Francine Spang-Willis named Emerson Fellow for her work with PCEC
We’re writing to share some exciting news about our evolving effort in the Crazy Mountains – the Crazy Mountain Oral History Project.
A collaborative partnership with Appearing Flying Woman, Francine Spang-Willis, and PCEC’s Sarah Stands and Erica Lighthiser, the Crazy Mountain Oral History Project aims to provide a deeper understanding of the layered history of the landscape to strengthen relationships between people, the land and all wild nature.
Francine, an oral historian of settler and Northern Cheyenne descent, is the project lead and was recently awarded an Emerson Collective Fellowship to support this innovative project!
Francine has been consulting the PCEC team since 2018, first helping us plan women's leadership summits, and later collaborating with us as we evaluated ways to be better ancestors to this Crazy Paradise – the first name of our organization in the early 90s.
About the Crazy Mountain Oral History Project
The Crazy Mountain Oral History Project will bring new context to the Crazy Mountains by archiving and sharing the voices of diverse narrators — from Indigenous Peoples, to settlers and ranchers, to hunters and recreationists and academics and scientists — creating a record of the mountains authored by those who live in connection with the landscape and its diverse inhabitants.
The project aims to deepen the relationships between local people, the wildlife, and communities who share the mountains but often misunderstand each other. It will provide guidance and vision to PCEC and other interested organizations in collaborating and stewarding the natural and cultural resources of this landscape.
With the support of the fellowship, our team will spend the next year interviewing and recording oral histories of people with unique and diverse connections to the Crazy Mountains landscape. These oral histories will be transcribed and archived at the Montana Historical Society. Beyond 2024, we will be curating a podcast, a digital platform, outreach programs, and a stewardship strategy plan in relationship with the narrators, who are our partners in the project. The interview, transcripts, and narrator photo will be archived for public access.
This oral history project is a space that we hold — to allow for something unique to emerge, for common values to be discovered, for our layered history to be shared, so that our connection to the land and our sense of place will deepen. It will be a space for greater listening and observing and reflecting, now and long after we are gone.
The goal is to connect, to listen, to learn from one another, and build deeper relationships, so we can explore and develop new possibilities for living more in balance as part of this iconic ecosystem and with one another.
About the Emerson Collective
Like Francine, this year’s Emerson Collective cohort are all local leaders, pursuing projects of their own creation. “They’re all working on a culturally relevant local approach to knitting their communities together, many of them bridging divides and ultimately creating a stronger civic fabric in the place that they live,” Patrick D’Arcy, senior director of the fellows program at Emerson Collective, told the Associated Press.
This Emerson Collective Fellowship demonstrates a meaningful investment in our community and the people that are sitting down, sharing stories and building bridges. We are overwhelmed with gratitude to Francine and the Emerson Collective for making the Crazy Mountain Oral History Project a reality.
To learn more about the project, check out the Emerson Collective website
We’re excited for this opportunity, and we’ll be sharing more in the coming months.