The Project

ORAL HISTORY ARCHIVE 

Recorded Interviews 

The Warrior Women Project is building a comprehensive, community-based archive of oral history interviews with key organizers and activists of the Red Power Movement of the 1970s into modern Indigenous struggles. We’re focused on collecting individual, group, and place-based oral histories centered on Indigenous matriarchy and movement building. 

But simply documenting, preserving, and cataloging these histories is not enough. The ultimate goal of the Warrior Women Project Archive is to not only record these histories, but to make them accessible to those who need it most—the frontline communities, organizers on the ground, and educators working toward decolonization and anti-racism in the classroom. We’re putting history back in the hands of its makers.

If you have questions about the archive, or relevant source materials you would like to submit, please get in touch with us at info@warriorwomen.org. 

WATER PROTECTOR ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

This community-based oral history project came from out of the long time collaboration between Dr. Beth Castle and Madonna Thunder Hawk. The Grandmothers’ Group of Cheyenne River invited Castle’s college class on Native women’s activism to collaborate in community based scholarship and travel to the reservation to meet with, learn from, and interview Water Protectors who were being honored at the annual labor days wacipi at Cheyenne River. The students determined the goal was to provide a space where anyone who participated in the resistance movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock from 2016-2017 could have the agency to share their story on their terms. As an Indigenous-led movement to protect the water of the Missouri River from the oil pipeline, thousands of “Water Protectors” from around the world came in peace and prayer to “Stand with Standing Rock” against the Energy Transfer Partners Company. Visit https://waterprotectorscommunity.org to learn directly from a diversity of Water Protectors.