New guidance offers blueprint for Tribal research agreements
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- A team of NC State and Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians researchers published guidance for research agreements between scientists and Tribal nations, targeting shortcomings in policies written without Tribal input that left unclear protections and data vulnerabilities.
- Christina Perella, corresponding author and NC State Ph.D. student, said the guidance synthesizes existing scattered resources since there is no centralized location for Tribes to access them.
- The document outlines four agreement types — Data-Sharing Agreements, Memoranda of Understanding, Cost-Sharing/Service/Research Agreements, and Non-Disclosure Agreements — accompanied by a decision tree for selecting the right structure for a given project.
- Caleb Hickman, supervisory fish and wildlife biologist with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, said research on Tribes has been "largely extractive" and that data-sharing agreements offer a practical path to protecting Tribal sovereignty in conservation and climate work.
- Jelena Vukomanovic, NC State associate professor and co-author, said the guidance's key contribution is clarifying the circumstances under which each agreement type should be used rather than simply listing what exists.
- The guidance also flags federal open-records requests as a threat to Tribal data sovereignty, noting that federal grant funding can trigger data-sharing requirements that certain agreements can help shield against.
- The paper, "Data sharing agreements for conservation science and management," appears in the inaugural issue of "From the Field—Elevating Indigenous Voices", with the authors providing their own Eastern Band–NC State agreement as a template.
Why it matters: The guidance gives Tribes with limited administrative infrastructure a practical starting point for negotiating research deals on their own terms, rather than relying on university-drafted terms. It also surfaces a structural trap: federal grant funding can itself trigger data-sharing requirements that expose Tribal information through open-records requests, a risk the four-agreement framework is designed to mitigate for conservation and climate collaborations.
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