Event Details 

Native Americans of the Great Lakes Region Day Pass *NEW DATE* 5/26: From Encounter to Removal: Indigenous Persistence
Strategies in the Western Great Lakes
*NOW ON MAY 26TH, RESCHEDULED FROM APRIL 21ST*
This lecture traces the involvement of Europeans in an Indigenous world and discusses the crucial role that women played in that encounter.  Indigenous
women’s involvement in the fur trade facilitated their role as cultural intermediaries with the French and English in the 17th and 18th centuries, and
with the Americans in the early 19th century. This presentation focuses on the persistence strategies that allowed women to commercially exchange peltry
for European trade cloth, the changes that both Indigenous people and Europeans experienced, and why and how the U.S. government attempted to remove them,
rather unsuccessfully, in the 19th century.  
Dr. Susan Sleeper-Smith is Professor of History and American Indian and Indigenous Studies at Michigan State University.  Her research explores history as
a narrative structured by sites of encounter, in which the interaction of diverse people created new processes of social and cultural change.  She focuses
on Native American women’s involvement in that process and explores how gender affects cultural interaction.  Recent publications include Indigenous
Prosperity and American Conquest (2018) and Violence in Indigenous Communities (2021). Earlier works include: Indian Women and French Men; New Faces of the
Fur Trade; Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives; Rethinking the Fur Trade; and Why You Can’t Teach U.S. History Without American
Indians.  Her articles appear in numerous journals and edited editions. Dr. Sleeper-Smith joined the Michigan State department of history in 1994, was
promoted to full professor in 2008, and has recently retired.