St. Andrew's College Winter Refresher 2014

A Native American anti-violence activist and scholar will be the theme speaker for Winter Refresher 2014, Feb. 27 to March 1 at St. Andrew’s College.

Andrea Smith, an associate professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside, Calif., will speak on the conference theme Confronting Racism with Solidary: Untangling Colonial Webs and Creating New Contexts.

Smith received a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz in 2002 and previously earned a bachelor’s degree in comparative study of religion at Harvard University and a Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary.

She currently serves as the U.S. co-ordinator for the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, is a co-founder of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence and the Boarding School Healing Project and recently completed a report for the United Nations on Indigenous peoples and boarding schools. Previously, she taught in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan.

Smith’s publications include Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances and Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. She is also the editor of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, and co-editor of The Color of Violence, The Incite! Anthology.