Standard frameworks for evaluating tourism human resource quality - including Vietnam's Tourism Occupational Standards and the ASEAN Tourism Competency Standards - were developed primarily for urban and mainstream tourism contexts, and consequently fail to capture the distinctive competencies required of tourism workers in destinations built around indigenous cultural heritage. This study employs reflexive thematic analysis of 15 in-depth interviews conducted with tourism enterprise managers, industry administrators, and training specialists in the mountainous areas of Quang Ngai Province to explore indigenous cultural competence as a component of tourism human resource quality. Results identify four main themes: indigenous ethnic knowledge as a foundational condition for service quality; competence in connecting with and interpreting indigenous resources; intercultural conduct in a multi-ethnic highland environment; and the gap between formal training systems and the practical competencies that indigenous tourism destinations actually require. These findings provide substantive grounds for proposing an extension of existing tourism human resource quality frameworks to include indigenous cultural competence as a distinct and independently structured component. They also offer a contextual mechanism to explain the companion quantitative study's finding that accumulated education and experience exerts the largest direct effect on tourism human resource quality in the structural model - a result that, in isolation, risks being misread as straightforward returns to formal credentialing rather than as the capture of deeply embedded indigenous knowledge that cannot be replicated through short-cycle occupational training.