problem was never only measurement; it was the location of authority. When protection rests on a researcher’s score, it depends on the persuasiveness of that score to agency officials. When protection rests on tribal sovereign authority formalized in regulation, it depends on the government-to-government relationship itself. Ethnobotanical documentation remains essential, supplying the empirical content of the agreement’s conditions, but it functions as evidence within a sovereign framework rather than as a substitute for one. That reordering, from significance scoring to sovereign authority, is the agreement’s most consequential contribution, and it offers a precedent whose influence on federal tribal plant gathering is likely to grow as other units and other tribes undertake similar negotiations.

Subject of Research: Ethnobotanical research and the Cherokee Nation plant gathering agreement at Buffalo National River

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

Article References: Evans, M. J., & Stoffle, R. W. (2026). From cultural significance to sovereign authority: ethnobotany, federal land management, and the Buffalo National River/Cherokee nation plant gathering agreement. Frontiers in Sustainable Resource Management, 5, Article 1918750. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsrma.2026.1918750

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsrma.2026.1918750

Keywords: ethnobotany, Cherokee Nation, Buffalo National River, National Park Service, tribal sovereignty, plant gathering, traditional ecological knowledge, cultural significance, 36 CFR 2.6, NEPA, data sovereignty, climate change