Lindsey Willow Smith

Lindsey Willow Smith is a Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians citizen, born and raised in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. She earned her undergraduate degree in History with a minor in Museum Studies, summa cum laude, at the University of Michigan. Her undergraduate honors thesis, “Ancestry For Sale: Native Identity on Ancestry.Com Forums,” uses forum posts from Ancestry.com to explore how Native identity is created by users through historical documents rather than traditional tribal ways of knowing and understanding community. She then worked as a Curatorial Research Assistant at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. She is interested in understanding the role of society in identity formation, especially in relation to how digital platforms influence how people view themselves. She is now pursuing her Ph.D. in History at the University of Minnesota.