Andrea Lee Smith is a native of San Francisco, California, United States. Her mother Helen Jean Wilkinson was born in a small town in Indiana, USA to what appear to be middle-class parents, who are of Scandinavian descent.
At one point, Wilkinson was a trustee for Luce Township, a farming town in Spencer County, Indiana. Some of her ancestors in Kentucky, USA fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War and a couple owned slaves.
In the 1990s, Smith and her younger sister Justine Smith started the Women of All Red Nations‘ chapter in Chicago, Illinois, USA, the hometown of their father Donald R. Smith. He is an engineer with a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Donald was a nuclear physicist with the Pentagon before he retired. His family are mostly of British ancestry.
As an academic, a feminist and an activist, Andrea is known for her works on issues of violence against women of color and their communities, specifically Native American women. Since at least 1991, she has claimed to be Cherokee she has never been enrolled in any recognized Cherokee tribe.
By the fall of 2008, Andrea had a new job as an assistant professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside in Riverside, California. After 2008, she no longer identified as Cherokee in her official bios but she continued to identify as such for the interviews and lectures and panels she spoke as a representative of Native American views and causes.
In the early 1990s, while Andrea was working as a Native organizer in Chicago, she asked Cherokee genealogical researcher David Cornsilk to research her mother’s side of the family and near the end of the 1990s, she hired him again to research her father’s side of the family. He concluded that she had no identifiable Native American relatives, enrolled or unenrolled or even living near those who were once enrolled.
“I have always been, and will always be Cherokee. I have consistently identified myself based on what I knew to be true,” Andrea wrote in her personal blog on July 9, 2015. “My enrollment status does not impact my Cherokee identity or my continued commitment to organizing for justice for Native communities.”
Andrea earned her bachelor’s degree in comparative study of religion from Harvard University in Cambridge. Here are 13 more things about her:
- In 1968, her parents divorced.
- In 1991, she served as a delegate to the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa where she represented the Indigenous Women’s Network and the American Indian Law Alliance.
- In 1997, she earned her master’s degree in divinity from the Union Theological Seminary in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.
- In 2000, she and Nadine Naber co-founded INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence.
- In 2002, she graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz in Santa Cruz, California with her Ph.D. in history of consciousness.
- In 2005, Swiss parliament member Ruth-Gaby Vermot-Mangold nominated her and 999 other women as a group for the Nobel Peace Prize.
- In 2007, an official from the Cherokee Nation started sending her emails, asking about her connections to the Cherokees given that she was not enrolled.
- On February 22, 2008, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA denied her tenure,
- In 2012, before a lecture by her at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona in Pomona, California, Richard Allen, then a policy analyst of the tribal nation, emailed the organizers and explained that her claim of being Cherokee is fraudulent and it “is likely that she is not American Indian at all”.
- In 2014, her mother died.
- In 2019, Duke University Press published her book “Unreconciled: From Racial Reconciliation to Racial Justice in Christian Evangelicalism”.
- In January 2023, she and the University of California, Riverside signed a separation agreement negotiated by the university after a complaint by faculty members accusing her of lying about her Native American lineage.
- She was 57 when signed a deal with the University of California, Riverside in January 2023. She will be allowed to teach classes until August 2024 then retire with full benefits and her title intact.