Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz | |
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Born | San Antonio, Texas, U.S. | September 10, 1938
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Spouse | Simon J. Ortiz (third husband) [1] |
Children | 1 |
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Website | reddirtsite |
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (born September 10, 1938) is an American historian, writer, professor, and activist based in San Francisco. Born in Texas, she grew up in Oklahoma and is a social justice and feminist activist. [1] She has written numerous books including Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra Years (2005), Red Dirt: Growing up Okie (1992), [1] and An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014). She is professor emeritus in Ethnic Studies at California State University. [2]
Born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1938 [3] to an Oklahoma family, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in Central Oklahoma. Her father was a sharecropper of Scots-Irish ancestry. Dunbar claims her mother was of Cherokee descent. [1] Dunbar-Ortiz initially self-identified as having Cheyenne ancestry, but she subsequently acknowledged that she is white. [4] She has since claimed to be of Cherokee descent, [4] and that her mother denied her Native ancestry after marrying into a white family. [5] Because of her various claims of having Indigenous ancestry, Dunbar acknowledged that she has been "denounced as a fraud pretending to be Native American." [6]
Dunbar's paternal grandfather was a settler, landed farmer, veterinarian, labor activist, and member Socialist Party in Oklahoma and the Industrial Workers of the World. Her father, Moyer Haywood Pettibone Scarberry Dunbar, was named after the leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, "Big" Bill Haywood. Her father's stories of her grandfather inspired her to lifelong social justice activism. [7] Her account of life up to leaving Oklahoma is recorded in the book Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie.
Married at 18, Dunbar-Ortiz and her husband moved to San Francisco three years later, where she has lived most of the years since. This marriage later ended. She has a daughter, Michelle. She later married writer Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo). [8]
Dunbar-Ortiz graduated from San Francisco State College in 1963, majoring in history. She began graduate study in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley but transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles completing her doctorate in history there in 1974. In addition to the doctorate, she completed the Diplôme of the International Law of Human Rights at the International Institute of Human Rights, Strasbourg, France in 1983 and an MFA in creative writing at Mills College in 1993.
From 1967 to 1974, she was a full-time activist living in various parts of the United States, traveling to Europe, Mexico, and Cuba. She was also involved in the women's liberation movement. Outlaw Woman: Memoir of the War Years outlines this time of her life, chronicling the years 1960–1975.
In 1968 she founded Cell 16, which was a feminist organization in the United States known for its program of celibacy, separation from men and self-defense training (specifically karate); it has been cited as the first organization to advance the concept of separatist feminism. [9] [10] [11]
She contributed the piece "Female liberation as the basis for social revolution" to the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women's Liberation Movement , edited by Robin Morgan. [12]
In 1974, she accepted a position as assistant professor in the newly established Native American Studies program at California State University at Hayward, where she helped develop the departments of Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies. In the wake of the Wounded Knee Siege of 1973, she became active in the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the International Indian Treaty Council, beginning a lifelong commitment to Indigenous peoples' right to self-determination and to international human rights.
She edited the book The Great Sioux Nation , which was published in 1977 and presented as the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indians of the Americas, held at United Nations' headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. The book was issued in a new edition by University of Nebraska Press in 2013. The Great Sioux Nation was followed by two other books: Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico (1980) and Indians of the Americas: Human Rights and Self-Determination (1984). She also edited two anthologies on Native American economic development while heading the Institute for Native American Development at the University of New Mexico.
In 1981, Dunbar-Ortiz was asked to visit Sandinista Nicaragua to appraise the land tenure situation of the Miskito Indians in the northeastern region of the country. Her two trips there that year coincided with the beginning of United States government's sponsorship of a proxy war to overthrow the Sandinistas, with the northeastern region on the border with Honduras becoming a war zone and the basis for extensive propaganda carried out by the Reagan administration against the Sandinistas. In over a hundred trips to Nicaragua and Honduras from 1981 to 1989, she monitored what was called the Contra War. She tells of these years in Caught in the Crossfire: The Miskitu Indians of Nicaragua (1985) and Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War (2005). [13] [14]
In her work An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States , Dunbar-Ortiz condemns the Discovery Doctrine and the settler colonialism that devastated Native American populations in the United States. She compares this form of religious bigotry to the modern-day conquests of al-Qaeda. [15] She states that, since much of the current land within the United States was taken by aggression and oppression, "Native peoples have vast claims to reparations and restitution," yet "[n]o monetary amount can compensate for lands illegally seized, particularly those sacred lands necessary for Indigenous peoples to regain social coherence." [15]
She is featured in the feminist history film She's Beautiful When She's Angry . [16] [17]
She is Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at California State University, Hayward. Since retiring from university teaching, [18] she has been lecturing widely and continues to write.
The Lannan Foundation awarded Dunbar-Ortiz the 2017 Cultural Freedom Award "for the achievements of her lifetime of tireless work." [19]
The Trail of Tears was the forced displacement of approximately 60,000 people of the "Five Civilized Tribes" between 1830 and 1850, and the additional thousands of Native Americans and their enslaved African Americans within that were ethnically cleansed by the United States government.
Leslie Marmon Silko is an American writer. A woman of Laguna Pueblo descent, she is one of the key figures in the First Wave of what literary critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.
The American Indian Movement (AIM) is an American Indian grassroots movement which was founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota in July 1968, initially centered in urban areas in order to address systemic issues of poverty, discrimination, and police brutality against American Indians. AIM soon widened its focus from urban issues to many Indigenous Tribal issues that American Indian groups have faced due to settler colonialism in the Americas. These issues have included treaty rights, high rates of unemployment, the lack of American Indian subjects in education, and the preservation of Indigenous cultures.
An Okie is a person identified with the state of Oklahoma, or their descendants. This connection may be residential, historical or cultural. For most Okies, several of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their being Oklahoman. While not an official demographic used or recognized by the United States Census Bureau, Okies, due to various factors, have developed their own distinct culture within larger social groupings both akin to and separate from Midwestern and Southern influences. Included are their own dialect, music, and Indigenous-derived folklore.
Paula Gunn Allen was an American poet, literary critic, activist, professor, and novelist. Of mixed-race European-American, Arab-American, and Native American descent, she identified with her mother's people, the Laguna Pueblo. Gunn Allen wrote numerous essays, stories and poetry with Native American and feminist themes, and two biographies of Native American women. She edited four collections of Native American traditional stories and contemporary writing.
Linda K. Hogan is an American poet, storyteller, academic, playwright, novelist, environmentalist and writer of short stories. She previously served as the Chickasaw Nation's writer in residence. Hogan is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms. Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
This is a bibliography of selected works about Nicaragua.
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is an American poet and editor. Her debut book, Dog Road Woman, won the American Book Award and was the first finalist of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Diane DeCora Award. Since then, she has written five more books and edited eight anthologies. She is known for addressing issues of culture, prejudice, rights, the environment, peace, violence, abuse, and labor in her poetry and other creative works.
Brooke Medicine Eagle is an American author, singer/songwriter and teacher, specializing in her interpretations of Native American religions. She frequently teaches workshops at New Age and other events.
During and after the European colonization of the Americas, European settlers practiced widespread enslavement of Indigenous peoples. In the 15th century, the Spanish introduced chattel slavery through warfare and the cooption of existing systems. A number of other European powers followed suit, and from the 15th through the 19th centuries, between two and five million Indigenous people were enslaved, which had a devastating impact on many Indigenous societies, contributing to the overwhelming population decline of Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America is a book edited by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, "An Oral History of the Sioux Nation and Its Struggle for Sovereignty", that documents the 1974 "Lincoln Treaty Hearing". Testimony produced during that hearing has been cited by the International Indian Treaty Council in advocating for Indigenous sovereignty and treaty rights, efforts which eventually saw the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) is an author and an associate curator at the National Museum of the American Indian. He writes and lectures frequently on American Indian art and politics.
Native American feminism or Native feminism is, at its root, understanding how gender plays an important role in indigenous communities both historically and in modern-day. As well, Native American feminism deconstructs the racial and broader stereotypes of indigenous peoples, gender, sexuality, while also focusing on decolonization and breaking down the patriarchy and pro-capitalist ideology. As a branch of the broader Indigenous feminism, it similarly prioritizes decolonization, indigenous sovereignty, and the empowerment of indigenous women and girls in the context of Native American and First Nations cultural values and priorities, rather than white, mainstream ones. A central and urgent issue for Native feminists is the Missing and murdered Indigenous women crisis.
Since the mid-twentieth century, indigenous organizations in Nicaragua have historically formed in response to economic, political, and cultural injustices and to create infrastructure for self-governance. They often represent their motives and goals as pan-indigenous and do not employ Marxist or Leninist ideas or language of class struggles. Although many organizations stress Miskitu ethnicity, language, and history, most major Nicaraguan indigenous organizations have generally advocated for indigenous peoples.
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a non-fiction book written by the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and published by Beacon Press. It is the third of a series of six ReVisioning books which reconstruct and reinterpret U.S. history from marginalized peoples' perspectives. On July 23, 2019, the same press published An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People, an adaptation by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese of Dunbar-Ortiz's original volume.
Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment is a book written by the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and published by City Lights Books. It takes a close and unexpected look at the historical origins of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.
As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock is a 2019 non-fiction book by Dina Gilio-Whitaker. The author details the history of Native Americans in the United States since European colonization, including criticisms of the modern conservation movement as exclusionary to indigenous concepts of land and environmental stewardship, and coverage of the 2010s Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker is an American academic, journalist and author, who studies Native Americans in the United States, decolonization and environmental justice. She is a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes. In 2019, she published As Long as Grass Grows.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a long-time activist and author ... professor emeritus in the Department of Ethnic Studies at California State University East Bay in Hayward, California