Francine D. Spang-Willis is an independent oral historian and educator based in Bozeman, Montana. She is of Cheyenne, Pawnee, and settler descent. Francine was the American Indian Tribal Histories Project (AIHTP) Director at the Western Heritage Center in Billings, Montana, from 2003 to 2009. She and the AITHP team collaborated with Northern Cheyenne, Crow, and Chippewa Cree narrators to amplify, share, and preserve Indigenous history and culture through storytelling as an oral history tradition and oral history methodology.
Spang-Willis serves as the Oral History Association's Diversity Committee cochair, Nominating Committee member, and Indigenous Caucus member. She also serves on the Humanities Montana, Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Foundation, and WildEarth Guardians' boards of directors.
In addition to her MA in Oral History from Columbia University, she also holds an MA in Native American Studies from Montana State University. Her oral history thesis at Columbia University, Becoming Wild Again in America: The Restoration and Resurgence of the Pablo-Allard Bison Herd, was cited as a thesis of exceptional distinction in the Oral History Master of Art’s 2021 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History competition.
