Engagement

CICR is committed to engaged research and outreach efforts where complex conservation and sustainability challenging topics are brought to the fore, and where the voices of those historically excluded from conservation planning and decision making are centered. In so doing, CICR hopes to place diverse tools and perspectives at the service of complex decision contexts and foster innovative solutions that enable more transformative, adaptive, and just approaches to socio-environmental problem-solving in an uncertain future.

Partnership with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI)

Since Fall of 2019, CICR has been collaborating with the Natural Resources unit of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) and partners from the U.S. Forest Service to place faculty and student research at the service of tribal aspirations in the forestry sector. 

The partnership comes on the heels of nearly a century of fire exclusion and criminalization of “cultural fires” on both national park and national forest lands bordering the EBCI, and on tribal lands held in trust by the federal management. A history of rampant extractivism and catastrophic fires induced by European settlers, followed by federal protection and fire exclusion, substantially changed forest composition and ecology in the southern Appalachians and resulted in the loss of culturally important species well adapted to historical tribal fire regimes. This included White Oak, a species important to Cherokee artisans for basketry.  It has also contributed to shifts in forest ecology through the mesophication of eastern forests, which in turn complicates efforts to restore historical fire regimes and culturally important species (Lafon et al. 2017; Nowaki and Abrams 2008). Thus, while the US Forest Service is increasingly embracing a collaborative approach to the management of USFS lands, these shifts in forest ecology, coupled with a suite of human-caused disturbances (climate change, atmospheric nitrogen deposition, “invasive” species and timber harvesting) create significant uncertainties for managers that make such a partnership both challenging and important to efforts to restore tribal forest practices and values. 

The overarching goal of the EBCI forestry program is to restore tribal forest knowledge and management throughout the traditional Cherokee homelands. This partnership aims to support this goal through research activities that advance specific goals linked to White Oak restoration and access, namely:

1. To enhance the availability of, and tribal access to and management of, White Oak stands on USFS and tribal lands. 

• To identify and inventory White Oak stands suitable for Cherokee artisans on USFS lands.
• To establish silvicultural needs and management plans for white oak stands, with a focus on fire.

2. To pilot restoration activities for culturally important plants and ecosystems on EBCI land. 

• To establish these activities as demonstration sites, both to orient possessory holders and to facilitate dialogue with partner agencies.

3. To enhance forest resilience in the face of climate change.

Prior work of ICON students under this partnership included literature reviews of interest to the EBCI, namely: (i) a literature review to reconstruct the historical ecology of EBCI-forest relationships through time (to highlight forest conditions under EBCI management and how those changed under removal and the suppression of customary land use practices); (ii) an overview of shifting paradigms in restoration ecology (to profile the growing recognition that values drive restoration activities); (iii) a policy brief clarifying the rules governing tribal access to forest products on federal land (to bring clarity on the rules governing harvesting for Federally Recognized Tribes); and (iv) a literature review on the response of White Oak to prescribed fires and possible implications for fire treatments and monitoring. A new cohort of faculty and students is now working with EBCI and USFS partners to develop a burn prioritization plan and accompanying monitoring framework for tribal reserve land.