Grounding vs. Supplemental: The Use of Indigenous Feminist Oral Histories in Guiding Archival Research rather than Supplementing the Archive

The fourth 2025-2026 Indigenous Learning Forum will take place December 4, 2025 at 3:00 p.m. ET on Zoom. This talk will be given in English with Spanish translation. 

Se ofrecerá interpretación en español/inglés.

This event is open to all but registration is required.

Lindsey Willow Smith is a Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians citizen, muhkwa nindoodem, born and raised in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. She earned her undergraduate degree in History at the University of Michigan and then worked at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian before beginning her Ph.D. in History at the University of Minnesota. Her research is rooted in concepts of relationality stemming from her experiences learning Ojibwemowin and is deeply grounded in Indigenous Feminisms and Critical Indigenous Studies. Her research interests include Native American urban history, Indian relocation, and Indigenous oral histories. 

Grounding vs. Supplemental: The Use of Indigenous Feminist Oral Histories in Guiding Archival Research rather than Supplementing the Archive 

While Detroit is historically understood as a Native place in early French settlers’ accounts, its Native inhabitants in the 20th century are often ignored, especially in contrast to the attention Indigenous peoples in Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Relocation cities such as Minneapolis and Chicago are now receiving. My research aims to resituate the city of Detroit as a modern Native place through the use of Indigenous Feminist Oral Histories. Voluntary relocation over the 20th century and the continued maintenance of Native identity, as well as the creation and dissemination of global Indigenous identity, were part of the everyday life of Native people in Detroit and its suburbs. Approaching understudied Native urban histories such as the experiences in mid-20th-century Detroit, archival research does not allow a researcher to pursue this history through a lens of Indigenous Studies. In this work, I have centered Indigenous women’s oral histories to guide my archival practice, rather than starting from the archive and using Native women’s voices to fill in the gaps. The act of doing these oral histories has illustrated the pitfalls of the archive, and this talk will discuss the ways that starting with oral histories can be used as a method to resist settler-colonial and archival assumptions. Using this method, and with a fierce dedication to Indigenous Feminist methodology, Detroit is not only understood as a Native place, but the role that Native women played in maintaining this community is not obscured as they are in the archive.