Researcher, Author & Activist
From the Nlaka'pamux and Diné Nations, Cherry Smiley is an Indigenous feminist activist, researcher, and author of Not Sacred, Not Squaws: Indigenous Feminism Redefined.
Cherry holds a PhD in communications studies from Concordia University in Montreal, and her research is grounded in the material realities of women’s lives, in the work and goals of the women’s liberation movement, and in her experiences as a front-line anti-violence worker in a rape crisis centre and transition house for battered women and their children. Cherry’s areas of study include historical and contemporary strategies of the women’s liberation movement to end male violence against women and girls, impacts of colonization on Indigenous women, feminist theory, historical women’s studies and present-day gender studies in Canadian universities, and prostitution.
She has worked as a project manager in the area of violence prevention and safety for a national Native women's organization, and is a founding member of Indigenous Women Against the Sex Industry (IWASI) and is honored to have been invited to speak at conferences, events, and rallies in locations such as Prince Rupert, Toronto, New York City, London, and Tromsø.
Cherry graduated with a master of fine arts degree from Simon Fraser University, exhibiting her photo-text installation, Revolution Songs: Stories of Prostitution. She has also exhibited artwork in locations such as Vancouver BC, Kamloops BC, and London, England. Cherry’s writing has been published in the Globe & Mail, Policy Options, Feminist Current and Herizons, as well as articles in academic and other journals, and in the edited books Feminism and Art History Now: Radical Critiques of Theory and Practice and Spinning and Weaving: Radical Feminism for the 21st Century.
