The Jeff Farias Show Interviews

We spoke  with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a lifelong social justice activist and a leading historian of indigenous struggles in the Americas. She is professor emeritus of Ethnic Studies at California State University and works in a variety of political capacities. The daughter of a landless farmer and a half-Indian mother, Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma. In the 1960s, she worked in the anti-war movement, spent time in a clandestine group, and organized in support of anti-imperialist movements in Cuba, Nicaragua, South Africa, and elsewhere. Through her involvement in the feminist group Cell 16, she became a key figure in the women’s liberation movement. In 1974, she became active in the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the International Indian Treaty Council. This engagement marked the beginning of a life-long commitment to advancing indigenous struggles. In 1981, Dunbar-Ortiz traveled to Nicaragua to investigate the Miskitu Indians’ land-tenure issues. Over the next eight years, she made more than 100 trips to Central America to monitor the conflict between the Contras and Sandinistas. Dunbar-Ortiz’s first book, The Great Sioux Nation: An Oral History of the Sioux Nation and its Struggle for Sovereignty, was presented as the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indians of the Americas, held in 1977 at the UN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. In the years since, she has continued to write works concerned with indigenous struggles for self-determination and the politics of place and land. In the last decade, she has written a trilogy of acclaimed memoirs – Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975, and Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War.

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