Cherry Smiley is a feminist campaigner, artist, and researcher from the Nlaka'pamux (Thompson) and Diné (Navajo) Nations. She has worked as an anti-violence worker in rape crisis centres and transition houses for battered women and their children, as the assistant coordinator for drop-in anti-violence groups for Indigenous girls, and as a project manager for a national native women’s organization.

Cherry speaks locally, nationally and internationally on sexualized colonial male violence against Indigenous women and girls. She is also the founder of Women Studies Online, an educational platform which aims to recentre women in their academic field utilising consciousness-raising as a liberational tool.

She is a co-founder of Indigenous Women Against the Sex Industry and was the recipient of a 2013 Governor General’s Award in Commemoration of the Person’s Case and the 2014 winner of The Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy. She is currently a PhD candidate at Concordia University where her research works to end sexualized male violence against Indigenous women and girls. 

Cherry Smiley spoke with FiLiA’s Spokeswoman, Raquel Rosario Sánchez, about her work as a campaigner for the liberation of Indigenous women and girls, and as a researcher within the Canadian academic system.

You can read more about Women’s Studies Online on their website.

And you can read Cherry Smiley’s work as a writer on Policy Options, Medium and Feminist Current.

This episode was edited by wonderful FiLiA volunteer Suzi Sevgi.