A Collaborative Ute Ethnobotany Project

This Powerpoint presentation will provide a visual overview of an applied anthropology ethnobotany project with the Northern Ute. It will examine how anthropologists collaborate with tribes on issues regarding cultural resource management, re-establishing connections with ancestral homelands, language preservation, and traditional ecological knowledge. In the past ten-plus years, the Northern Ute tribe (of Utah) has begun a systematic collection of native plants. The resulting herbarium has been used in working with elders, whose recollections, reminiscences, and stories of plant use are being recorded and preserved by tribal members. This “Ute Ethnobotany Project” also includes youth whose field visits to ancestral Ute homelands with knowledgeable Ute tribal members has renewed an interest in recording these traditions.

This project is a collaborative one with a number of federal agencies including the National Park Service, US Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management providing much of the necessary funding. The ways that cultural anthropologists and Native peoples can and must work together is explored. Additionally, the preservation of plant-use traditions has, according to tribal members, sparked a concrete interest in preserving not only plant lore, but also the intimate and profound connections between a people, ancestral landscape, and the voices of the elders