Dr. Susan Sleeper-Smith didn’t set out to become a leading voice in American Indian history. In fact, her path to the field was anything but linear. It was shaped by a passion for preservation and a remarkable ability to adapt.
Now, as she receives a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society for Ethnohistory, her colleagues and former students are celebrating not just her scholarship, but the profound legacy she’s built as a mentor.
“Susan’s influence on my career and life cannot be overstated,” said Dr. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, associate professor of History at George Mason University, and one of Dr. Sleeper-Smith’s first Ph.D. students. “Her impact on me has extended far beyond learning about historiographical debates and research methodologies. I am who I am as a historian, but also as a teacher, mentor, colleague, and community member because she is who she is.”
“And her influence on me continues to this very day, all these years later,” he said.
Reframing the Historical Narrative
Dr. Sleeper-Smith retired from Michigan State University’s Department of History in 2021, after teaching for nearly 30 years. Her body of work spans seven books, more than 44 articles and book reviews, and over 110 presentations and community lectures. Her 2018 book, Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women in the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792, earned honorable mention for the Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians.
Through her research, she has reshaped how historians understand Indigenous women’s roles—not only in the fur trade, land ownership, and resistance to removal, but also within the broader narrative of cultural exchange and transformation. Her work highlights how encounters between Indigenous communities and settler colonists created enduring social change, particularly in the Great Lakes region, which she calls “one of the most understudied areas in American history.”
“Susan Sleeper-Smith is one of the most important scholars of Indigenous history of her generation,” said Dr. Michael Stamm, professor and chair of MSU’s Department of History. “She made the MSU History Department into a destination for top graduate students, and her work and community-building activities have been profoundly important to her field.”
Her scholarship has also reached beyond academia. She’s been featured on C-SPAN’s American History TV, Chicago Public Radio, and podcasts like Ben Franklin’s World and New Books in Native American Studies. But for Dr. Sleeper-Smith, the heart of her work has always been her students.
“I think the most rewarding part of my career has been watching students grow,” she said. “Seeing all their successes and even their failures and how they’ve learned or taken a risk. Maybe it worked out, or maybe it didn’t, but you’re watching that path, their trajectory. That’s amazing. That’s what I’ve loved about teaching.”
Guiding with Grace
That mentorship has left a lasting mark on many students—among them, Aaron Luedtke, whom Dr. Sleeper-Smith fondly recalled. When he arrived at MSU from Lehigh University, Aaron was married with three children and a vague idea of writing about the 19th-century frontier. “It’s very brave to go back to graduate school when you have three children,” Dr. Sleeper-Smith said. “But he opened up, and he really blossomed in the CIC program,” she said, referring to the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC)-American Indian Studies Consortium, which she directed from 2008 to 2012.
Her empathy for students navigating questions of identity and belonging stems from her own experience. Dr. Sleeper-Smith’s mother was Sámi, an Indigenous person from Tromsø, Norway. “She never spoke Sámi unless she was alone with my grandmother,” she said. “I’ve always had a sense of what it’s like to distance yourself from your background.”
That understanding helped her support students like Aaron, who went on to meet other Native students, find pride in his identity as a descendant of tribal chiefs, and conduct important work with the Haudenosaunee in New York. Today, Dr. Luedtke is at Syracuse University, where he has received multiple awards for his community-engaged scholarship. He also helped organize a session in Dr. Sleeper-Smith’s honor at the Organization of American Historians.
A Career Built on Reinvention
Dr. Sleeper-Smith’s path to academia was far from traditional. After starting graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, she quickly realized it wasn’t the right fit and returned to New York City, where she launched literacy programs in public schools and later worked in juvenile justice. A move to Iowa led to a role in the governor’s office, where she helped develop a statewide corrections master plan.
Her career took another turn in Rochester, New York, where she taught criminal justice and started a successful historic preservation business, restoring 18th- and 19th-century homes. When her family relocated to Michigan, she seized the opportunity to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, focusing on colonial history, art history, and historic preservation. Although American Indian Studies wasn’t her original focus, a transformative course—and the encouragement of her dissertation committee—led her to explore Indigenous women’s histories. “They told me, ‘We don’t know anything about this, but we want you to write about it,’” she said.
After earning her Ph.D., she joined MSU’s Department of History. Early on, she trained graduate students through a now-defunct American Studies program, which allowed them to work across history, preservation, and Indigenous studies. But when she realized the university lacked the infrastructure to support American Indian Studies, she helped build it—founding the CIC-American Indian Studies Consortium and later directing the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago for a year.
“MSU has always had a kind of flexibility that allows you to do what’s good for the profession and good for the students,” she said.
“If you want to do something, you need to find a way to do it. That’s the lesson I’ve learned. Whether it’s starting over in another state or building a consortium from scratch, you just go out and do it.”
The Work Lives On
Today, Dr. Sleeper-Smith continues her research on Indigenous women who resisted removal and retained land through treaty rights. Her current book project traces the lives of women like Marie Bailey, who ran fur trade operations and titled land in their Christian names to circumvent legal restrictions. “These women were farmers, traders, and leaders,” she said. “They’re not in the history books—but they should be.”
Her students are also carrying that mission forward. “I got most of them to work on the Great Lakes,” she said proudly. “They’re rethinking how important this region is and putting Indians back in to show how much influence they had on how the world is shaped.”
As she reflected on her career, Dr. Sleeper-Smith doesn’t point to a single favorite memory. Instead, she speaks of moments, like sitting with a student who shared his creative comic book work or hearing from a former student who left California to teach in South Africa.
“There’s something about working with students that’s different than having your own kids,” she said. “They let you be completely open. They tell you amazing things. They become part of your story, just as you became part of theirs.”
And that, she said, is the true reward.