In this public interview, Francine Spang-Willis, of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and Columbia University Oral History Master of Arts candidate, will have a conversation with educator Brent Stonefish of the Lunaapeew Nation. Their discussion will highlight the Lenape origin story. It will also focus on Brent’s journey to learn living oral history from his and neighboring nations’ elders and to learn the history from a Lenape lens.
Brent Stonefish, turtle clan, is Lunaapeew and a member of Eelūnaapèewi Lahkèewiit (Delaware Nation) in Ontario Canada. Brent is married and is the father of two children. Brent holds a BA in Native Studies from Trent University and a MES from York University. Brent has work extensively in western educational institutions, urban Indigenous communities and for various First Nations communities.
Brent actively uses the skills and knowledge acquired through his mother, valued Elders, ceremony and western education in all aspects of his personal and professional life. Brent has been an education administrator, educator, lecturer, drummer/singer, counsellor, elected First Nations councillor, ceremonialist, policy analyst, manager, an author and is an all-around good guy.
Francine D. Spang-Willis is of the Northern Cheyenne Nation. She is also of settler descent. While she was raised on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, she resides in Bozeman, Montana and an off-grid cabin in the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains.
Francine currently serves as the Listening to Harlem and Rethinking Community Engagement Project Manager in the Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) program and an audit-edit reviewer for the Obama Presidency Oral History Project at Columbia University. She has also served as an Obama Presidency Oral History Fellow. Francine co-owns a business with her husband.
Francine is an OHMA candidate at Columbia University. She also graduated with a Master of Arts in Native American Studies from Montana State University in 2013 and a Bachelor of Science in Business Management from Rocky Mountain College in 1999.
These events are open to all. For more information or if we can make any of these events more accessible to you please contact Rebecca McGilveray at rlm2203@columbia.edu.
This event will be recorded. As with our oral history interviews, we will wait until after the event to determine with the guest(s) whether or not they want to share the recording more publicly. You can follow our social media channels/mailing list for updates on if/when recordings are made available!
We have shifted the way we pay instructors for this series and how we charge participants. This shift was influenced by Sarah Dziedzic and Jess Lamar Reece Holler's work on equity budgeting for oral historians, and building on the broader legacy of oral history economic justice organizing & praxis developed by the Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History Program, the Oral History Undercommons working group, Danielle Dulken, the OHA’s Independent Practitioner Task Force, and informal and candid conversations initiated by students and graduates of the OHMA program -- all inspired by decades of BIPOC-led movement work advocating for fair pay for labor.
In the past we paid $500/workshop, as an honorarium. We are now asking instructors to self identify as either a full-time salaried employee who should receive an honorarium or a freelancer who should be paid a fee for service, and we are offering each freelance instructor $1200. This reflects the fact that freelancers have additional expenses (health insurance, equipment, office space, self-employment taxes) to do the same work as salaried employees.
We are also committed to making these workshops as broadly accessible as possible, so we are offering an option of free registration for those who could not otherwise attend, with a sliding scale suggested donation of $20-$100 per workshop. We encourage you to pay what you can to support fair pay for our instructors as well as free registration for those who need it.
In the past we have used these workshops to raise money for financial aid for OHMA students. In order to pay instructors fairly, we have committed to finding other ways to raise these funds. Any money we make from this series beyond that required to pay instructors will be used to continue to build and deepen this work through, for example, paying for interpretation for workshops.
Sponsored by: OHMA and
