I am an oral historian, writer, educator and sometime dramaturg. My work in oral history engages the arts, disability justice and social change, with a particular focus on how to be a narrative ally, collaborating across ability. I am also deeply involved in nurturing a community of artists who create work on, in, and with water, especially those working in New York City. I am passionate about teaching and learning, and work with undergraduates at the College of Performing Arts at The New School and graduate students in the Oral History Master of Arts Program at Columbia University.

In all that I do, I work oral historically—that is to say, I am deeply invested in co-creation, grounded in listening, with a rigorous ethic around stewarding stories into the world, in the labor of belief that doing this work might create better conditions for justice, repair, restoration, and restitution. I live on Munsee Lenape and Canarsie land, in present-day Brooklyn, overlooking an expressway built between 1953-1962, displacing more than 1200 families.

I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, on the land of the Ho-Chunk, Sauk, Meskwaki, Peoria, and Kickapoo, with a sacred family haven in the wilderness of Ontario, on Anishinabewaki land. I am white, of mixed settler/colonial ancestry, including German, English, French and Dutch. My maternal family’s origin story includes a great-great-great-great-grandmother who was Cherokee, but we are not yet able to substantiate the story with detail and I am mindful of Vine Deloria’s warning against white claims to matrilineal native lineages*.

I include these unresolved genealogical details to signal the silences in my whiteness, which mirror, and enact, silences in this country’s story of itself. The work of un-silencing these lineages is political, and I am undertaking my own attempts to do so with support from, and gratitude for, Erin Dunlevy at True North EDI.**

To find the names of the native peoples on whose land you stand, use this tool: Native Land Digital, a Canadian not-for-profit organization, incorporated in December 2018. Native Land Digital is Indigenous-led, with an Indigenous Executive Director and Board of Directors who oversee and direct the organization.

*See Custer Died for Your Sins by Vine Delora

**I originally met Erin through her work with the NYU Metro Center on Research in Equity and the Transformation of Schools

Header image taken on a research trip for The Bakken, August 2017 . Photo taken at the Garrison Dam, which was built by the Army Corps of Engineers from 1947-1954, drowning the towns of Independence, Elbowoods, Shell Creek, Lucky Mound, Nishu and Beaver Creek, flooding the rich bottomlands families had farmed for decades and lived on far longer, erasing the schools, shops, streets, cemeteries, hospitals, rodeos, everywhere that was home for hundreds, forcing eviction/evacuation and scattering/shattering communities on Fort Berthold Reservation. The dam shaped the river into lake, named without irony Lake Sakakawea for the woman whose knowledge saved Lewis and Clark as they worked to spread the word that the Great White Father was now in charge. There's no mention on any dam placards of the towns that once were, now underwater.

Most of the photos on this site are my own, and others are used with attribution, gratitude and admiration for photographers Nura Qureshi, JJ Tiziou, Robin Michals, and Walter Hergt.