Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians assumes greater leadership role

Trey Adcock, executive director for the Center for Native Health, believes history was made when around 20 Cherokee people gathered at an undisclosed location deep in Nantahala National Forest in late 2024 to continue fostering the long-developing costewardship between the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Natural Resources Department (EBCI NRD), the Center for Native Health (CNH) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS).

“As far as we know, this is the largest gathering of Cherokee people in this place together since the removal period, which to me is really meaningful,” says Adcock.

Central to that day’s conversation was the topic of Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge, also referred to as TEK. 

“The Forest Service recognizes the importance of Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge,” says Maria Dunlavey, a Nantahala National Forest botanist involved in tribal forestry projects since 2019. “We have guidance to incorporate it into decision-making. We also know that TEK isn’t static; it’s an evolving body of observations, oral and written knowledge, practices and beliefs, and it’s owned by tribes. By investing in the Cherokee relationship with the land, we’re investing in that knowledge.”

And the knowledge runs deep.

“The health of Indigenous peoples is inherently tied to the well-being of the land we call home. For so many people, there’s no connection with culture when there’s no access to land,” says Bonnie Claxton, program officer for CNH Land and Wellness. 

Honoring traditions

Present at the gathering were the Earth Keepers — Elohi Dinigatiyi in the Cherokee language — a group of traditional Cherokee knowledge keepers who “came together to apply Kituwah science, and the language that protects it, to conserve and preserve the mountains, forests, water and air and all they contain,” according to the CNH website. Formed three years ago, the group helps guide the EBCI Natural Resources Department and others on how to best care for Cherokee people, also known as Kituwah people, and lands. The Earth Keepers have some fluency in the disappearing Cherokee language and are practitioners of basketry, wild food and medicine gathering and preparation, and other traditions that involve deep relationships with the land. 

For nearly 20 years, the Forest Service has been engaging more and more with tribes to incorporate TEK in the collaborative management of public lands. “Many of those lands and waters lie within areas where tribes have reserved the right to hunt, fish and pray by ratified treaties and agreements with the United States,” says a 2023 Forest Service Action Plan. “Concurrently, it is important to recognize a dark and complicated shared history, where many Indigenous people were forced to move from and give up their homelands. When we acknowledge that history, we can begin the urgent work to repair relationships with tribes.” 

The move toward collaborative stewardship is also a result of mounting Western scientific evidence that TEK can be a powerful tool to protect biodiversity and adapt to climate change. “TEK strengthens community resilience to respond to the multiple stressors of global environmental change,” according to a paper titled “Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Global Environmental Change” published in Ecology and Society. 

Tommy Cabe, a forest resources specialist and enrolled member of the EBCI who has worked with the EBCI NRD for over 20 years, says that as the relationship between the USFS and the EBCI NRD grew, he and others realized, “It was probably not a good representation of who we are as Kituwah people to operate in a colonial framework.” He and others believe it makes sense for the EBCI NRD to be a point of contact in this government-to-government relationship and for the traditional wisdom of the tribal community to guide the conversation through the Earth Keepers. 

Ancestral lands

For at least 10,000 years, the Cherokee people have been living in what we now call the Southern Appalachians and beyond, encompassing parts or all of West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians was once part of a much larger Cherokee population, but forced relocation split Cherokee people into the Cherokee Nation and United Kituwah Band, located in Oklahoma, and the Eastern Band, made up of those who remained and rebuilt within North Carolina’s Qualla Boundary (sometimes called the Cherokee Indian Reservation), according to the EBCI website.  

“These places are Cherokee ancestral lands; they’re here because of thousands of years of Indigenous stewardship,” says Dunlavey, referring to the biologically rich areas that she studies and helps to protect in the Nantahala. 

The costewardship projects being undertaken by the CNH, EBCI NRD and USFS are part of a larger “land back” movement, a decentralized effort that began in the 1960s to return land ownership and access to the hands of Indigenous people. According to the Community-Based Global Learning Collective, land back means “returning control over ancestral territories back to its stewards, allowing them to begin restoring their connection to ancestral lands in meaningful ways. By transferring power and wealth back to Indigenous people, land restitution … supports Indigenous sovereignty.” 

Even though these local projects in the Cherokee homeland don’t involve transferring ownership, they do give Indigenous people a seat at the table to influence management decisions. “Land back can look a lot of different ways,” says Claxton. “It has to be specific to the community you’re working with.”

Cabe agrees and says he prefers to think of it as “land forward” and “reindigenizing the colonial framework of management.” He echoes the views of the CNH that land is a part of wellness — and not just for Cherokees but for everyone. “What people call conservation in this modern society, we call relationships,” says Cabe.

Work in 2025 will include more visits to important sites and efforts to involve other Native people, including the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. The EBCI NRD also is working with the USFS to incorporate artisanal resources and food sovereignty into management plans and restore Cherokee language place names to more areas. 

Both the CNH and EBCI NRD are engaging youth in restoring traditional practices such as controlled burning as part of their Youth Workforce Development Initiative and creating pathways for young Cherokee people to develop careers in land management and forestry. All are part of collaborative stewardship of these wild mountains.  

 “What they call the ‘land of many uses’ we see as a ‘place of many relatives,’” Cabe says. “We’re hopefully creating a path toward having our Tribal seal right next to the Forest Service seal.”